Berlinale 2015#1

يادداشت‌هاي شصت و پنجمين فستيوال فيلم برلين - بخش اول

در سوي اشتباهِ جاده

احسان خوش‌بخت

1

برليناله، خرس طلايي دستاوردهاي يك عمر را به ويم وندرس داد و در كنارش همه فيلم‌هايش را نمايش داد كه توسط بنياد تازه تأسيس وندرس - با آرمي مثل بال يك فرشته - مرمت و ديجيتال شده‌اند. سفر من از زادگاه وندرس، دوسلدورف، آغاز شد. يك نمايشگاه عكاسي من را به آن‌جا كشاند و ديدن عكاسان كه يك به يك كارهايشان را روي پرده‌اي بزرگ معرفي مي‌كردند، مثل ديدن فيلمي بود كه از يك نما يا چند نماي پراكنده تشكيل شده باشد؛ فريم‌هايي از فيلمي كه هرگز ساخته نشده، اما ‌چشم‌ها و مغز مي‌تواند آن‌ها را به هم وصل كند، روايت خودش را بسازد و به عكس‌ها زندگي بدهند. فيلم‌هاي برليناله، يا لااقل بيشترشان، مثل همين فريم‌هاي جداافتاده‌اند. سينما هر سال منقطع‌تر و گسسته‌تر مي‌شود. آيا اين فيلمسازانند كه در كوير تخيل بخشي از باري كه قادر به بردوش كشيدن نيستند را بر شانه‌هاي تماشاگران مطيع نشسته در سالن تاريك گذاشته‌اند؟

سينما مغز آدم را پر از تصوير مي‌كند و باعث مي‌شود هر تصويري نتواند به سادگي تأثير بگذارد. مغز پر از تصوير ناخودآگاه و به شكلي دائمي در حال مقايسه و نتيجه‌گيري است. اگر در دوسلدورف يك دختر عكاس نيوزلندي از كوره‌هاي كارخانه‌هاي آلمان در مناطق صنعتي عكس گرفته، مغز سينمايي فكر مي‌كند كوره‌هاي صحراي سرخ به مراتب كوره‌تر‌ند. اگر در همان‌جا عكاسي چيني روزمرگي و ملال را در عكس‌هايش تصوير كرده، مغز سينمايي به خاطر مي‌آورد كه ‌سينماي امروز يعني تصاوير روزمرگي و روزمرگي تصاوير.

My Top 10 Documentaries (The Sight & Sound Poll)

Forugh Farrokhzad directing The House Is Black (1962)

From the September issue of Sight & Sound:

1

The Sound of Jazz (Jack Smight, 1957)

This is the greatest improvised documentary ever, and features a super-stellar line-up of 32 leading jazz musicians gathered at the CBS Studio in New York City in December 8, 1957. It was made in one hour and broadcast live on television. Cameramen were as into ad-libing as Thelonious Monk, and when Billie Holiday and Lester Young started to play Fine and Mellow everybody in the control room was crying.

2

Quince Tree of the Sun (Victor Erice, 1992)

Documentary cinema as meditation. No film, fiction or documentary, has captured the meticulous, painfully stagnant process of artistic creation with such rich expansion of cinematic time and space.

3

Shoah (Claude Lanzmann, 1985)

There is a logical, aesthetic and moral relation between the scale of the tragedy and the length of the film, which leaves a lasting physiological and psychological impact on the viewer.

4

Histoire(s) du cinéma (Jean-Luc Godard, 1988)

A multi-dimensional, free-form history of 20th century which proves all one needs is some ideas and an editing table, because the images are already out there.

5

The House Is Black (Forugh Farrokhzad, 1962)

The crowning achievement of Iranian documentary movement of the 60s and 70s, and singular in its hypnotic melancholy, its profound humanism and its poetic imagery.

6

Hôtel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie (Marcel Ophüls, 1988)

This film taught me the methodology of cinematic inquiry, as well as lessons in persistence and integrity. In every documentary Ophüls has ever directed, he proves that cinema is, above all, a machine of humanism, if one knows how to use it.

7

Robinson in Space (Patrick Keiller, 1997)

My traveling guide to Britain. Behind its cold, bureaucratic, un-poetic shots, lie a majestic world of complex emotions.

8

Lektionen in Finsternis (Werner Herzog, 1992)

I was born and raised during the Iran-Iraq war, and every bit of the horrendous landscape portrayed on this film is also carved in my memory. What Herzog with his hel(l)i-shots does is to dive into that collective memory shared by millions who were inside that hell.

9

P for Pelican (Parviz Kimiavi, 1972)

A haunting and stylized mediation on solitude, beauty and language through the story of a real-life protagonist, Agha Seyyed Ali Mirza, who’s been living in the ruins of the earthquake-shaken Tabas for forty years. A day arrives when he has to leave the ruins and face the great, strange, Lynch-like beauty: a pelican!

10

The Battle of Chile (Patricio Guzmán, 1976)

The film’s bleak transition from the hope and ardor of the first part to the harrowing shot-from-the-rooftop second section, tells not only of the history of Chile, but also of the process of toppling other democratic governments in 20th century (namely, Iran of 1953).

Sound of Jazz (1957)

Notes:

In order to narrow down the range of choices, I exclude documentaries if an experimental nature such as great city symphonies of the late silent era, as well as actor-less fiction films such as Soy Cuba.

There are many jewels of documentary cinema hidden in the vaults of TV stations. In that regard, Cinéastes de notre temps, a French produced-for-TV film-portrait of masters of cinema, of which only a few titles are available to the public, is the greatest film university one can attend, as well as a perfect example of a masterpiece produced by filmmakers whose names are not yet in the canon.

As a trained architect who has designed, written and filmed about architecture and cinema, I still feel there are many unexplored territories in this field, and that many great films are waiting to be made. However, it doesn’t mean overlooking what’s already been done, especially works of Thom Andersen, Hiroshi Teshigahara, Man Ray and Alexander Kluge.

Lastly, there are directors whose body of work has influenced me more than any single film. Georges Franju’s early work, Fredrick Wiseman and Chris Marker are among them. Kamran Shirdel’s clandestine documentation of the lives of unprivileged in pre-revolutionary Iran, in particular, stands out.

P Like Pelikan (1972)

Three Significant Films of the Year for 24 Monthly

ماهنامه بيست و چهار از من خواست سه فيلم «مهم» سال انتخاب كنم. اين سه فيلم انتخاب‌هاي من بودند و چند خطي اجازه داشتم دلايل اهميت اين فيلم‌ها را توضيح بدهم:

معماهاي ليسبون (رائول روئِس)

272 دقيقه وقت داريد حركت تدريجي نور خورشيد را روي برگ‌هاي سبز حيات‌ خلوت قصرهايي در ليسبون نظاره كنيد، يا به اين فكر بيفتيد كه ثبات شخصيت‌ها در هنر سينما و اين‌كه هركدام واجد ويژگي‌هايي مشخص و ثابتند آيا يك اشتباهِ فني و دست و پا گير در هنر سينما نبوده؟ چه مي‌شود اگر شخصيت‌ها هر نيم ساعت يا يك ساعت تغيير حالت و تغيير شخصيت بدهند؟ آيا معماهاي ليسبون مي‌توانست هم‌چنان بعد از چهار ساعت و نيم پرسه در صومعه‌ها و قصرها ادامه پيدا كند؟ تصور من اين است كه معماهاي آن براي ادامه يافتن تا روزهاي متمادي كافي بود. معماهايي كه مثل معماي بزرگ - هنر سينما - هرگز پاسخي روشن پيدا نمي‌كنند.

Filming the Non-existence

Amos Vogel calls Werner Herzog's Fata Morgana "a cosmic pun on cinéma vérité." Cinéma vérité or a LSD film, Fata Morgana is a masterpiece of unconscious images streaming out of a man's mind who knows how everything about the cinema is unreal and dream-like, sometime even making the film itself. Fata Morgana is born out of a madness. Its aim is to shoot mirages in the deserts of Africa. A mirage, cinema, should have capture another mirage.

"Maybe more than any other films I have made Fata Morgana is one that needs to be completed by the audience, which means all feelings, thoughts and interpretations are welcome. Today, forty years later, the film is very much alive to audiences. It is like nothing they have ever seen before, and I think everyone comes away with their own understanding of the film.

But immediately after making it I felt that people would ridicule the film. I felt Fata Morgana was very frail - like a cobweb - and I did not consider it a robust piece of work that could be released. I kept the film for almost two years without showing it, and then I was deviously tricked by my friends Lotte Eisner and Henri Langlois who borrowed a print and gave it to the Cannes Film Festival. When it was finally released it was a big success with young people who had taken various drugs and was seen as one of the first European art-house psychedelic films, which of course it has no connection with at all.

'Fata morgana' means mirage. The first scene of the film is made up of eight shots of eight different airplanes landing one after the other. I had the feeling that audiences who were still watching by the sixth or seventh landing would stay to the end. This opening scene sorts out the audiences; it is a kind of test. As the day grows hotter and hotter and the air becomes drier and drier, so the images get more and more blurred, more impalpable. Something visionary sets in - something like fever dreams - that remains with us for the entire length of the film. This was the motif of Fata Morgana: to capture things that are not real, not even actually there.

In the desert you can actually film mirages. Of course, you cannot film hallucinations which appear only inside your own mind, but mirages are something completely different. A mirage is a mirror reflection of an object that does actually exist and that you can see, even though you cannot actually touch it. It is a similar effect to when you take a photograph of yourself in the bathroom mirror. You are not really there in the reflection but you can still photograph yourself. The best example I can give you is the sequences we shot of the bus on the horizon. It is a strange image; the bus seems to be almost floating on water and the people seem to be just gliding along, not really walking. The heat that day was beyond belief. We were so thirsty and we knew that some of the buses had supplies of ice on board so right after we stopped the camera we rushed over there. But we could not find a single trace of anything. No tire tracks, no tracks at all. There was just nothing there, nor had there ever been anything there, and yet we had been able to film it. So there must have been a bus somewhere - maybe 10 or 100 or 300 miles away - which was visible to us because of the heated strata of air that reflected the real existing image.

Today Fata Morgana seems very frenzied to me, as if a major catastrophe is round the corner of every scene."

From Herzog on Herzog.

Werner Herzog's Heart of Glass

I just watched Werner Herzog's Heart of Glass [Herz aus Glas], least effective among his great films of the seventies. But I was striked by the fact that all actors during the production were hypnotized and as a matter of fact the whole film has been made under such a condition.

Herzog says he was influenced by Jean Rouch's Les Maitres Fou, a documentary shot in Ghana and featuring the annual ceremonies of the Hauka tribe who, when heavily under drugs.
To me, heart of glass is like a Hieronymus Bosch painting - minus religious aspect of it - a gathering of madness in the world that is going to collapse any moment. But if a director's concept is picturing a Bosch, I prefer his cinematic style be closer to Robert Altman's moving camera, long shots and zoom than Herzog's rather still and interior treatment of the concept.

The script is loosely adapted from a chapter of Herbert Achternbusch's novel The Hour of Death which was, in turn, based on an old Bavarian folk legend about a peasant prophet in Lower Bavaria who, like Nostradamus, made predictions about the cataclysmic end of the world. In the film Hias - a shepherd with prophetic gifts - has apocalyptic visions and foresees an entire town becoming halfway insane and the destruction by fire of its glassworks. At the end of the film the factory-owner burns his own factory down, as foreseen, and the prophet is then blamed for the fire.

During pre-production Herzog put an ad in the newspaper asking for people who wanted to take part in a series of experiments involving hypnosis. There were sessions once a week for about six months, and they ended up selecting those people according to the types that were needed for the story, and also, crucially, based on their receptivity to hypnosis.

For production, Herzog and his cinematographer, Schmidt-Reitwein looked at the work of seventeenth-century French painter Georges de La Tour. Herzog wanted to capture something of the same atmosphere one can find in his canvases. As I observed La Tour paintings, his influence is visible on interior photography and lighting the scene with candles (a year after Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon).

Most of the film was shot in Bavaria, some in Switzerland and some in Alaska near Glacier Bay. The final sequence was filmed on Skellig Rock, Ireland.

According to Herzog, the title of film, Heart of Glass, means an extremely sensitive and fragile inner state, with a kind of transparent glacial quality to it. "What I did with Heart of Glass was, for me, part of a very natural progression. My attempts to render inner states that are transparent from a certain viewpoint were realized in a kind of nightmarish vision in Even Dwarfs Started Small, in ecstatic states in The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Sterner, and even in the state of non-participation of social activities with the children in Land of Silence and Darkness and Bruno in The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser. In all these films none of the people are deformed, not even the dwarfs,” says Herzog.

The film would seem to depart from known behavior and gestures and would have an atmosphere of hallucination, prophecy and collective delirium that intensifies towards the end. For me the most unforgettable part is its seven minutes prologue about collapsing the world (with a mystic music by Herzog usual collaborator, Pupol Vuh).

--Ehsan Khoshbakht