Festivals The 10th Berlin Critics’ Week (14th-22nd February, 2024)
Day Two - Elemental Bodies: Ecologies, Media, Extraction
The following evening’s debate was called Elemental Bodies: Ecologies, Media, Extraction, and was curated by the art historian and cultural critic T. J. Demos, who was guest curator as well as co-curator of this year’s opening conference that addressed the theme of artistic responses to ecological issues. His guests were present for discussion on Elemental Bodies: designer, artist, and author Daniel Felstead who presented Literally No Place (2023), an 18-minute short co-directed with Jenn Leung; filmmaker and critic Kevin B. Lee, maker of hundreds of video essays and presentations; and the artist Angela Melitopoulos, who presented her video essay Crossings (2017).
The program itself was a repertoire of video essays that deal with the interrelationships between ecology, capitalism, technology, and image-making. The German premiere of the Swiss 11-minute short The Ecology of Science Fiction (2023), directed by Renee Hendrix, Tobias Dekker and Marlene Fischer juxtaposes images of the future in cinema with PR videos by types such as Elon Musk. Daniel Felstead’s Literally No Place looks at how the representation of AI (Artificial Intelligence) has created a kind of media hysteria leading to an inferred rhetoric of doomsday, contrasted with new beliefs AI in progress and human advancement, as well as certain levels of spirituality and ideology. Crossings, by Angela Melitopoulos, shown here as a 20-minute excerpt, is a German production but looks at Greece in the context of recent migration crises, labour relations and financial struggles, set against historic notions of Greek democracy and philosophy.
The other two films in the program, Message of the Forest (2019) a four-minute film by the British collective The Otolith Group, and the 30-minute Norwegian film Serpent Rain (2016) a collaboration by the artist, filmmaker and writer, Arjuna Neuman, and the philosopher Denise Ferreira Da Silva, both offered political perspectives on representations of nature. Message of the Forest was the poetical text by Bengali polymath Rabindranath Tagore and inspired by his vision for a University campus that would become Visva-Bharati in Santineketan, West Bengal, in 1921. A hundred years later it also serves as an ode to the Sal Forests of West Bengal, or a song for the inexorable cycle of nature. It was produced for the The Otolith Group by Hannah Liley and the excellent Director of Photography was Kate McDonough. Serpent Rain was first screened at the 2017 edition of the prestigious DocLisboa Festival. Arjuna Neuman and Denise Ferreira Da Silva considered it just as much an experiment as a future prophecy, therefore attempting to bypass both technology and time. It also looks at the vulnerability of humans in nature when exposed to the elements. Intentionally contemplative, the viewer is encouraged to become active through the images witnessed. For example, an establishing shot of an oil refinery renders the intended inference of the now complicit destruction of the planet for short-term corporate greed. Later, burning oil refineries juxtaposed with long static shot of trees swaying summarise technology attacking nature. The rain on the snow towards the end of the film perhaps serves as a requiem, a lullaby. At times drawing allusions to the Qatsi film trilogy by Godfrey Reggio, Serpent Rain is well-produced with editing and pacing conveyed to an almost contemplative rhythmic and hypnotic effect.
After the film screenings, T. J. Demos, whose writings on contemporary art and visual culture have foregrounded globalization, politics, migration and ecology, hosted the subsequent discussion. He began by asking how contemporary artists are reacting to human exploitation, fast moving technological advances after Big Data, leading to AI-related future shock, and the splintering of the climate movement following the optimism of the Green Revolutions of the late 20th Century. With a focus on what (especially) political alternatives art can implement, including modes of representation, Demos suggested that the screenings were dedicated to Extraction (primary forms of extraction) in a multiplicity of ways, like the forms of exploitation in historical life, in ecology, the media, as well as strategies of resistance. He also admitted feeling a disjunction between the works screened but in that they should each be considered as distinct artistic practices.
Talking in particularly about technology and in relation to her screening excerpt from her video essay Crossings, Angela Melitopoulos commented that she considered machines to be processed based but particularly in the way they dictate human behaviour. Kevin B. Lee, creator of his own video essays that reflect the contemporary, believed what links the very different films is that we can’t avoid what we are inside of or encompassed by in the here and now, as well as agreeing with Demos of feeling a disjunction between the works screened. Demos offered Daniel Felstead the idea of a counter-Extraction and the filmmaker replied that he considers the notion of Extraction as a base condition for his own work Literally No Place, and also in life, believing an individual is inexorably caught in the web of life and has to navigate their way through it via uses of autonomy or agency.
Day Three - Imitation of Life
The next session debate was called Imitation of Life and took place after the two short films, Slow Shift (2023) and Horse Girl (2023), and the feature Camping du Lac (Lakeside Camping) (2023). The guests were: Shambhavi Kaul, Éléonore Saintagnan, Natalia del Mar Kašik, Khaled Abdulwahed, and Tomás Guarnaccia. The debate was introduced and moderated by Charlie Bendisch from the Free University of Berlin's Institute of Theatre Studies and was concerned with the notion films as escapism, as a simulacrum, yet more superior to reality. This was an interesting departure in subject matter, an escape from the (necessary, but) often mirroring or documenting the depressing effect of humanity’s treatment of itself and the natural world in cinema. The focus this time was on how film is able to take the self-reflexive route of filmmaker and/versus apparatus.
In the nine-minute short Slow Shift, director Shambhavi Kaul makes experimental use of documentary footage to transform the town of Hampi, in the state of Karnataka in southern India, from the remains of a 14th century city (also a World Heritage site) into a totally unpredictable cinematic space of rediscovery. The facial expressions of langur monkeys become juxtaposed with stones and rocks. The Langurs belong to their environment. When humans have departed, serene nature returns to a place. Langurs contemplate another sunset, the end of another day where all is calm, atmospheric and contemplative. Otherwise, in her four-minute short film Horse Girl, Natalia del Mar Kašik shows just how much direct and to the point her filmmaking is, by simply having a woman impersonate a horse for four minutes. The girl likes horses, the girl imitates a horse, and the camera becomes a horse.
The feature presentation was Camping du Lac (Lakeside Camping), by Éléonore Saintagnan, who was director, writer and protagonist. After her automobile breaks down, Éléonore rents a bungalow on a campsite with a view of Lake Guerlédan, in French Brittany, in which the legend of Saint Corentin and his holy fish lives on, and while, it is said, a mythical beast also resides. Éléonore closely examines the solitary lives of the campers and as she decamps from one temporary mobile home to another, fantasy encroaches on her space. The film subsequently becomes more surreal and the central character gradually less prominent. Stories are told by the landscape where legends and literary tales unite fiction with documentary. While transcending its mythological premise, the film reflects on some of society's obsessions to create a fable with an environmental message. Working together with a group of mainly amateur actors, Saintagnan seamlessly combines virtuosity with tension, relaxation, genre, and utopia, while other elements take over which combine, legend, fables with a critique of contemporary environmental realities. At the 2023 Locarno Film Festival, where it won the Special Jury Prize and the CINÉ+ award, the sentiments of the prestigious festival considered Camping du Lac to be an everyday event wrapped in mythological stories that infects the entire film with fantasy, becoming a story that is progressively transformed. In 2023 it would also screen at the San Sebastián International Film Festival, São Paulo International Film Festival, and the Ghent Film Festival.
Day Four - Sound and Fury
The screenings and accompanying debate for the topic of Sound and Fury looked at how film represents the ambivalent charms of humour and anger within satire, the limits of plausibility, and the more intentional essay film form, with examples of two particular films. In her 11-minute video essay I Would Like to Rage (2023), Chloé Galibert-Laîné directs the fun at herself but this only belies the more serious notion of how expressions of anger are often stigmatized, both privately and publicly, and particularly in the case of women. This becomes a focused attempt to make a video about the ubiquitous human emotion that oscillates between fun and research, with therapy and self-help rendering itself somewhere in between. The film had its World Premiere at the Festival des Cinémas Différents et Expérimentaux de Paris and its International Premiere at the prestigious IDFA (International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam).
The conspicuously titled feature Dicks: The Musical (2023) is the A24-produced film adaptation of the musical Fucking Identical Twins, of whom the authors and lead actors Aaron Jackson and Josh Sharp appear in straight drag and lampoon male entrepreneur types. After the film programme, the filmmakers were present to discuss further their approaches to humour, satire, self-irony, in conversation with the cabaret artist Idil Baydar, along with Margarita Tsomou, the co-founder and co-editor of Missy magazine, and with moderation by Dennis Vetter, the co-founder and artistic co-director of the Berlin Critics' Week who since 2007 has been involved with platforms of film culture.
Day Five - Hangover
The mood swung back to the serious and melancholy again for the start of the second week and the debate (perhaps knowingly) titled Hangover. Two films were screened followed by a discussion, with both the director’s present, and with additional guests. As a consequence of the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, many Russian civilians (claimed to have) started having dreams about Vladimir Putin and then shared them on social media. Two years later and now more than a thousand dreams about Putin have been recorded and posted on public platforms. For her short film Dreams about Putin (2023) the DocNomads alumna Nastia Korkia has re-interpreted these many dreams that are related by a narrator for 30 minutes. The effect of formatting into 3D scenes is of course not literal and some of the archival footage has also been slightly manipulated and edited. However, if the intention is to be at once dryly comic, absurdist, disturbing, even hopeful, the end result is fully achieved.
The literary scholar, art historian, and artist Zhenming Guo has now made his feature film debut with the documentary Tedious Days and Nights (2023) which had its premiere at the 2023 Singapore International Film Festival. Over thirty years ago, when he was a student leader, Zeng Dekuang's life had changed greatly because of his participation in the 1989 democratic movement. Now, after thirty years of wandering as a poet, Zeng returns to his decrepit hometown, the former industrial town of Coal Dam, which is located in a closed state-owned coal mine in southern China. He has come back to find the place in disrepair, in an unsettling parable of the promise of youth that has decayed progressively with time. His intimate and wider world has undergone profound changes, while the line between reality and memory becomes increasingly difficult for him to separate. Two poet friends, Lu He and Dangsheng Guan, come to visit Zeng and together they wander aimlessly among the debris. Through the accounts of personal memories, at times with humour, but mostly in drunkenness and sometimes despair, hidden historical wounds are revealed, with the interjection of poetry occasionally providing respite to their melancholic recollections.
After the screenings, in a conversation moderated by Andrea Kuhn (Festival Director of the Nuremberg International Human Rights Film Festival), the directors were joined by the Chinese activist, cultural scientist, and filmmaker Jinyan Zeng, who currently teaches about Chinese documentary film in Sweden, and also by Anna Narinskaya, a Russian journalist, filmmaker, activist and curator. The guests posed questions about taboo and (self) censorship in Russia, Ukraine, China, and Berlin. The discussion of the two films explored the deep effects that political violence and dictatorship has on the conscious and subconscious states of artists (as well as in the general population), and how it advertently affects their work as an expression and outlet for their emotions, the rendering of poetical films that that use defence through means of artistic expression.
