From the terror of the past to current violence. Berlinale 2002: A reflection of the world today

History carries weight in Germany's capital. Up until 13 years ago, Berlin still embodied the Cold War with its divide between East and West. Remnants of the Wall or the recent renovation of the Parliament, set on fire by the Nazis over half a century ago, make the city's past hard to forget. But once a year the city takes on a lighter feel as the Berlin Film Festival, a leading festival in the Venice and Toronto league, gathers crowds on the Potsdamer Platz, the new center between East and West. This year's 52nd edition of the Berlinale ran from February 6 to the 17th, scoring high on movies, VIP's, and -more prosaically- on comfortable theaters with screens ranging from huge to gigantic. Under exceptionally good weather conditions, the festival's new director, Dieter Kosslick, set his reign in motion by promoting Teutonic films overlooked in the past by former Swiss director Moritz de Hadeln.

Kosslick also gave considerable room to U.S. productions, although none of these high profile features fared very well on the award podium. Only Monster's Ball's Halle Berry snatched a coveted Bear in the Best Actress category, although how one could overlook Dame Judi Dench's stunning performance in Iris as a woman slowly loosing her mind to the devastating Alzheimer's disease still beats me. Controversy was quick to appear, not only about the director's new Perspective German Cinema section but also vis-à-vis the much-criticized Competition. The latter was a display of mostly skillful productions and solid interpretations. Topics ranged from essential -Forster's Monster's Ball and Beneath Clouds by Ivan Sen tackled oft-ignored racism issues in America and Australia respectively- to entertaining (Ozon's musical Eight Women or the whimsical The Royal Tenenbaums). But all in all, the Competition selection was disappointing by its overall blandness. Few features really stood out, and trying to rate one higher than the rest proved almost impossible. Out of competition films like Robert Altman's Gosford Park and its uncompromising, careful depiction of the past century English aristocracy, or Zhang Yimou's bittersweet, understated tribute to nostalgia, Happy Times, could have been serious contenders.

Things being what they were, the Japanese animation film Spirited Away emerged as the most innovative picture, tying with Paul Greengrass' Bloody Sunday for the prized Golden Bear. Like many of the films presented at the 2002 Berlinale, Bloody Sunday dealt with violence. The film provides a detailed reconstruction of the infamous events of January 30th, 1972 that lead to civil war in Northern Ireland: the shooting by British troops of unarmed citizens on a protest march. The film was made more personal through the point-of-view of four protagonists caught in the midst of the showdown. It has the great merit of presenting a variety of perspectives, from a civil-rights activist to the British troop leader, plus some regular Joes on each side. Other filmmakers didn't have Greengrass' finesse. Tom Tykwer, who takes a look at a terrorist act gone horribly wrong in Heaven, shows a fraction of the victims' standpoint but still ends up portraying black-and-white, all-good or all-bad protagonists. Baader, the story of a group of local terrorists wreaking havoc in Germany throughout the 60es and early 70es, left me confused to whether director Christopher Roth was actually condemning the gang's deeds or not. Only Site, a Competition short by Jason Kliot recording people's reactions to the remains of New York's Twin Towers, openly addressed September 11th but many productions dealt with terrorism in particular and violence in general.All this only made the tie for the Golden Bear with the fairytale-like Spirited Away all the more surprising, although the animé certainly gave viewers a lift. Psychoanalysts have dissected fairytales and made clear that these tales contain acts of an extremely violent nature, but that the stories' supernatural settings and characters allow violence to be expressed, channeled and controlled, thus making it acceptable while exorcising our fears.

The choice of Spirited Away was surprising on another level. Some Euro-journalists responded to this daring selection by deeming the tie a pairing of serious filmmaking versus kid-oriented entertainment. Animé films are still treated with snobbism on the Old Continent where the genre doesn't seem to have acquired its legitimacy marks, contrarily to Asia (Spirited Away blew apart all box-office records last summer in Japan, taking in over $215 million) and to a certain extent to the U.S. Barring categories, the picture was enchanting and clever, but still attracted unusually sparse audiences. Ultimately, it stood out in my mind whenever it came to casting my personal vote. Hayao Miyazaki's animé, which is evocative of "Alice in Wonderland", delves into the same fantasyland as his previous feature Princess Mononoke, with even more mastery if that were possible. My initial worry, ten minutes into the film, disappeared as soon as the heroine, Chihiro, sets foot into the story's parallel world. At that moment, the Japanese cartoon-like illustration gives way to an array of wonderfully imaginative, well-drawn fairytale characters ranging from ghosts, gods, goblins and ogres to awkward creatures of all shapes and sizes. Seldom is imagination displayed so creatively and beautifully. Spirited Away fulfills the same longing for a clearer and more magical world that gave Shrek or The Lord of the Rings such a good run, perhaps in response to the feelings of uncertainty (surfacing long before September 11th but on the rise since) that people and societies throughout the world seem to be experiencing. Built on deeper psychological issues in the tradition of great myths, the scenario provides a classic quest framed from the perspective of personal identity and the loss thereof. Miyazaki colors the story in more hues than fairytales usually do, bringing out the good and the bad in each character. The picture is also shot like a movie, with long pans over establishing shots followed by close-ups, which adds to its richness. Some images -Chihiro standing alone, surrounded by water, waiting for a train that runs over the surface of an empty ocean- were so poetic that I almost wished the amazing landscapes to be real. More stirring than most of the competition movies, Miyazaki's feature definitely managed to spirit reality away for a while.

Except for a few features like the award-winning Japanese animé, most innovative films were to be found outside the mass-audience oriented competition flicks. Often left aside by journalists lacking time to see more than the Competition selection, the Panorama section focusing on World Cinema and especially the Forum, with one-third feature debuts, showcased original, often small-budget pictures carried out through thick and thin. A majority of films originated from Asian countries. While the Panorama section comprised more Japanese movies than ever before, the Forum, piloted by new head Christoph Terhechte, zeroed in on guerrilla Chinese features. The focus on China, named Electric Shadows after the Chinese word -dian ying- for "film", regrouped 10 nouvelle vague productions tendering a fascinating social assessment of the People's Republic of China. Underground documentaries, films produced outside of China or government authorized features, all revealed different facets of the contemporary society's identity crisis, struggling to integrate past and present values, Western influences and modernization. Zhu Wen's Seafood offers a disturbing portrayal of society's downturn focused on the perception of sexual malaise in modern China. This tale of desperation and abuse matches up a corrupt cop and a suicidal prostitute. The unseen but overheard scene of the cop having sex with what seems to be his 10-year-old daughter, presented as run of the mill and unimportant -a necessary release no different than eating- is downright chilling. A common factor among these productions is the suppressed, latent violence that permeates them. Unlike other movies, the ferocity in people surfaces in small details, in dialogues or in the feelings of desperation that are portrayed more than in the occasional outbursts of brutal behavior. Liu Hao's Chen Mo and Meiting, the recipient of a Special Mention of the Premiere First Movie Awards, centers on one man's struggle against poverty. The film brings up the displacements brought on by the Cultural Revolution -when people were sent from city to country and country to city, to worlds and jobs they knew nothing about. Chen Mo, an unsophisticated man from the country, is trying to make a better living in the city but his lack of skills compel him to keep mostly odd jobs. He epitomizes the following generations that were allowed to return to the environment their parents were taken away from and that -once more- they know nothing about. He encounters Meiting, a city girl, and the two, who have barely known family life, try to recreate a family-like atmosphere together. Yet despite Chen Mo's seemingly endless tolerance, the quiet desperation of the characters keeps building up and the film ends in bloodshed. Based on filmmaker Liu Hao's own experience of illegally selling flowers on the street and in Dogma-like, naturalistic photography, Chen Mo and Meiting is an extremely touching film about real people and plain, real life. Through the portrayal of two lonely people coming together by chance, Liu hints at a larger picture: the feelings of isolation and the breakdown of family units of an entire generation.

On the other hand, raw, physical violence primarily suffused the Japanese productions at the Berlinale, from genre films to the many features portraying a nation in search of its identity. On the lighter side of this tendency, the audience-favorite Go makes use of trendy filmmaking techniques reminiscent of Guy Ritchie's Snatch -freeze frames, extreme camera angles, alternating slow and fast motion on a frenetic soundtrack- to illustrate harsh topics: the rough treatments inflicted by schoolteachers upon students, by students upon each other and upon random passersby, and more importantly, the racial issues between Japanese and Japanese-born Koreans. The clever use of camera effects, combined with a good dose of humor and with romance as a backdrop, allows up-and-coming director Isao Yukisada to illustrate the current violence in Japan while entertaining the audience. Shunji Iwai, to whom Isao Yukisada was an assistant, takes the more classic route of dramatic storytelling to denounce the brutality inside and out of the classroom, winning a Special Mention by the International Confederation of Art Cinemas along the way. In a beautiful visual style, with images as ethereal at times as the ether-nirvana sung by teenage-idol Lily Chou Chou, the uncompromising All About Lily Chou Chou paints a squalid picture of Japanese schools. Forget bullying: gang leaders go much further, forcing classmates into prostitution, pushing others to suicide through hazing, rape, extortion and sexual harassment. Iwai brings a disturbing realism to the film by making the characters evolve from victim to bully, friend to hangman, innocent to accomplice, and by depicting the kids' loneliness and desperation no matter if they happen to be on top or not. Although his portrayal, based on research as well as personal experience, is realistic, the director confessed to not having used some of the more disturbing material he collected.

Not sparing the audience was an undercurrent at the 52nd Berlinale. Many films dealt not only with present unrest but also with past violence and the need to face up to history. Two competition features, one out-of-competition and one gala screening dealt with the Nazi era, respectively Costa-Gavras' Amen, Bertrand Tavernier's Safe Conduct, István Szabó's Taking Sides and Chaplin's classic Hitler satire, The Great Dictator. The two German productions, Amen and Taking Sides, were unrelenting in their depiction of Hitler's destructive actions, unearthing every ugly last detail. No way to ignore what happened (or forget it) after seeing one of these films, which is perhaps the point of this self-flagellation. Based on authentic facts, Amen charts the efforts of an SS Officer involved in the death camps' extermination program to stop the massacre by alerting the Pope to what is going on, alas to no avail. Taking Sides looks at similar WWII events from another perspective, that of an American officer in charge of indicting Berlin's greatest conductor, Wilhelm Furtwängler, for submitting to the Nazi yoke, thus becoming an accomplice of Hitler's mass destruction -even if this enabled him to save many Jews. Collaboration or forced relationship with the Nazis, that is the question left forever unresolved. The almost unbearable face-off between the two men (and between two outstanding actors, Harvey Keitel and Stellan Skarsgård) brings up different angles of the question of guilt: is it fair to judge with the benefit of hindsight and full knowledge, not knowing how one would have reacted in the same situation? The arguments used on both sides -the flawed, human dimension for one and the sense of righteous justice for the other- make sense by turns, putting the viewer through the same paradoxes as the protagonists. Seeing such movies surrounded by generations of German viewers, not far from the bunker where Hitler committed suicide, can give a serious case of spine chills. But Berlin audiences seemed to ask for more, awarding Blind Spot. Hitler's Secretary the Panorama Audience Prize. This documentary by André Heller and Othmar Schmiderer highlights Traudl Junge, Hitler's private secretary from fall 1942 up to the dictator's final moments. For the first time in her life, Traudl Junge shared on camera her memories and little-known anecdotes about the regime and the man everyone loves to hate. Like many Germans, she appears unable, even now, to forgive her past naiveté and ignorance, and her liking of Hitler as a person. Ultimately, the documentary proved to be more perhaps than Traudl, who died on the day of the premiere, could handle -or perhaps it was the ultimate confession she had been waiting for.

From the horrors of the past to the unrest present in many societies around the world, violence was the ever-present, unseen guest of the Berlinale, permeating many feature-length films, shorts and documentaries. Although never directly part of the festival, September 11th was, in this sense, never far away. The Berlinale's Golden Bear tie expresses better than anything else the world's mixed feelings: on one side the need for poetry and illusion, pictured in the magic Spirited Away, and on the other hand a desire to take a hard look at past mistakes in order to avoid repeating them, reflected by Bloody Sunday. Cinema here was at its best, illustrating, exploring and alleviating the apprehensions, needs and beliefs of society the way it always has.

© Briana Berg, 2002