By Andrew Horn



I started off Saturday with “Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present” playing in the Panorama. During "Iron Sky", I met a critic friend of mine and asked her if she had seen it. She acknowledged that it was ok but semi dismissed it as “typical HBO”. But okay, I’m interested in Marina Abramovic and while I never personally saw anything she did, I have heard a lot about her big show at the Museum Of Modern Art where she basically sat in silence for three months and people could elect to sit facing her for short periods of time.



The show was actually also a retrospective of her work where a group of performers recreated various of her pieces, mostly performed naked, such as a naked woman hung up on a wall like a painting, a naked man lying on the floor with a skeleton lying on top of him, or a naked couple standing facing each other in a doorway where people have to walk between them to get through. Not restaged were a piece where she drove a van around and around in a circle for 16 hours shouting through a bullhorn, and another where she was surrounded by a flaming star. Too bad.



The film itself was mostly about her preparations for the big three month piece that was paralleled by a reunion between herself and her former performance partner Uwe "Ulay" Laysiepen with whom she lived and worked for 12 years. Interestingly there was also a scene of a lecture she gave in Italy where she read her ‘manifesto’ in which included the statement: “an artist should never fall in love with another artist”. Okay...



The piece itself, as spare as it would appear to be, was actually a very emotional experience. People who sat in front of her cried, people in the audience cried, Marina herself cried. Crying is certainly the cum shot for certain kinds of documentaries and one wonders if the camera crew were instructed to get all the crying they could. But all cynicism aside, it did have genuinely emotional moments, such as Laysiepen walking through the doorway with the naked couple, knowing that he was once the naked man, or when he sat with Marina during her piece and even when the curator sat with her to officially end the show. I have to say I once participated in a few days of silent meditation and there were a few occasions where people just broke into wracking sobs. Silence can be a very powerful thing. And it’s not just about the crying.




The movie ended later than I thought and I got closed out of my next film, “The Woman Who Brushed Off Her Tears”. I wanted to see it first off just for the title. Then I saw the poster which looked like a Cocteau drawing. Then I found out that a friend of mine had produced it. The description didn’t tell me much but I liked the idea that it had “fairy tale elements”. Oh well, maybe I can see it later.









I had some time to kill so I went into an installation at Forum Expanded called “white on white: algorithmic noir” by artist Eve Sussman which runs every day at Arsenal 2 from 4-6. It’s a film made up of a collection of sequences edited in realtime by a random generated computer program called a ‘serendipity machine’. A screen on the wall in the theater displays the shot list as it is being constantly updated. If you go everyday, you would always see a different movie made up of the same raw material. You are allowed to enter and leave whenever you like. As a museum installation with a monitor or in a darkened room, you might sit there for a few minutes and move on. In the sort of psychological space of an actual movie theater, and given the context of the kind of programming of the Forum itself, I took it as a film experience and was there for about an hour. And if I didn’t have to leave, I would have stayed longer. The sequences (I am not clear if the editing was shot for shot or whether it involved composed short sequences - it seemed to me to be the latter, but...) were as random as the computer program: two people walking down a green corridor, a man watching tv in a narrow room, a man standing by an illuminated tree by a parking lot at night, an Asian woman’s face on a giant billboard, a door opening onto an exterior elevator and the view out the glass wall as it rises, etc, etc, etc. There were various spoken texts that were fragments of descriptions, or stories, or whatever, some in English and some in Russian. Some of the scenes were shot for the piece and some were found footage from the former Soviet Union. It didn’t matter. It was actually pretty - am I allowed to say, entertaining? - let’s say, engaging.



At the end, I decided to see another Forum Expanded called “Program B” but as it involved waiting several hours for showtime and after drinking a couple of beers at the Co-Production Market cocktail, I decided to bail. I went home and konked out at 9:30. Later in the clear light of morning, I re-read the catalogue entry for “Program B” which involved a look at the political situation in Iran in terms of film history and a film about shooting the last role of Kodachrome ever (especially in light of Kodak’s recent bankruptcy) I was kind of pissed at myself for having missed it.




The next morning I went to see “Jayne Mansfield’s Car” at the Competition. I was never a particular fan of its director/writer/star Billy Bob Thornton but I am a sucker for all things Jayne Mansfield. Is that a reason to go to a movie? Particularly as it was clear that this was only a metaphoric title, though the car does appear briefly in the movie in some kind of carnival sideshow exhibit, complete with a dummy disembodied head on the backseat. The film turned out to be a sort of dysfunctional family (psycho)drama which is usually the sort of thing I really can’t deal with. Robert Duvall played a sort of nouveau riche, Vietnam Era “Big Daddy” patriarch with a collection of weird sons who somehow never quite grew up - one of them being an almost 50 year old hippie. His wife had run off some years ago to marry a proper Englishman - wounded in the Great War don’t you know - and died, leaving a last request that she be buried back in her home town. So the two families have to confront each other at the funeral with all the ensuing weirdness that you would expect. As well as - thankfully - some that you don’t. The movie was kind of weirdly witty (or wittily weird?), and not always good weird and in fact seemed repeatedly on the verge of going off the rails, yet somehow managing to take a sharp left turn just in time to prevent it falling into teeth grinding land. I have to say, the tension created by this kind of constant threat and rescue was nothing short of thrilling. Definitely a good thing.




The Competition film, "Flowers of War" is one of those films that seems a lot better when you think about it later than it was when you were actually sitting through it. Zhang Yimou is sort of a traditional heavy hitter at the Berlinale so I thought it would be a good bet. I also liked the story description of a group of prostitutes hiding out in a bombed out church during the Chinese- Japanese war in Manchuria, who end up masquerading as schoolgirls to protect the real schoolgirls from the Japanese soldiers. In fact, however, the movie was pretty brutal piece of business with a lot of bodies being blown up and a lot of blood spurting around – not something I like all that much. Somewhere amidst all the blood and rubble , though, was a story that sort of straddled Clint Eastwood’s “The Beguiled” and Cary Grant in “Father Goose” - or Robert Mitcham in “Heaven Knows Mr. Allyson” for that matter - , with Christian Bale as a mortician who disguises himself as the dead priest he was sent there to bury, landing in the midst of the sexy Chinese prostitutes and the spartan Chinese schoolgirls, and, of course, experiencing the pre-requisite Eastwood/Grant/Mitcham character change from self-involved cynic into protector/hero. I really liked how he used his mortician’s abilities of make up and hair to transforms the prostitutes into the schoolgirls so they could deliver themselves to the enemy soldiers - eagerly awaiting a carload of virgins – armed with homemade daggers made from shards of shattered mirrors, ready to go down fighting.




From there I went to a Berlinale Special film, “Young Adult” with Charliz Theron as the ghost writer of a successful teen book franchise who is just too, too quirky for words. If you are inclined to ask yourself how a drop dead babe who looks like Charlize Theron could be so relationship-challenged that she desperately decides she just has to go home and nail the home-town-high-school-boyfriend who she has not only not seen since college (and their “inexplicable” breakup), but who is also blissfully (or, rather, naively, as Ms. Theron would like to believe) happily married with a newborn kid, just remember that totally-screwed-up trumps drop-dead-gorgeous any day of the week. The script here is by Diablo Cody and what I found sort of sharp and witty in “Juno” comes across here as, well, pretty mean spirited. To mostly everybody in the film. And anybody who didn't see her ending up drunk and pathetic, ruining the new mom’s lawn party and landing in bed with Patton Oswalt as handicapped-geek-that-she-never-paid-attention-to-in-high-school should try taking off their sun glasses when they go to the movies. Don’t ask me why I went to see this.




After that I needed a 180 degree corrective, so I went to see a silent movie in the Russian Retro, “Miss Mend”. A sort of adventure serial along the lines of a small town “Perils Of Pauline”, our heroine – the Miss Mend of the title, a secretary at the Littletown Herald newspaper – finds herself drawn into a conspiracy plot perpetrated by a bunch of evil capitalists full of dark secrets, murder, anti-Bolshevik machinations and a whole lot of other fun stuff. Not quite as funny or exciting as I expected from what I had read about it before hand, it was still amusing if for no other reason than the comedy antics of her three reporter boyfriends investigating the plot and for the fact that, despite being a Soviet film, it was meant to take place in the US. Anyone who cares to make any smart remarks about how odd their idea of what Americans are like, should remember how askew most Hollywood portrayals of any foreign culture usually is. The live accompaniment, by the way, was great.