Of the two, West Berlin’s thriving Super 8 scene of the 1980s is much better known outside of Germany, spawning collections such as Berlin Super 80. Even at the time of their making, some of the films were shown in New York and London, receiving a better reception in the avant-garde circles of those metropoli than they did in West Germany. If the West Berlin underground filmmakers styled themselves as radical and transgressive, their east German counterparts took many more risks, as unlicenced film-making was prohibited in the GDR and they risked arrest. Even the act of picking up a Super 8 camera was circumscribed: it was the only technology available to amateurs, as only the Stasi, the ubiquitous security police, had video. Shooting in secret, they used the limitations to their advantage, creating their own worlds within their flats and then screening the results in private, word-of-mouth gatherings, known only to kindred spirits.

Generation Berlin Wall gathers a selection from two programmes that have screened separately in Germany — Gegenbilder, GDR Film in the Underground, and Who says concrete does not burn, have you tried? West Berlin Film in the ’80s. It seems appropriate the two should be united.

Comparisons are inevitable. For a start, the West Berliners had access to a range of technology, and the films on show include not just Super 8, but 16 mm and video films, as well. The West Berliners, encircled as they were by East Germany, display a restless energy, tearing around the island city by foot and in cars, as if testing the limits of their boundaries. Narrative is largely absent, and experimentation with form is very much to the fore. Brigitte Bühler and Dieter Hormel’s a-b-city looks like an MTV video, with its quick cutting and time-lapse photography. Music is a prominent feature in these films, as they are largely asynchronous. The West Berlin band Einstürzende Neubauten appears numerous times on the soundtracks, their brand of industrial mayhem fitting the mood, apparently. But, the US group Pere Ubu is another popular choice.

The East German films also employ music as the primary soundtrack, but seem to favour experimental jazz, the improvised quality of the music adding to the discordant visuals on show. How to describe the iconography? Skulls, reclining women and falling apples are recurring images that seem to symbolise death, sexuality and, perhaps, fertility. The gender politics of the comrades leave something to be desired: many of the male filmmakers only seem to cast women as passive, silent sex objects, quite odd considering the active role women played in GDR society. A pity none of the films of the Exterra XX group in Erfurt was included, as they feature quite bold statements from women behind and in front of the camera. One female GDR filmmaker who is included is the artist Cornelia Schleime, notable as an East Germany who emigrated to West Berlin before the fall of the wall. Her film Unter Weissen Tüchern includes shots of morose-looking young people gathered by the Spree, the river that served, at some points in Berlin, as a border. Perhaps these protagonists were prescient in seeing a future across the way.

Generation Berlin Wall runs from November 4th to 8th in London.

Val Phoenix

The opening scene of Cracks is very Madchen in Uniform, as the innocent 1930s school girls stuck on a remote English island sing their hymns, awaiting the arrival of the figurehead: Miss G, the striking, eyeliner-wearing cool teacher, the one the girls all have a pash for, especially head girl Di. But then an interloper arrives, a rival for Miss G’s affections in the form of the exotic new girl, a Spanish aristocrat called Fiamma, and everything goes wrong…. It’s all set up for a cracking drama. Or comedy. Except director Jordan Scott plays it as a kind of gothic melodrama, with the suggested seething passions reduced to endless shots of girls diving into the water under the watchful eye of Miss G. Regaling the wide-eyed girls with tales of imagined travels to faraway places, when it turns out she’s not been beyond the island in years, Miss G flatters to deceive.

Eva Green’s portrayal of Miss G is the great weakness of the film. With her affected speech, visual tics and her rolling eyes, Green appears to be going for a crazed predatory lesbian characterization, rather than something more subtle. The scene in which Miss G takes Fiamma back to her room under the guise of protecting her is plain creepy. And the scene in which the girl begs for her inhaler once she’s collapsed with an asthma attack is dragged out too long. Again, very creepy. Too bad, as it might have been played much, much more subtly, allowing for some understanding of how Miss G could be a crush object and role model for the girls, even given her flaws.

Precious
Directed by Lee Daniels

How much better if they had had a teacher like Ms. Rain, dedicated, patient and encouraging of the most awkward kids, even Clarice “Precious”  Jones, who arrives at the alternative school in Harlem having been expelled from her own for being pregnant. Precious is also being beaten by her mother and, having been called fat and stupid for her entire young life, is at a low ebb. Learning to read and write is one step in a long road to self-fulfillment, but Ms. Rain sees greater promise in Precious’ future. A real tear-jerker, Precious is visceral film-making of the highest order and, while the violence is hard to watch, it is not sensationalized. Mo’Nique as the mother and Gabourey Sidibe as Precious are impressive foils, complex characters locked in a battle of self-loathing and thwarted aspirations – but only one will emerge with any respect.

An Education
Director by Lone Scherfig

Far less dramatic is An Education‘s setting of Twickenham, a suburb just outside swinging London, but culturally far, far removed from the metropolis. Here clever school girl Jenny dreams of visiting Paris, being accepted at Oxford and just getting away from her stuffy parents. When she meets the seemingly refined David, she thinks she has arrived in society, as he takes her to supper clubs and to meet his terribly glamourous friends. But, David’s not all he seems and Jenny, having burned her bridges at school, must call on the assistance of her English teacher, Miss Stubbs, whom she had earlier scorned as leading a dead life. It seems Jenny is not so clever, after all. An Education could have been a biting satire on class or a farce on sexual mores. It sits uncomfortably in between, a gentle nudge in the ribs at suburban mores. Emma Thompson is wasted as the headmistress, who only appears in a couple of short scenes. One wonders what Thompson, an Oscar-winning screenwriter, might have done had she been let loose on the script.

- Val Phoenix

The Exploding Girl

Directed by Bradley Rust

In the early 1990s, slacker cinema was all the rage in American independent cinema, with wacky, mumbling characters, slow pacing and the mundanity of everyday life replacing traditional plots, characterisations and drama.

Which brings us to these two Amerindie offerings. Whereas the London Film Festival programmers found them delightful, bold and original, my experience in the cinema was rather different. And given the snoring and sighing I could hear among my fellow audience members, I suspect I was not alone in my lack of enthusiasm.

The Lonely Man, the anti-hero of The Limits of Control , is a blank canvas, a man with no name, no back story, next-to-no dialogue and no seeming motivation other than he is on some shadowy assignment involving the exchange of matchboxes with a parade of very talented actors in implausible outfits (step forward, Tilda Swinton, John Hurt and Gael Garcia Bernal) marooned in Spain. This involves several visits to an art museum in Madrid, numerous orders of espressos in separate cups and a series of alarmingly shiny suits, one for each stage of his assignment.

Jarmusch seems interested in rituals and repetition, as The Lonely Man keeps to his routine in whatever city or town he finds himself, folding his suit jacket, running through his martial arts positions, memorising the codes he is given and swallowing the notes with his espressos. The only break in his routine is one visit to a flamenco rehearsal when he actually displays emotion, smiling and clapping at the performance. But then it is back to the cryptic assignations and rituals. Without the benefit of some kind of emotional engagement with this character, who carries the film, it proves a very, very dull, as well as baffling, journey.

In The Exploding Girl, even less happens, without even the compensation of the lovely scenery of rural Spain or the cameos. Here, a whiny college student comes home for spring break, has a series of monosyllabic phone conversations with her idiotic boyfriend and stares into space a lot for no discernible reason, with many of the shots blocked by passing cars and pedestrians. This all happens very, very slowly for 77 minutes. Dazed and Confused has a lot to answer for.

- Val Phoenix

Burning Down the House

Directed by Mandy Stein

No One Knows About Persian Cats

Directed by Bahman Ghobadi

Teheran, Iran and New York aren’t obvious kindred spirits and unlikely to be twinned in any civic program any time soon, but two music-related films at the festival point out how underground culture can act as the heartbeat of any metropolis and, indeed, keep its independent spirit alive in the face of crushing obstacles. The 1970s weren’t kind to New York, with bankruptcy, strikes and urban decay depressing the city. Yet, from this squalor sprang the misfits who gravitated to Hilly Kristal’s shabby Bowery hole-in-the-wall, CBGB. Burning Down the House, Mandy Stein’s documentary on the club (which closed in 2006 after a protracted dispute with the landlord) provides the usual, if well-executed archive-photo-soundtrack-talking heads (and, indeed, Talking Heads) formula, with Kristal, Debbie Harry, Sonic Youth, Patti Smith and Little Steven all making appearances, but also makes a more grave point: if “progress” means driving out the scruffy, unwanted elements of society, it also risks producing a homogenized culture. An end credits sequence showing a succession of Starbucks facades makes this point implicitly.

Meanwhile, back in Teheran, just being in a band without official sanction is grounds for arrest and harassment and in No One Knows About Persian Cats, Bahman Ghobadi has assembled a collection of CBGB T-shirt-clad metalheads, NME-reading indie rockers, and other musicians just waiting for their chance, building makeshift rehearsal spaces, putting on word-of-mouth gigs under the noses of the authorities. Their motives are a mix of ambition and creative energy: some want to emigrate, others just want to play without restriction, but they display extraordinary resilience: one band rehearses in a cowshed. Shot in secret, the film is a fictionalized version of reality, with non-professional actors playing the musicians, but the behind-the-scenes story is probably more dramatic: credited as co-screenwriter and -producer is Roxana Saberi, the Iranian-American journalist who was imprisoned earlier in the year for alleged spying. She certainly won’t be heading back to Iran anytime soon, but, as one rapper explains, he wouldn’t leave Teheran even if he were allowed; his city is his inspiration. As in NYC, the sounds of the streets are the conscience of any metropolis.

London Film Festival Homepage

Val Phoenix

London Film Festival: Lessons in Love

Dear Lemon Lima,

dir Suzi Yoonessi

Wah Do Dem

dir Sam Fleischner/Ben Chace

A Thing Called Love (shorts programme)

Today’s lesson is all about love: the things we we do, etc. Poor Vanessa Lemor (l’amour—get it?). All she wanted when she entered Nichols High School was to maintain the affections of her beloved, geeky Philip Georgey. But, alas, Philip is a social climber and rejects her, leaving poor Vanessa (Savanah Wiltfong) to her dreams and her diary entries, addressed to Dear Lemon Lima,…. Fear not, though, as Vanessa gathers the assorted FUBAR (F_ed Up Beyond All Recognition) geeks in the school and sets out to beat Philip at his own game in the (well, it is Alaska) Snowstorm Survival competition. Atypical of this kind of Revenge of the Nerds scenario, the setting is used to good effect in highlighting co-optation of indigenous culture, and there is also a strong girl-bonding theme. Well-written, directed and performed, this film will resonate for anyone who was an outsider at school, even if the ending is a bit pat.

Max (Sean Bones), the anti-hero of Wah Do Dem, has serious love problems, as well: his girlfriend Willow (Norah Jones, woefully underused) has dumped him two days before the start of their planned cruise to Jamaica. Forced to go on his own, Max takes wrong turn after wrong turn, ending up penniless and shoeless in rural Jamaica trying to walk to the US Embassy in Kingston. Clearly, for the filmmakers, this tale of travail is all about the journey, rather than the arrival, with a procession of shots in buses, on bicycles and of people walking. Shot on the fly, it seems longer than its 76 minutes and also makes some quasi-mystical statements about Rasta culture that some may find difficult to swallow. Indeed, at the screening I attended, one audience member asked the filmmakers if they had thought of making something other than a film about the superior American who is wronged by the indigenous population. Somewhat taken aback, they replied that wasn’t the film they thought they had made.

The shorts programme A Thing Called Love was notable for the absence of standard boy-meets-girl fare, even if it was heavily weighted toward male POVs. Instead of romance, one got a series of seriously dysfunctional family relationships, from the inter-generational sniping of Three Mothers (dir Daniel J Schachter) to the father and son who barely communicate in Kid (dir Tom Green). Pick of the bunch, however, was the delightful Swedish comedy Seeds of the Fall (dir Patrick Eklund), in which a middle-aged couple find their space invaded by a runaway digger. With their house gone skew-wiff, they find out more than they wanted to know about the neighbours. Rarely have I seen comedy of embarrassment handled with such a deft touch.

London Film Festival Homepage

Val Phoenix