Arts
Kampf followers
Phillip Bergson
Fittla critics don't die, they go to festivals, Where heaven is a dozen films an hour, on the hour, with the original version of The Devil is a Woman as a cautionary bonus. Keys to a pressbox open on to a festivallasting kingdom of gaudy leaflets, a glut of Polyglot synopses and 'thematic readings'. To every film there is a screening, and a repeat to every sell-out in the programme. From morn to noon we view, from noon to dewy eve, sleeping during films, with hardly time for food between. Hell is other festivals that don't invite you, and Limbo is being missed off the official register of arrivals, which fate befell a doyen of the Sundays, who found himself unlisted and roomless in Berlin.
• West Berlin is an extraordinary place, the Perfect centre for the cinema-gypsies who tour the globe; camping from festival to festival. After the deluge of Cannes, this citybound event has its own charins, not least the evocative setting, wistful with memories of its former glories — Unter den Linden is now in the East, the square where the books Were burned is a car-park, the rebuilt Reichstag largely a banqueting-suite, for weddings and barmitzvahs. And, as if to cap the ironies, out of the panorama of new international cinema on display, Adolf and Marlene emerged as the biggest hits, and the stars of the festival.
This year, Berlin made a bid for the big time with its young new director, Dr Wolf banner, blitzing the twenty-seventh event With innovatory seasons showcasing the latest in contemporary German cinema, an enlarged Film Market and welldocumented 'information shows' (not didactic diversions of a dubious nature, but reviews of otherwise inaccessible productions from countries such as Turkey and Iran). This luxuriant fringe wisely disguised the thinness of the main competition, which Was doubtless due to Britain's foolhardy absence. (Our sole entry, Jabberwocky forsooth, broke the rules by opening prematurely in London and Paris and had to be Withdrawn from competing. In Jubilee year Our film production is in a parlous enough state; small wonder, when we muff such Chances as come our way.) But more experimental British works managed to surface in the eccentric Forum of Young Films, which offered a further forty obstacles to the critic's hopes of sight-seeing. Marsh.alled, rather than organised, with characteristic efficiency, the festival put its one-and-a-half-million-mark budget to good use. Greeted by familiar choruses of ,Wilkommen! Bienvenu! Welcome!, lavoured participants were given meal you'hers which functioned as cash cheques — you could order lemon tea for 75p and the waiter would give you the tip. There was a refreshing excursion on the lake one morning and a modest little thrash for two thousand in the Hilton, graced by Peter Bogdanovich, Francois Truffaut, Rainer Werner Fassbinder (all the long names), desperately trying to forget the oafish, opening film Nickelodeon.
With personalities thin on the pavement (the bright light i were all on the jury — Fassbinder, Senta Berger, Ellen Burstyn, Derek Malcolm), attention focused on the films, as long as was humanly possible, and was as often disappointed: from Russia A Sentimental Story (of hapless loves entre deux guerres) had a melodious score and little else — pity they couldn't have dubbed on a better story. The taste for war-torn dramas soon palled and dulled my appreciation of Larissa Schepitko's The Ascent, a stark parable placing Judas and Christ in a prisoner-of-war camp. It eventually won the main prize, but in a heated controversy (the jury were out for fourteen hours and three of them minuted their dissent at the bumpy prize-giving). Also curiously unmoving was Robert Bresson's Le Diable Probablement, which the director had pulled from Cannes and sent to Berlin as the great hope of the festival. A stylistic advance on Lancelot du Lac (most of this one is in three-quarter shot), it evinces dissatisfaction with the modern world (tree-felling, seal-slaying — these trompe l'oeil documentary sequences do succeed) and has a singularly unsympathetic student commit suicide (aided by an even more revolting youth) as the intellectual's response to the agony of existence in a consumer society. Bresson manipulates his non-professionals wanly and the film is even bleaker than its thome. It may be the masterpiece some hvitantly hailed it, but I fear the maker is out of touch with the generation he pretends to portray. Its specially created award was bitterly contested. I await with apprehension the Bresson party some festival wits threatened to stage — in a cemetery, under-lit, with immobile guests forbidden to smile or chat and waiters serving water instead of wine.
Don's Party was a livelier, but equally unsociable affair, a beery, leery electionnight vigil, signalling the collapse of the Australian Labour Government in1969 and the bankruptcy of the married trendies who supported it, a typical clutch of whom cluster in Don's suburban menage to grope, curse, and psychologically lacerate each other before the dawn that reveals the utter vacuity of their beliefs. A striking, if unflattering conversation piece.
A similarly Proustian anti-social set-piece figured in Joan Micklin Silver's Between the Lines, a brilliantly realised film and the funniest I've seen in too long a time. Against the impersonal gaiety of a showbiz promotion party, characters cry into their manhattans in corners while asserting how delighted they are, their careers rising, but their private lives careering. What pulls apart an otherwise unusually personable young team of players is a callous businessking's take-over of the underground paper (the Back Bay Mainline, though it could be the Village Voice) on which they have worked so haphazardly, but so happily. If ultimately there is sadness for the realisation that things must change— and for the worse — there is an ineradicable sense of achievement, that they used their talents to make themselves a name and fought some good campaigns along .the way. The observations ring true — the prizewinning journalist lost in search of his book, the treacherous advertising manager, the rock critic reduced to hocking review copies, and, whatever their foibles, the satire pauses and you begin to care for the people presented. Fast-paced, with frequently hilarious dialogue, this is the kind of film that revives your enthusiasm for the cinema and encourages for its future.
A hooray, too, for the new Truffaut, L'Homme qui aimait les femmes, blackish farce, slick, perhaps slight, but undeniably professional and entertaining, and for the revelation of the festival, from Hungary Pal Sandor's A Strange Role, spellbinding and unforgettable. In 1919, a young political refugee retreats en travestie to a sanatorium where circumstances force him to keep up his masquerade as a nurse. The ambivalences are tenderly handled — a woman patient falls in love with the sister, and a soldier attempts to rape 'her' — with none of the kinkiness that marred The Tenant (and Polanski made a typically rip-roaring visit to the festival). Much more of a drag was the ghastly West German Be/canto whose operatic heroine (and I use the term loosely), a transsexual winningly called Romy Haag, was almost picked up by a short-sighted colleague. Methinks, the lady did not protest at all (or 'That was no lady, indeed').
Decadence surged to the fore with both German and American prints of The Blue Angel in the crowded Dietrich Retrospective. An extremely rare 1929 film with a spirited piano accompaniment showed her raw talents before von Sternberg developed them. Both artists fled the other draw at Berlin, the Third Reich. The film of Joachim Fest's A Career was tumultuously received, its 155 minutes of original footage full Of fascinating insights into the Fuehrer's rise to power. Fascinating but also frightening. Could it be that the Germans are falling in love again — with Hitler?
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