In the Moment
A preliminary report from the 73rd Berlin International Film Festival
For the first few days of the 73rd Berlin International Film Festival, my most rewarding viewings came from neither the Competition nor the Encounters slates, but the Forum lineup. Prior to the festival, I’d been able to see and write about two strong selections, Antoine Bourges’s Concrete Valley and Burak Çevik’s Unutma Biçimleri (Forms of Forgetting), and the early press days were dominated by endorsements of still another: Claire Simon’s Notre corps (Our Body). Documenting a Parisian gynaecology clinic for nearly three hours, the film largely comprises doctor–patient interviews and medical procedures, all engrossing in their intimacy and level of detail. What differentiates Simon’s approach from a Wiseman-esque chronicle, though, is its emphasis not on the hospital’s institutional workings, but on the patients’ comprehension of how their bodies relate to the scientific and social facts involved. The collective title refers to the fact that all the patients are women; but it also demonstrates an understanding that medical facts are, in the end, as much social as they are material, and that what we consider “natural” exists at the conjunction of the two. In De Humani Corporis Fabrica (2022), Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor explored our “natural” responses to bodily imagery using radical visual abstraction. Our Body does something similar, only with a keen balance of documentation and portraiture. Its cumulative force is considerable, and is only slightly diminished by a patly affirmative ending.
Also in Berlinale’s Forum is Martin Shanly’s superb Arturo a los 30 (About Thirty), which one could reasonably describe as Je t’aime, je t’aime (1968) shifted to the key of a slacker comedy. On one level, this simply says that the film centres on a go-nowhere protagonist (played by Shanly) and drops us into different moments from the past decade of his life. On another, though, it indicates that Shanly has internalized the film’s deeper implication, which is that if Resnais can use a time-machine to access the past in its entirety, then one can, in theory, achieve similar effects without an explicit sci-fi conceit. One need not necessarily fragment time as aggressively as Resnais does; and one can even allow temporal dislocations to appear within a continuously articulated space. Thus, About Thirty opens with a lengthy reverse zoom, accompanied by voiceover which reframes the image as much as the camera movement does, while also introducing the diary device which will motivate the subsequent time jumps.
The originality of About Thirty lies in how it uses its structure to expand and control the tonal range of its story, allowing crowd-pleasing humour to coexist easily alongside bold, Resnais-like formal play. By its very structure, Je t’aime, Je t’aime turns narrative certitude into a matter of probability: Our ability to resolve any question—Did Claude kill his wife?—is a function of what we see and in what order. Similarly, though to very different effect, Shanly uses his keen grasp of narrative expectation to transform how we take an otherwise unremarkable story. I lost count of the number of times Shanly introduced a dramatic focal point, deflected it with tangential material, only to circle back around to the original development which, though unchanged materially, has been totally altered in the meantime. Given that Shanly himself plays the lead, it may be tempting to consider About Thirty as an exercise in auto-fiction—and perhaps it is. But if so, the film also suggests that we should not be so quick to consider narrative indirection as a mere gimmick, or as somehow less true to “reality.” For as the film’s closing makes clear: structure is for coping, not copying.
To say that Shanly has absorbed the lessons of Je t’aime, Je t’aime is not, of course, to suggest that he is completely beholden to Resnais. Similarly, it’s not an automatic putdown to say that Yoo Heong-jun’s debut feature Uriwa sanggwaneopsi (Regardless of Us) clearly builds on Hong. The programme note describes the film as a “Hong Sang-soo fever dream,” and Yoo all but solicits the comparison. Apart from employing formal moves easily identifiable with Hong’s cinema—a set of pans which follow a character turning street corners would fit seamlessly into Night and Day (2008)—the film also makes use of conspicuously similar narrative material. Its first section sees Hwa-ryeong (Cho Hyunjin), a middle-aged actress who is in the hospital after a recent stroke, receive four bedside visits from collaborators on a recent film. The stroke having wiped her memory of the movie she worked on, particularly its ending, her collaborators attempt to fill in details—though conspicuously, these contradict each other in several key ways. The second half of Regardless of Us then resets things, with Cho now playing an unnamed actress auditioning for a part, and the previous figures now playing roles that shift from scene to scene.
Yoo’s overall approach effectively takes Hong’s formal toolkit into baroque territory, upping the ante on the discontinuities and contradictions that Hong’s structural gamesmanship tended to foreground. He subsequently repeats the aforementioned camera pans, but without any character movement to motivate the formal choice; later, he returns to the same camera setup yet again, but with large sections of the frame now engulfed in pools of darkness. In the film’s second half, these extremes of visual blackness become the film’s dominant formal principle. Not wanting to be misunderstood, Yoo makes sure to include an in-film conversation explaining these formal decisions, and his story anarchy is far from being unaffected. But apart from producing one of the most striking individual frames I’ve seen at the festival, Regardless of Us suggests a development of Hong’s cinema that accentuates, rather than diminishes, a dependence on compositional integrity.
Yoo’s method, which in effect introduces the blackness of the cut into the frame itself, is one instance of Bresson’s principle that “what happens in the junctures” are as constitutive of a film as anything we see or hear. We see this at work in Alexandre Koberidze’s What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? (2021), when on-screen text instructs us to close our eyes for a few seconds. And we find it, too, in Lois Patiño’s Encounters title, Samsara, whose two halves, set in Laos and Tanzania respectively, are bridged by a 15-minute passage during which we are asked to make the inside of our eyelids a part of the film itself. For a while, we see only blackness, accompanied by a dense soundscape—but soon we get intermittent flashes of white light and fields of colour which form into intricate, radially symmetric patterns. This section of the film, motivated by the death of an elderly woman, and inspired by the Buddhist concept of the bardo, connects to established traditions of experimental cinema: not just films like Jordan Belson’s Re-Entry (1964) and James Whitney’s Lapis (1966), which are themselves inspired by Eastern sources like the Tibetan Book of the Dead, but also the flicker-films of Tony Conrad, Paul Sharits, Peter Kubelka, and their subsequent developments in the digital works of Rainer Kohlberger. Not being sufficiently familiar with either lineage, I am hesitant to weigh in on the technical merits of Patiño’s perceptual play, but at the very least, I am curious to see whether (and how) other experimental artists might develop the basic concept. If I am dwelling on this dazzling 15-minute middle section at the expense of the material on either side, it’s partly because the ethnographic tours that frame the film—and they do feel like tours—leave something to be desired, often coming across as rather indifferent in their approach to performance and behavioural ambiance.
Whereas Patiño’s film may be considered rather aggressive in its aesthetic play, Bas Devos’s Here, another Encounters selection, operates on a much gentler register, though it is no less impressive for it. Despite a somewhat precious logline—insomniac Romanian construction worker (Stefan Gota) meet-cutes with Belgian-Chinese bryologist (Liyo Gong)—the film distinguishes itself by how assuredly it subordinates potential dramatic links to textural play, with most every scene built around a perceptual event. The film’s opening moments, which see Gota’s character at his workplace, amid the ambient thrum of urban construction, obliquely recall the tradition of the city symphony, and though Devos’s project may not seem to share much with Man With a Movie Camera (1929), it nonetheless fulfils Vertov’s dream of the cinema as “the kino-recording of facts,” an investigation of the natural world through the objectivity of the camera-eye. It is for this reason that Here can accommodate startling shifts in scale and location, encompassing both the lonely, Hopper-esque vibe of Gota’s nocturnal wandering as well as a microscope view of an emerald-green sample of moss. Even before we hear Gong’s character relate a dream in which she has forgotten the names of things, Devos makes clear that his domain of perceptual investigation is a world prior to naming—a world in which every entity is a this, and every location a here.
The Berlinale Competition eventually found surer footing with the premiere of Tótem, which does not just confirm the talent of Mexican director Lila Avilés, but also showcases her ability to work with different sets of formal parameters. Trading in the mostly static, wide-screen compositions of The Chambermaid (2018) for a narrower aspect ratio and a mobile handheld camera, Avilés deftly orchestrates overlapping planes of activity in the manner of Lucrecia Martel’s La Ciénaga (2001), a film evoked in an image of its six-year-old protagonist, Sol (Naíma Sentíes), framed against the glass door of a house. The story conceit, which follows the chaotic preparations leading up to a birthday party for Tona (Mateo García Elizondo), Sol’s terminally ill father, recalls Buñuel, and there is something of The Exterminating Angel (1962) in its claustrophobic environs and atmosphere of class decay. The difference, though, is that Avilés organizes her film not around any high-concept story structure, but the subjectivity of a child: Not everything is seen from Sol’s perspective, but she is the prism through which we grant events and actions any significance—through which we distinguish, or rather fail to distinguish, between nature and culture, superstition and fact. Animals are a constant presence throughout, treated with fascination by Sol, and it is crucial that the adults are presented in much the same way—less as active, individuated personalities than as masses of instinctive behaviour. If one figures action in terms of dramatic causation, one could go so far as to say that the film does not observe acts so much as impulses. More important than any narrative trajectory is Avilés’s evocation of childhood as a kind of originary world—a primordial space where ritual and superstition have not yet been marked off.
The other notable Competition title to have screened so far, Angela Schanelec’s Music, was my most highly anticipated film of the entire festival. After one viewing, its structuring principles remain rather obscure to me, though as with The Dreamed Path (2016), I find the Kuleshov effect a useful starting point for thinking through the film. Conventionally, the classic montage principle is seen in terms of addition. A face, coupled with another image, results in a certain affect: hunger, lust, and so on. But a small step in sophistication will show that the principle is explained less by the association of a facial expression with objects than by the ambiguity of the expression itself, which can be connected to more than we typically notice. The potential connections that an image can form are actually restricted by being directly linked to other images. One way of characterizing Schanelec’s method in The Dreamed Path, then, is as allowing individual images to retain as many of their potential connections as possible. The approach, a development on Bresson, thereby permits viewers to chart myriad paths through the images, which exist as so many shining points that can be assembled and reassembled in various ways. The result—always discombobulating, potentially frustrating, occasionally transcendent—is that one often ends up lost in space, adrift in time.
Music operates on similar principles, and like The Dreamed Path moves from Greece to Berlin across an opaque, decades-spanning timeline, with characters and key visual markers refusing to age or alter. But what this new film adds, as its title suggests, is a particular emphasis on musical performance. Dance and music have of course played significant roles in Schanelec’s past films, but the repeated musical numbers across the timeline, with their implicit assumption of an audience, turns the question of watching, which is at the core of the Kuleshov effect, into the film’s very theme of investigation. Time and again, we are shown a person looking, but with what they are looking at left obscure, implicit, or only later clarified in a way that prevents us from forming a direct link between seer and seen. Add to this the fact that Music is “freely inspired by the myth of Oedipus,” as well as the failing eyesight of the protagonist (Aliocha Schneider), who turns blind at a crucial juncture, and the act of looking becomes something of the film’s organizing theme.
The extent to which Music does conform to the Oedipus myth is of course far from settled. Here, as in most every Schanelec film, narrative incident is not easily parsed, and the tragic archetype is less a passkey than a challenge. The underlying question is whether, faced with a set of floating story signifiers, one inevitably sees the same plot structures repeated again and again—whether, as with chords major and minor, we cannot but perceive stories in terms of comedy or tragedy. Such thoughts are arguably a product of any sort of narrative openness, not just the variety one finds of Schanelec’s films, and her apparent disregard for film-level structure is not always easy to reconcile with the moment-to-moment intention of her montage. A second viewing may not resolve my lingering reservations—but one does seem necessary for a film that so continually examines what we take in at a glance of the eye.
