When the International Jury President, Kristen Stewart, was announcing the winner of this year’s Golden Bear for Best Film, she briefly addressed one of the recurring themes of this year’s festival: what is art? And who gets to decide? It was a question that was raised in at least two movies shown during the 10-day gala: Liu Jian’s Art College 1994 and Vasilis Katsoupis’ Inside.
Of course, there isn’t an easy answer to the question. But of the “major” international film festivals around the world, which include Cannes, Venice, and Toronto, a case can be made that Berlin is the artiest of them all. The long-running Forum and Forum Expanded sections of the festival (which accounted for 58 films in this year’s edition) are havens for boundary-pushing art films, many of which would otherwise only be screened at museums, or within the walls of the endangered species known as the art-house cinema. While we continue to debate which movies benefit from the theater experience, as opposed to the at-home streaming experience, the art film is usually left out of the discussion. But what better way is there to watch a James Benning film than to be immersed by a giant screen and stereophonic sound?
The octogenarian Benning is one of the titans of the current art movie scene. At last year’s Berlinale, his film The United States of America featured one of the most jaw-dropping endings of the festival. It contained 50 single-take shots, each lasting about two minutes, and each representing one of the 50 states. Each shot is fairly convincing, but at the end we learn that all the imagery was captured in California. It’s a brilliant, playful and thoughtful twist. He returned this year with ALLENSWORTH, another compendium of single-shots, each capturing one of the remaining structures from the long abandoned town of Allensworth, which was California’s first Black-founded and Black-goverened municipality. I didn’t find it quite as impressive as America, but it’s still a remarkable experience. Much of the effectiveness of Benning’s films comes from the accumulated effect of one long, static shot after another, which is something that is far more likely to be achieved in a theater. It’s all too easy to disengage or be distracted from work like this if you’re watching from somewhere other than a darkened theater.
More impressive was Notes from Eremocene (Poznámky z Eremocénu), a hallucinatory journey from the future into the present, wherein the filmmaker Viera Čakányová is experimenting with all of the filmmaking tools to try and figure out what in the hell happened in the early years of the twenty-first century. Language, artificial intelligence, avatars, blockchain, climate change, Nick Cave, pandemics, activism, and apathy – these are all on Čakányová’s mind and the way she mixes computer generated imagery with found footage, stills, and her own videography, is a true sensory experience that verged on overwhelming at times, but was never less than fascinating to behold. I had to wonder, where else but at Berlinale would I stumble upon such a work of art?
The films in the Forum section aren’t all museum pieces, however. This year there were offbeat comedies like Melisa Liebenthal’s The Face of the Jellyfish (El rostro de la medusa), and even a somber crime film from France called The Temple Woods Gang (Le Gang des Bois du Temple). I especially want to tip my hat to Mammalia, a strange and funny whatsit of a film from the Romanian filmmaker Sebastian Mihăilescu.
If Midsommar was too mainstream for your tastes, then Mammalia might be the kind of messed-up, mysterious cult film you’re after. When a guy’s girlfriend ghosts him, he starts to investigate the weird cult-like group she’s been gravitating towards lately. What he finds defies easy description, but it raises all kinds of questions regarding gender and group identity, as well as what kind of agency we have over our lives and bodies. That may sound a bit heavy, and Mammalia is a heady trip to be sure, but it is also playful and perverse in a way that makes it all indelibly watchable. This is a true cult film (in that it’s not for everyone), and one worth keeping an eye out for.
Before getting to some of the higher-profile movies from the festival, there’s one highlight from the Panorama section that I must mention. Compared to the Forum lineup, the Panorama section is less formally adventurous and experimental.These are the kinds of international films that you would expect to find serving as the backbone of a world-spanning film festival like the Berlinale. Still, I wasn’t expecting to come across Hello Dankness.
If you’re not familiar with the work of the A/V collage artist duo known as Soda Jerk, I recommend giving this video a spin. Their dizzying creations allow Beavis and Butt-Head to share a scene with both Steve Martin from The Jerk and Laura Dern from Citizen Ruth. Not only that, but at the same time Butt-Head will have Christian Slater’s dialogue from Pump Up the Volume coming out of his mouth. It’s uncanny stuff. With their feature-length Hello Dankness, the duo get thematically resonant by creating a super-edit that speaks to the madness that surrounded the Trump election and the outbreak of COVID-19. Seamlessly edited footage from The ‘Burbs and American Beauty comment on neighborhood political party paranoia. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles discuss pizzagate. Napoleon Dynamite responds to email leaks and Trump’s behind-the-scenes rant on Access Hollywood. It’s both hilarious and existentially distressing. Hello Dankness is a masterwork of sampling, repurposing and retrofitting, and it works amazingly well to remind you of how absurdly cartoonish and nightmarish our reality is.
Situated somewhere above Panorama, but below the main Competition lineup, is the Encounters section, which is a relatively new addition to the festival, arriving in 2020. This smaller group of around 15 titles usually contains a few high-profile names and some unimpeachably great movies. In other words, the Encounters films can be just as good as the Competition films but harder to get a ticket to since they’ll be shown in smaller theaters. I only managed to see two this year: The Adults by Dustin Guy Defa and starring Michael Cera, and in water (mul-an-e-seo) by Berlinale mainstay Hong Sangsoo.
I loved The Adults. It features a career-best performance by Cera, who plays the brother of two sisters (Hannah Gross and Sophia Lillis) who is returning home after living on the other side of the country since the death of their mother. What the sisters don’t know is that he’s mostly there to play poker, but he slowly comes to understand how much work needs to be done to heal his relationship with his siblings (and thereby heal himself). The screenplay is particularly strong as it makes great use of the kind of secret, coded language that brothers and sisters can form during childhood. Plus, there’s a single-take scene where Cera is sitting at a poker table and recounting a harrowing memory that was one of the most jaw-dropping moments of the entire festival.
Hong Sangsoo’s new film, on the other hand, is a mixed-bag. For starters, it clocks in at just over 60 minutes, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing – especially when you consider the fact that the movie is almost entirely shot out-of-focus. This may sound bonkers, and it kind of is, but it’s also kind of justified since it’s a story about an untrained, amateur filmmaker attempting to shoot his first movie. It’s not an easy movie to sit through, but it still comes with a Hong Sangsoo script, so the dialogue is still delightful and the narrative comes to a very satisfying conclusion. It might end up as one of those “for-completists-only” entries in the prolific director’s filmography.
Now, I’ll briefly touch on some of the films in the main Competition section of the festival. In the five years since I’ve been attending the festival as an accredited member of the press, I’ve always managed to see between 20 to 30 films, and I’ve always managed to not see the Golden Bear winner. This year was no different. If you’ve been following the news coming from Berlin, you’ve surely heard that this year the Golden Bear for Best Film was given to the French documentary On the Adamant (Sur l’Adamant) by Nicolas Philibert. Meanwhile, the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize (essentially the runner up award) went to Christian Petzold’s newest film Afire (Roter Himmel), which I did see and was completely wowed by. After some relatively esoteric detours with 2018’s Transit and 2020’s Ondine, Petzold is back to telling a grounded tale, this time about a bitterly frustrated writer (is there any other kind?) who is trying to finish a doomed second novel while staying at a friend’s summer house. Complicating matters is a mysterious woman (played by Petzold’s ongoing muse Paula Beer) who’s also staying at the house, and an encroaching forest fire that gives the movie its name. While there’ve been plenty of movies about jealousy and resentment among artists, few have hit me with as much accuracy and authenticity as this one. It’s another twisty winner from a director with one of the best track records going today.
I also enjoyed Till the End of the Night (Bis ans Ende der Nacht), which earned Thea Ehre the festival’s Best Leading Performance award. The movie can be accurately described as a neo-noir, as it deals with an undercover cop who enlists his former flame to help him take down a drug dealer. It’s also a truly modern tale, with the former flame being the cop’s ex who spent the past two years in jail. In that time she’s transitioned into being a woman, which is something that greatly complicates their relationship and the sting operation that’s been put together. Despite the modern trappings, the movie, by Christoph Hochhäusler, has deep 1970’s vibes. From time to time, I couldn’t help feeling like I was watching an old William Freidkin movie. It’s completely unsentimental and unflinching, and I was completely enthralled to be following these star-crossed characters as they fell deeper and deeper into trouble.
My favorite movie of the 2023 Berlinale was one that sadly went home with no awards (but I definitely would have given it the best director award over Philip Garrel’s The Plough, which was my least favorite movie of the festival). Celine Song’s Past Lives does the incredible job of making the well-trod long-distance romance story feel not only fresh again, but profoundly, heartbreakingly touching. When Nora (Greta Lee, in a star-making turn) moves from South Korea to New York City, she leaves behind her friend Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), who never quite got over her disappearance. They reconnect years later thanks to social media and Skype, but their lives and aspirations keep throwing roadblocks in the way. This is a personal movie for the first-time writer/director Song, who found herself in the very same situation Nora does in the movie – sitting at a bar between her husband and her childhood sweetheart. The results are truly magical. We fall in love with each character and are forced to wrestle with the fact that, as much as we don’t want to see them get hurt, we know that life is sometimes painful. There are so many ways this kind of romantic comedy-drama can go wrong, but Song and her actors (which also include John Magaro from First Cow) imbue the scenes with such a deep tenderness that I was left a sobbing mess by the end. Not out of sadness, necessarily, but just from the sheer open-hearted, human vulnerability that was on display.
For some, Past Lives will be the kind of movie they point to as an example of a movie just being a movie, and not art. Certainly, it’s not the kind of movie the Berlinale will bestow awards upon, but it’s obviously more than just a romantic trifle. Like the great classics, it gets at the sad-but-beautiful aspects of humanity that are ripe for cinematic depiction, which is ultimately why it was included in the Competition lineup. This is a big part of why Berlinale is so special: that a movie like Past Lives can sit side-by-side with inscrutable experimental features that will challenge the aesthetic sensibilities of even the most liberal cinephile. To anyone who questions whether movies are art, steer them towards the next Berlinale film festival and they’ll never ask that question again.
