By Andrew Horn



Leave it to the Forum to program a film about concrete. All kidding aside - actually only some kidding aside - the film "Parabeton - Pier Luigi Nervi" is about the architect, Nervi, insofar as it documents his various buildings, all designed for his material of choice, poured concrete (concrete in German is Beton - the 'para' part is a joke on the film studio 'Paramount').


The film is #32 in a series that filmmaker Heinz Emigholz has been making on various architects by visiting and documenting, from multiple interior and exterior views, as many of the buildings as he could. Silent, except for ambient sound from the various locations, and without any camera movement, you might expect it to be pretty excruciating, but in fact it's visual and engaging, and as spare as all the films are - and I have seen four now - if you can get into the rhythm of it all, you get a real feel for the structures without anyone actually 'telling' you anything. Even to me as a layman, it communicated an appreciation for each of the buildings, as well as the architect's work as a whole.


The show I saw was presented in an IMAX theater and whole the sense of scale certainly contributed to the impact. According to Heinz, there are two more films on architects working in this style and then the whole series will come to the end. The various parts of the series is, or will be soon, available on DVD and it's worth a look.



I started the next day, with "Cesare Deve Morire", partly because a friend of mine recommended it, and partly because I suddenly had cold feet about seeing "Tabu" which was playing around the same time (big mistake, I heard later). Nominally a 'prison picture' it portrayed a group of maximum security inmates who put on a production of Shakespear's 'Julius Caesar' in jail, the story and text of which seems to completely take over their daily lives as they prepare for the show. The movie stars real inmates of a real prison - who are introduced in beautifully composed mug shots, stating their names, crimes and sentences - but it is not a documentary. [Note from the editor: "Cesare Deve Morire" eventually nabbed the Golden Bear.]


I'm not quite sure just what it was, since it seemed to play with multiple layers of self-reflexive interpretations of real and not real. Anyone who has ever thought about the Shakespearean machinations of 'The Sopranos', can appreciate the all the power struggles and emotional wrangling that these genuine criminals and mafiosi go through, both from the play and apparently between each other, which gets pretty blurry in the course of their preparations. It all resolves itself into the climax of the actual performance in front of an audience of spectators from the 'outside' who were just as appreciative as the Berlinale audience I saw it with. If nothing else, this very visceral, and very Italian (though, given the variety of accents, not exactly Roman), interpretation was a much needed corrective to the usual Britishness (and all that that implies) we associate with Shakespearian performance.



I stayed around for the next show which was "Side By Side", a documentary about the transition between the possible end of celluloid as we know it and the ever greater frequency of digital filmmaking with a number of notable Hollywood-type directors and cinematographers, each weighing in with their own experience and opinion some of which varied wildly - from George Lucas who had already been a total convert 10 years ago to Christian Nolan who had no interest in, or intentions towards, digital at all.


The above mentioned friend who recommended "Cesare Deve Morire" described this film as "very educational", in a way that didn't make it sound particularly attractive. But having recently shot a film of my own using a digital still camera with video capability, the Canon 7D, and still wrestling from the pros and cons of the experience, "educational" was something I was totally ready for.


Watching the film, I felt at times like I was attending an Industry convention in Las Vegas, and information-wise it did not deliver all that much that I didn't already know, or suspect. That is not to say it was not interesting, however, and someone in the discussion after the film sort of nailed it for me as to the film's value: which was as a time capsule of opinion and experience at a very pivotal time in the evolution of filmmaking where it could very well be that film itself is ready to drop out of the equation (especially given the recent bankruptcy of Kodak), perhaps leaving the word 'filmmaking' to live on only as metaphor, like the floppy disc symbol for 'save' or the expression 'dialing a telephone'.


Oh, and did I happen to mention that Keanu Reeves was the producer and narrator of the film? This was my big celebrity moment this year as Keanu himself was present to participate in the discussion, which made the event into a mini red carpet experience.



I ended the day at a Cambodian film called "Peov Chouk Sor" in the Forum. The director and an actress were there and explained that this was one of the few surviving films from the Cambodian film industry. The director said he was able to escape the Khymer Rouge with a few of his films and would take them out from time to time and clean them so as to be ready in case he ever had the chance to show them again. It seems like this was his first chance.


I went to see it frankly because the picture in the catalogue had such beautiful color. I was not disappointed. Had there been a Q&A at the end, I would have asked if Cambodia really had blue flowers. The film itself was a fairytale about 4 celestial sisters who visit Earth and one of them, Poev, accidently breaks something and so is punished by having to stay and live as a mortal for 7 years. She is left with a magic gem to protect herself which she does by changing into a rabbit. This doesn't actually work all that well as she is injured in a trap, breaking her leg.


She is found by a poor farmer who is deeply in debt to the local landowner. He fixes her leg and in return, she conjures up elaborate meals for him while he's gone. Catching her one day in her human form, the two fall in love and marry. To make a long story short, a lot of stuff happens, some of it good and some bad and in the end Poev's celestial sisters come to take her home to her father who is not at all happy that she's been fooling around on Earth all this time.


This story was very similar to a Chinese movie I saw many years ago called "The Fairy Fox" where instead of taking the shape of a rabbit, the celestial maiden becomes a fox and instead of the magic gem, there was a magic pearl, and instead of the stern father come to take her away, was an evil magician out kill her for her pearl. In this one, she prays to the Buddha who sends down the celestial police who arrest the villain "in the name of heaven". Poor Poev and her lover have no such luck. He dies of malaria and she commits suicide by drowning herself in the lake. But this is still a fairy tale - in the lake where she drowns, a lily grows, and her lover's spirit becomes a butterfly who alights on the flower.



The next movie I saw, "Ulrike Ottinger - Nomad From The Lake" was arguably too personal for me to be objective about. I first met Ulrike in 1984 when I first came to the Berlinale to show my film "Doomed Love" in the Forum. Also showing that year was Ulrike's film "The Image of Dorian Gray in the Yellow Press" - starring the model Verushka as Dorian Gray. I have since seen many more of her films and, as I saw this one, I was surprised at how many that was. I can't say that I know Ulrike all that well personally but we have been friendly acquaintances all these years and the woman who made the film, Brigitte Kramer, has been a friend of mine for at least as long. So no, no objectivity here. But as long as I've known Ulrike, and as many of the films as I've seen, I guess I didn't really know all that much about her so this was an interesting introduction, if way after the fact.



The short film that played beforehand, was also made by a friend of mine, John Heys. The film, "A Lazy Afternoon With Mario Montez" - who by the way received a lifetime achievement award at the Teddy's this year - was a mini portrait of a very famous drag queen from NY who I didn't know all that well but who I saw on stage a few times and with whom I shared a number of mutual friends.


Here she was, lying under a parasol and floating along in a rowboat on the lake in Berlin, as she read aloud from an autobiography of Joan Crawford. It occurred to me as I watched, that that original generation of drag icons - that is to say Joan et al - are fading ever increasingly into the past, so who are the new generations of icons for today's queens? Anybody?



I ended the day with another Cambodian film, a documentary called "Golden Slumbers" which was the perfect companion to the earlier Cambodian film (and probably the inspiration for showing it and the two others in the Forum program), this dealing with the history of Cambodia's Golden Age of Cinema. Well, their Golden Age of Cinema seems by all accounts to be their only age of cinema, which lasted from the early 60s to the late 70s when it was destroyed, quite literally and completely, by the Khmer Rouge. Aside from these couple of films showed by the Forum, it seems that nothing whatsoever remains except a few fragments of songs, pictures and ads, while the movies themselves exist only in the memories of those who survived.


It made for a very conceptual film which tried to recreate a history with literally nothing to show for it but stories, recollections and, I'm sure, a certain amount of exaggeration. Like many of the lost films, this became itself a sort of tragic romantic fantasy, particularly in relating the end years in the midst of the war when the cinema became a last refuge from the horrors of the destruction of their country, before that too was destroyed.


The episode that summed it up for me was a producer talking about his last film, called "The Sea Horse", which he said was the biggest Cambodian film of all. He bragged that it had all the other producers quaking in their boots and went on to describe the film with all the magic, spectacular costumes and special effects and blah blah blah, until he abruptly stopped in the middle to say, "I can't tell you any more, because if I did, you'd insist on seeing it. And you can't."