"pedestrian"; "flâneur"; a "gentleman stroller of city streets"; "lounger"; "saunterer"; "loafer"; a "person who walks the city in order to experience it"; an "idle man-about-town"; a "complete philosophical way of living and thinking".
The walls are the desk against which he presses his notebooks; newsstands are his libraries and the terraces of cafés are the balconies from which he looks down on his household after his work is done. -Walter Benjamin,"The Flâneur"
BEN BRYNMOR FOWLER
Currently living in Ebisu, Tokyo. A lover of city living & city walking, cinema, music, fiction, currently writing a PhD on contemporary theatre in Britain and Germany, and developing an intense relationship with apple gadgets.
OTHER HOMES:
http://www.scoop.it/t/british-and-german-theatre-today
Instagram username: IBKHOV
BEN’S BERLINALE
A mad, hectic, disorientating week, seeing films at 9.30 in the morning, snatching naps in the afternoon that doubled the week and made me more sleepy, galavanting around with byronic…
After nine films, I was back in the theatre on Friday night, and what a relief it was. The cinema audiences were really getting on my tits. This Berlinale seemed to bring out the worst in people - queues everywhere for everything, everyone intent on elbowing their way to the best possible experience, jumping lines, ramming their bodies this way and that, journalists dabbing away on their phones and ipads during screenings. I just wanted to scream - ‘what entitles you to be more important than anyone else on the planet?’. And the noise in the cinemas, chatting, no leg room… All the while the film carries on regardless. I constantly wished that these hoards of people would just evaporate and I could enjoy the films in my own private screening room.
But then I learned to love audiences again on Friday night. And reconnect to what I love about theatre: the simultaneous process of production and reception. It’s what Erika Fischer-Lichte calls an ‘autopeic process’ (Transformative Power of Performance, p. 38), basically meaning a feedback loop between audience and actors, something that cinema just finds impossible. Cinema, for all it’s joy and pleasure, serves up the past, the product, something already dead. I went into the theatre with a sinking heart - yet another dark auditorium to watch yet another set of characters inhabiting yet another timeframe. But happily I found that my dulled senses were re-charged by this exchange of energy. In theatre, you’re involved in the process. It matters that you are there.
Anyway, back to the Berlinale. A quick snapshot of what I saw:
METEORA (dir. Spiros Stathoulopoulos): Total crap. Such a slow film, which particularly annoyed me since I’d just read Hermann Hesse’s book Narcissus and Goldmund, which treats the battle between flesh and spirit in such a penetrating way. Nothing happens, apart from one terrifically acted scene where the nun and monk who share a longing to indulge in the carnal pleasures of each other’s flesh also share a picnic together, before they get down and dirty in a cave. If only we were given more of the actors and less lingering landscape shots. Plus on a big screen, the image quality was more home video than high res.
EXTREMELY LOUD AND INCREDIBLY CLOSE (dir. Stephen Daldry): Mawkish.
JAYNE MANSFIELD’S CAR (dir. Billy Bob Thornton): I loved this film, and the entirely sophisticated, effortless - Chekhovian! - way it introduced and developed a fascinating collection of characters. A well constructed, witty, brilliantly written film, which mines the rich seam of comic irony made available by forcing an encounter between a british and american 1960s family. A touching, but never saccharine, story about fathers and sons. Go see it!
CHERRY (dir. Stephen Elliot): Shocked. That this film ever made it into a festival. Or past a funding comittee. Without a doubt the worst script I have ever heard actors try and rescue.
WAS BLEIBT? (dir. Hans-Christian Schmid): A superbly acted family ensemble drama, which felt a bit made-for-TV, but charmed me nonetheless.
CAESAR MUST DIE (dir. Paolo and Vittorio Taviani): It won the Golden Bear, but I was disappointed. For me, the film fell between two stools - documentary and drama. As a ‘documentary’ it felt overwhelmingly contrived (especially the scenes with the ‘director’ setting up rehearsals with the inmates), and I wanted to see more of how this experience of playing Julius Caesar had affected these prisoners’ lives and relationships - you get delightful little snatches of it, but not enough. As a drama - it was fantastic to hear the words, and see the characters of Shakespeare’s play embodied by such a swaggering brood of Tony Soprano-esque liars, cheats and murderers, with their regional dialects and delightful idiosyncrasies. But the drama wasn’t illuminated much by the context of the prison. Frustrated.
KING OF COMICS (dir. Rosa von Praunheim): A documentary about German cartoonist Ralf König, trailblazing creator of gay comics. Nothing deep, but an entertaining account of growing up as an outsider in 1970s Germany.
JUST THE WIND (dir. Bence Fliegauf): Runner-up in the festival, it tells the story of a murder campaign against Romany gypsies families in Hungary c.2008. It’s a deeply affecting story about an important topic, independent of it’s cinematic merit, and hard-going for a Friday morning.
MERCY (dir. Matthias Glasner): This film could have been fascinating. It’s gorgeously photographed, and makes the most of stunning locations in a Norwegian industrial town. It follows an ex-pat German family who get sucked into a spiral of lies, self-deception and moral corruption after a freak accident turns into a serious crime through one fear-induced failure of judgement. For a while, it’s gripping, complex, challenging, but then becomes predictable and tags on a horribly sentimental ending.
So a rather mixed bag. Billy Bob Thornton was my winner.
-
tragos liked this
-
naprisi liked this
-
murmurandshout liked this
-
sabine said:
This is Germany. When people annoy you, they get on your cookies, not on your tits! (Es geht mir auf den Keks!)
-
mightyflynn liked this
-
fussgaenger posted this
