- Forum Expanded
- Alain Gomis: Tey / Aujourd'hui (Competition)
- Anja Salomonowitz: Spanien (Forum)
- Vincent Dieutre: Jaurès (Forum)
- Ursula Meier: L'Enfant d'en haut (Competition)
- Peter Kern: Glaube Liebe Tod (Panorama)
- Tea Lim Koun: Puos Keng Kang / Snake Man (Forum Special)
- Last Calls: Emin Alper, Kiko Goifman & Zoé Chantre
2/12/2012
Berlinale 2012
There's lots of quality Berlinale coverage by Lukas Foerster, Thomas Groh, Elena Meilicke and myself at perlentaucher.de. Here's a (growing) list of my own entries, which I will update as the festival proceeds. But beware, it's all in German:
11/07/2011
On Trial
Talking about the culture wars with my American friend Paul yesterday. When I told him about that double episode of "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip" (1.7 & 1.8: "Nevada Day") wherein Los Angeles' culture industry intelligentsia is put on trial in a culturally midwestern Nevada hicktown, he reminded me of a similar constellation in the ultimate episode of "Seinfeld". Here the New Yorkers Jerry, George, and Kramer, in a masochistic détournement of the nostalgic "best of" episode format, are made to defend themselves in front of a Massachussets court for all the terrible things they have done in the course of the preceding nine seasons. Unlike Aaron Sorkin's "Studio 60", which resolves the conflict of Weltanschauungen through rational dispute and - however precarious - mutual respect, Larry David's less optimistic "Seinfeld" ends with the whole cast's criminal conviction and subsequent imprisonment in a county jail. The final joke, it seems, is on them. Even though Massachusetts is hardly Kansas (and neither is Nevada), the same logic operates in both instances: By looking at themselves from the other side of the front line, Sorkin and David are measuring the growing distance between the two Americas, albeit with very different results. If only this process of self-reflexion would not be so thoroughly asymmetrical. Or can anyone think of a reverse example?
10/06/2011
Ghost Car: John Carpenter's "Christine" (1983)
Christine was born on a Detroit conveyor belt in 1957. A mere twenty years later, she is a thing of the past. Wrecked beyond repair, she has passed from commodity form to deformity and finally, when a young man's devotion reawakens her fetish powers, to monstrum. Her new life is the life of a ghost: No matter how hard we try to destroy her, Christine keeps coming back to haunt us; the violent return, in an age of deindustrialization, of the steel-fuelled consumer utopia that had once engineered her immaculate body.
Christine is a film about the degradation of industry, and of a whole world - of working stiffs, rock 'n roll and fast cars - attached to it. Despite the horrors Christine has inflicted upon the world, her eulogy is filled with shame and regret. The detective, played by Harry Dean Stanton, tries to reassure her vanquishers, two college kids, that killing Christine was an act of justice: "I wouldn't feel so bad if I were you. You two are heroes, you know." With an air of self-disgust, one kid replies: "Yeah, real heroes."
5/30/2011
Rain keeps falling: "The Killing" (2011)
This is my first entry in English, so please bear with me. Here goes:
I would like to think that The Killing has more to offer than what Michael Sicinski (via Twitter) identifies as "its sole purpose: making Mireille Enos a star." This said, ten (of altogether twelve) episodes into the series I find myself leaning towards Sicinski’s harsh verdict, delivered in the shape of a rhetorical question: "Can we just pull the plug and move on now?"
Even though The Killing has done a pretty good job of establishing Enos’ most peculiar and astonishing (television) screen presence – a presence that, as much as it is a calculated, marketable feat, will haunt anyone uncomfortable with the kinds of characters and styles of acting female television performers are commonly relegated to – the series may seem to fall short of its original promise: to explore the ramifications of a single murder in a caleidoscopic vision, tracing the catastrophic event’s many ripples (as if it was a stone thrown into a pond), from its immediate familial surroundings, where the waves hit the hardest, to the remote shores of local government powermongering.
These ambitions in mind, I can readily understand the naysayers’ disapproval. After a few intense episodes that centred around the hard to endure suffering of the bereaved and from there gradually opened up towards other strata and spaces of the social, The Killing’s initial slow moving expansivity has been bundled and redirected into the orderly course of whodunit dramaturgy – or maybe it has been this way from the very beginning and mine was wishful watching.
I don’t know why Sicinski doesn’t like The Killing, but my first guess would be that he fosters a similar sense of disappointment. But there is something else that I find displeasing about the series, something that I feel has to do with my viewing experiences as an occasional consumer of European or, more precisely, Scandinavian and German police procedurals. (This is where I should point to the fact that The Killing is the American remake of a Danish series entitled Forbrydelsen, which I haven’t yet come around to seeing.) It concerns some stylistic choices – the stereotypically reduced colour palette with its darkish-blue dominant; the warm (if dampened) lower-middle class interiors, pitted against the power elite’s cold glass-and-steel-environments – but also the constant intimations of an almost existential and thus inescapable dark side to humanity, exactly the kind of best-selling angst The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Niels Arden Oplev’s film, not Stieg Larsson’s novel, which I haven't read) carries to the market.
It’s not all bad, though. The pain that the victim’s parents have to go through is rendered in images that are neither too much nor too little, images that instead of seeking a supposed right balance between closeness and distance move back and forth between the two, confusing them, so that a respectful long take can feel singed by despair while a close-up might take us far away from the face whose affectivity it strives to capture. Another defining feature of The Killing’s design deserves mention. Although some might deem the ceaseless downpour of rain a cheap device in the service of the commodification of angst, to me it appears as a very effective and befitting building block of a muddled world that knows no solid ground. Much like Rubicon, another amc-series that, as Simon Rothöhler demonstrates in Cargo #8, betrays a deep sense of "epistemic scepticism", The Killing takes place in an ever shifting, never quite self-identical Seattle, covered in rain and mist. It also heaps plot twists upon turns like there’s no tomorrow – but here the series comes too close to the well-known game of switching suspicions to hold my attention.
The reason why I am still watching and, contrary to Sicinski, don’t want to pull the plug yet, is not a desire for a finalized knowledge of who, in the end, commited the crime. The reason I haven’t moved on is because in some respects (and admittedly not sufficiently so) The Killing itself is a moving thing, a state of being beautifully allegorized by Mireille Enos’ character, who is supposed to lead a murder investigation without standing on firm ground herself. From the first episode she is trying to leave Seattle, her job, the killing behind for another life that she never quite reaches. Meanwhile she stays, of all places, on a boat.
I would like to think that The Killing has more to offer than what Michael Sicinski (via Twitter) identifies as "its sole purpose: making Mireille Enos a star." This said, ten (of altogether twelve) episodes into the series I find myself leaning towards Sicinski’s harsh verdict, delivered in the shape of a rhetorical question: "Can we just pull the plug and move on now?"
Even though The Killing has done a pretty good job of establishing Enos’ most peculiar and astonishing (television) screen presence – a presence that, as much as it is a calculated, marketable feat, will haunt anyone uncomfortable with the kinds of characters and styles of acting female television performers are commonly relegated to – the series may seem to fall short of its original promise: to explore the ramifications of a single murder in a caleidoscopic vision, tracing the catastrophic event’s many ripples (as if it was a stone thrown into a pond), from its immediate familial surroundings, where the waves hit the hardest, to the remote shores of local government powermongering.
These ambitions in mind, I can readily understand the naysayers’ disapproval. After a few intense episodes that centred around the hard to endure suffering of the bereaved and from there gradually opened up towards other strata and spaces of the social, The Killing’s initial slow moving expansivity has been bundled and redirected into the orderly course of whodunit dramaturgy – or maybe it has been this way from the very beginning and mine was wishful watching.
I don’t know why Sicinski doesn’t like The Killing, but my first guess would be that he fosters a similar sense of disappointment. But there is something else that I find displeasing about the series, something that I feel has to do with my viewing experiences as an occasional consumer of European or, more precisely, Scandinavian and German police procedurals. (This is where I should point to the fact that The Killing is the American remake of a Danish series entitled Forbrydelsen, which I haven’t yet come around to seeing.) It concerns some stylistic choices – the stereotypically reduced colour palette with its darkish-blue dominant; the warm (if dampened) lower-middle class interiors, pitted against the power elite’s cold glass-and-steel-environments – but also the constant intimations of an almost existential and thus inescapable dark side to humanity, exactly the kind of best-selling angst The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Niels Arden Oplev’s film, not Stieg Larsson’s novel, which I haven't read) carries to the market.
It’s not all bad, though. The pain that the victim’s parents have to go through is rendered in images that are neither too much nor too little, images that instead of seeking a supposed right balance between closeness and distance move back and forth between the two, confusing them, so that a respectful long take can feel singed by despair while a close-up might take us far away from the face whose affectivity it strives to capture. Another defining feature of The Killing’s design deserves mention. Although some might deem the ceaseless downpour of rain a cheap device in the service of the commodification of angst, to me it appears as a very effective and befitting building block of a muddled world that knows no solid ground. Much like Rubicon, another amc-series that, as Simon Rothöhler demonstrates in Cargo #8, betrays a deep sense of "epistemic scepticism", The Killing takes place in an ever shifting, never quite self-identical Seattle, covered in rain and mist. It also heaps plot twists upon turns like there’s no tomorrow – but here the series comes too close to the well-known game of switching suspicions to hold my attention.
The reason why I am still watching and, contrary to Sicinski, don’t want to pull the plug yet, is not a desire for a finalized knowledge of who, in the end, commited the crime. The reason I haven’t moved on is because in some respects (and admittedly not sufficiently so) The Killing itself is a moving thing, a state of being beautifully allegorized by Mireille Enos’ character, who is supposed to lead a murder investigation without standing on firm ground herself. From the first episode she is trying to leave Seattle, her job, the killing behind for another life that she never quite reaches. Meanwhile she stays, of all places, on a boat.
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