naturemorte wrote:About to fly out of Berlin after my first Berlinale. I ended up sticking almost entirely to the Retrospective, Forum and Forum Expanded programs which was probably a mistake--I'm getting super tired of bog-standard "experimental" films and toothless political documentaries. The dominant modes are just SO dominant--revisiting earlier political histories through unusual archives, landscapes with voiceovers, "spontaneous" 16mm footage of beautiful people, and drones, so many fucking drones...Feel like I did a lot of running to stand still overall--hitting five or six programs per day, of which maybe one or two didn't feel like mistakes. I wish I was a little more adventurous when it comes to going blind into the Panorama section stuff, but bland arthouse shit drives me up the wall too.
Anyway, the Schanelec is the only thing I saw that felt like a masterpiece, and I was very cool on The Dreamed Path. Heimat Is A Space In Time, a 4-hour essay film that rehearses the last century of East/German history (through landscape shots and personal archives!) is pretty good, but the visual motifs (crowds! trains! ruins! more trains, and more still!) are more than exhausted by the end. Bait was good, but is smashing the novelty buttons (it's shot with black-and-white 16mm, hand-processed, and edited like a Pudovkin film or something) really hard for what is narratively a die-stamped British Class Politics movie. "Just Don't Think I'll Scream" is an interesting found-footage film made mostly out of insert shots from obscure films--the only thing I consciously recognized was "Funeral Parade of Roses". I most hipinion members would, like me, identify deeply with the film's subject, about the difficulty of excavating oneself from out of the self-constructed caves of media, weed and despair we constuct to shield ourselves from the shittiness of the current moment, but that's what makes it kind of uninteresting as found footage. Every shot relates primarily to the narration and to the emotional identification of the narrator with that image, and so thee images rarely interact with one another in meaningful or challenging ways. Of the new films I saw, only Ute Aurand's "Rushing Green with Horses" really made me think in any exciting way--i think I need to write something about it. If the older films I saw, Marta Meszaros' "Adoption" was the only knockout for me.
thanks for report on berlinale
was there any VR cinema worth mentioning?
i was at sundance this year and while they had a lot of VR filmmaking, it was extremely small scale and nearly impossible to access (unless you wanted to wait in line for hours and hours). not sure if i missed anything tho- the descriptions of the works sounded like run-of-the-mill "gallery films" though without a critical posture, from what i could tell
sadly there are few platforms for this area of moving image art- again, i can't tell if the FOMO is real, or it is still too young to be good