Hommage Documentaire à ”Charlie Hebdo”

The excellent French language ”Le blog documentaire” posted today a text with the headline above. The editor C.Mal has listed (some with links to clips/trailers) films made on some of killed cartoonists (like Cabu, photo) or on the satirical cartoon genre in general. Here is his introduction text:

“Après la sidération, après la consternation et les mots qui manquent, Le Blog documentaire se raccroche aux images. Images en forme d’hommage à Charlie Hebdo. Voici quelques propositions de films sur l’hebdomadaire satirique, et sur ces dessinateurs qui nous sont si chers. Certains d’entre eux viennent d’être rediffusés sur les chaînes du service public français.”

https://cinemadocumentaire.wordpress.com/2015/01/10/hommage-documentaire-a-charlie-hebdo/

Big Award for Best Nordic Documentary

From the website of Göteborg Film Festival (January 23 – February 2): French sadomasochism, Canadian social workers and an American free zone for convicted pedophiles are all found in the eight films nominated for the Dragon Award Best Nordic Documentary 2015. The prize sum of 100,000 SEK makes this one of the Nordic countries’ largest festival award for a documentary film…

I am curious to watch Swedish Magnus Gertten’s “Every face has a Name”, a follow-up to the excellent “Harbour of Hope”. The director is “tracking down several of the people who appear in the pictures” taken in 1945, when prisoners of war and holocaust survivors arrived in Malmö, “asking them to tell their story”.

To be mentioned is also the Swedish/Danish “Pervert Park” by Frida and Lasse Barkfors, a strong and touching documentary shot in Florida Justice Transitions, “a trailer park that serves as a free zone for” convicted sex offenders.

Among the eight nominated are also Camilla Nielsson’s “Democrats” from Zimbabwe and Joshua Oppenheimer’s “The Look of Silence”, no further introduction needed – and as on many other festival occasions Oppenheimer will hold a Master Class during the festival.

The photo is a still collage of the nominated films made by the festival.

http://www.giff.se/en/artikel/nominees-best-nordic-documentary

East Beats West

I know it looks stupid and tabloid, but I have been using that headline so many times and I do believe that there is a lot of documentary talent and originality to be found in the Eastern European countries. More than in the West where many filmmakers play according to television format requirements. And there is an interest in getting together as the news from IDF (Institute of Documentary Film) in Prague demonstrates:

… We are happy to announce the final selection of projects picked for the upcoming 15th edition of East European Forum, held in Prague within the fourth East Doc Platform. The board of experts went through more than 200 applicants and eventually picked 10 projects. These will be joined by 12 more projects that took part in 2014  Ex Oriente Film workshop. Together all the filmmakers will take part in a five-day-long preparatory workshop and get ready for their public presentations. After the weekend of public project pitching they will all eventually get to the round tables as well as individual meetings, where they will face the industry professionals (TV, funds, festivals and distribution and production companies representatives) from the whole Europe and North America and negotiate support for their documentaries…

10 from 200… and I am happy to see some projects presented by people I know so well and appreciate. Like Vesela Kazakova and Mina Mileva with ”The Beast is Still Alive”, a project the two have been working on for a long time and have come back to after ”Uncle Tony, Three Fools and the Secret Service”. Equally Salomé Jashi (if you want to see how she looks – take a look at the top of this page, she is the one in the middle) presents ”The Station” after her international success with ”Bahkmaro”. Estonian Jaak Kilmi is there with a project to be produced by Latvian company Mistrus Media, it’s called ”People from Nowhere”. And of course Vitaly Manski (photo) will be there with his personal Ukranian story to be produced by Guntis Trekteris, Ego Media, Latvia.

”Sometimes it turns out that borders of political events in your country come so close to the borders of your own creative work that you have no other chose but to step over and participate. That is what happened to Oleg Sentsov, Ukrainian film director from the Crimea who is now in Russian jail. The secret services of the Russian Federation are trying to prove that Sentsov has been preparing a series of terrorist acts on the territory of the Crimea, such as explosion of the Lenin monument and the “Eternal flame”… A quote from the description of the film project by Askold Kurov, ”Release Oleg Sentsov” that will be presented in Prague as well.

http://www.dokweb.net/en/

 

 

News from Paris: René Vautier 1928-2015

Grand old man and enfant terrible of French militant cinema René Vautier died Sunday January 4th in his home in Cancale, Brittany, at the age of 86. Originally from Brittany, René Vautier fought the Germans as a very young member of the French Resistance during the Second World War, at 16 he was decorated with the Croix de Guerre and honoured by de Gaulle. After the war he wanted to pursue the combat but not with arms and his friends then encourage him to take up a new weapon: the camera. His battle was to last a life long.

Vautier graduated in 1948 from the film school IDHEC in Paris. In 1949 he gets a command to make a film for the Ligue de l’enseignement about the benefits of the French educational mission in the West African colonies. The result, Afrique 50, became, on the contrary, a violent critique of the French colonial system. Vautier’s first film was also the first anticolonial film ever to be made in France and the reaction was violent in return: Vautier was faced with 13 charges and sentenced to one year of prison!

The film has an incredible story. To escape the limitations of the 1934 decree of the Minister of the Colonies Pierre Laval (forbidding any filming in the colonies without the presence of a an administration official) Vautier went on to film in secret. He almost got his film rolls confiscated for destruction in Africa but managed to get his work back to France where he finally had to illegally retrieve the reels kept under seizure by the board of censors (he got 17 of 50 reels). The film was finished in secret and stayed censured in France for over 40 years though it was awarded as one of the best documentaries of the year at the World Festival of Youth and Students in Warsaw in 1955 (with Joris Ivens as president of the jury). In 1996, a copy of the film was finally handed over to Vautier by the Foreign Ministry during the first official screening in France and only in 2003 the film was broadcasted on French television. The Cinémathèque française has recently made new copies of the film as part of their effort to safeguard the entire oeuvre of René Vautier initiated in 2007.

Afrique 50 is a short powerful outburst, a rhythmic pamphlet, swiftly edited with an attacking voice-over. Playing with the genre of educational state propaganda documentary but turning it against the government, the film pinpoints, with humour and great seriousness, the link between capitalism and racism. Film historian Nicole Brenez, specialist of avant-garde cinema at la Cinémathèque française, has called it the greatest film in the history of cinema. Go see it, it’s on YouTube!

Vautier got out of prison in 1952 and moved on to make films about Algeria. The first one Une nation, l’Algerie (1956) about the French invasion in 1830 doesn’t exist anymore, of the two copies, one was lost, the other destroyed. In 1956 he joined the Algerian maquis and filmed the National Liberation Front, the Algerian freedom fighters fighting for independence in the Algerian War 1954-62. He was wounded and spent the rest of his life with a piece of camera stuck in his skull and did a total of 25 months in prison. Amongst his films are Algérie en flammes (Algeria in flames, 1958, 20 min.) and Peuple en marche (People marching, 1963, 50 min.) and later the feature film Avoir vingt ans dans les Aurès (To be Twenty in the Aures, 1972, 100 min.) that won the Prix international de la critique in Cannes in 1972. After the independence of Algeria, he initiated the creation of the Centre Audiovisuel d’Alger where he was the director 1962-65 and he is considered as one of the fathers of Algerian cinema.

After having been living in exile for years, partly in Tunisia, due the fact that he was considered a danger to the national security, Vautier, granted amnesty, returns to France in 1967. He was a member of the militant cinema group Medvedkine from the beginning along with Chris Marker, engaged in making cinema a tool for the workers struggle. Settling down in Brittany, he founded the production and distribution company UPCB (Unité de Production Cinématographique de Bretagne) in 1970, in an effort to create a vital forum for cinema outside of Paris.

In 1973 Vautier did a 31 days hunger strike and ended up in hospital in order to obtain authorisation from the Ministry of Culture to distribute the film Octobre à Paris made by Jacques Panijel about the 1961 massacre of Algerian demonstrators by the police forces in Paris (probably more that 200 killed though the official number is still much lower, it took 40 years for the French state to even begin to admit the crime), a documentary banned since 1962. Supported by a great number of film makers (Agnès Varda, Jacques Rivette, Godard, Resnais, Claude Sautet) Vautier finally achieved nothing less than the end of film censorship for political reasons in France (interview in le Monde 14.10.2011).

Thus the story of René Vautier is also the less glorious story of the history of French film censorship and of the amount of control exercised by the authorities under the Fourth and Fifth Republic.

Trouble was not over though. In 1985 Vautier made the documentary À propos de l’autre detail (1985, 40 min.), testimonies of the use of torture during the Algerian War and in particular of an Algerian tortured under the orders of a certain lieutenant Jean Marie Le Pen. The film was a reaction to the fact that Le Pen, the leader of the extreme right party Front National, sued the satiric newspaper Le Canard enchainé for defamation after they had accused him of having used torture while serving the French army. In spite of a 1963 amnesty law forbidding the use of images that could be harmful to the honor of those who had served under the Algerian War, the film was shown in court. When Vautier returned home to Brittany after the trial, he found his archives vandalized: 60 km of film cut in to pieces and drenched with petroleum, totally destroyed …

Vautier also made films about South Africa, racism in France, women joining the workers struggle, immigration, poetry, oil spill and nuclear tests. He was a radical cinematographer, a very important “maker of historical documents”, and an inspiration in terms of alternative ways of production and distribution. He should be a hero to any young filmmaker with a political conscience.

Vautier sums up his cinematographic imperative transforming a quotation from the poet Paul Éluard: “Je filme ce que je vois, ce que je sais, ce qui est vrai” (“I film what I see, what I know, what is true”). He elaborated his thoughts on militant cinema in his memoirs Caméra Citoyenne from 1998.

A brave and remarkable man, and a very important figure of French cinema, is gone. We are lucky to still have most of his films…

Afrique 50 (1950, 17 min.), with English subtitles:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vb3DkggPtaQ

Just recently Les Mutins de Pangée released a DVD-box with the Algerian films (only with French subtitles) in addition to the nice edition of Afrique 50 that comes with a booklet:

http://www.lesmutins.org/coffret-avoir-20-ans-dans-les

For a more detailed and theoretic introduction read Nicole Brenez and Oriane Brun-Moschetti in La Furia Umana (in French):

http://www.lafuriaumana.it/index.php/archives/41-lfu-14/121-nicole-brenez-rene-vautier-devoirs-droits-et-passion-des-images

http://www.lafuriaumana.it/index.php/archives/41-lfu-14/315-oriane-brun-moschetti-l-oeuvre-filmique-de-rene-vautier-un-corpus-etat-des-lieux

Herzog møder Oppenheimer

Det er et besøg af fineste slags, meddeler Grand Teatret i København, når Werner Herzog og Joshua Oppenheimer gæster biografen fredag den 9. januar, hvor de i forlængelse af en særvisning af Oppenheimers seneste mesterstykke “The Look of Silence” kl. 19 vil diskutere dokumentarfilm, metode, moral og meget mere, hvad de jo på Den Danske Filmskole har været i gang med fredag og fortsætter med lørdag.

Billetter: http://www.grandteatret.dk/nyheder/nyhed/?newsid=4&newsid=444

Filmskolen: http://efu.filmskolen.dk/kurser/werner-herzog-and-joshua-oppenheimer-in-a-2-days-conversation-about-life-humanity-and

Fotomontage: http://www.doxmagazine.com/a-film-like-this/  

Miroslav Janek’s ”Olga” on DocAlliance

DocAlliance starts its new year with a present to its (hopefully) many viewers:

”Olga” by Miroslav Janek is available for free viewing until January 11.

It is a film that was on my Best of 2014 – here is a quote from the review:

Many words are taken from her memoirs and Janek found a woman, who knew Olga, and had the kind of voice she had to read pages about her upbringing in communist Czechoslovakia. Editor Tonicka Jankova and director Miroslav Janek have done a great work to make this archive film fresh to watch. The montage is brilliant. Janek has said that he – in ”Citizen Havel” – could feel ”her persona”. Director and editor has succeeded to offer the audience the same. You never get really close to Olga, she wanted to keep her integrity and dignity, the filmmakers respect that dignity, her unsentimentality and humour – it is a film full of admiration for the protagonist, playful, informative, what more could you ask for…?

http://dafilms.com/event/195-olga/

Pasolini in Rome in Berlin

On the way to the Zelig film school in Bolzano a stop was made in Berlin for some days. Apart from enjoying oysters in KaDeWee or la Fayette the city’s many good restaurants often have Kalbsleber in its classic version on the menu. And with Berlin with January weather you find it right to go to exhibitions. Three were visited, the RAF (Rote Armée Fraktion) in Deutsches Historisches Museum (until March 3), the West:Berlin in Ephrahim Palast and Pier Paolo Pasolini in Martin Gropius-Bau. As exhibitions the level of quality were in the same order.

The RAF was very interesting with lots of visuals (clips from the enormous amount of Dokumentation that has been made from the demonstrations, the fights in the streets, the story chronologically presented – but the elements had been given far too little space, it felt packed and klaustrophobic. So what do you do – you buy the catalogue! The approach of the exhibition organisers, a quote from the website can illustrate that: …In the 1970s the attacks took place primarily in southwest Germany. The Red Army Faction set their sights above all on the office of the Federal Prosecutor in Karlsruhe and the headquarters of the US Army in Heidelberg. The state reacted to the assassinations with the most extensive search and surveillance actions since the end of the Second World War. The escalation during the “German Autumn” of 1977 spread fear and a feeling of powerlessness among the people. Many citizens called for the death penalty for the terrorists… Sorry for not being more accurate but I could not see the exhibition for other visitors blocking the view!

West:Berlin with the subtitle ”an Island in Search of the Mainland” in three floors at Ephraim Palast with the beautiful staircase was a detailed presentation of daily life, culture, politics, ”die Mauer” of course, ”die Luftbrücke”, the division of territories between the four big ”allied powers” etc. The phonetics of Kennedy’s famous ”Ich bin ein Berliner” = ”bearleener”. On the third floor I sat down and listened to ”Berlin” by Lou Reed, ”Heroes” by David Bowie, ”Bahnhof Zoo” by Nina Hagen – all three tracks connected to the time and the city. An official exhibition by the Stadtmuseum that was well made, informative and with entertaining elements. In ”Berliner Zeitung” the reviewer, born and raised in the East, acknowledged the exhibition and called for an equivalent seen from the East Berlin pov!

And then 3 hours with Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-75) (PPP) in Martin Gropius-Bau, the last day of the amazing exhibition that takes the viewer from 1950, when PPP arrived in Rome till 1975 and his tragic death. Film by film, scandal by scandal, his homosexuality, his love stories and first and foremost his artistic development as a writer, screenwriter, film director, visual artist, philosopher, political commentator… What a creative force! For me who saw ”Accatone” and ”Mama Roma” as a teenage film freak in art cinemas in Copenhagen back in the 1960’es, it was a joyful visit to film history making you want to run for the best possible dvd box of the director’s films from these two to ”Salo” from 1976. There were his hand-written scripts, there was a fabulous audio-clip where Pasolini discusses a scene from ”Mama Roma” with Anna Magnani – well, there are several interviews with PPP and even a clip from a football match between the film crew of Bertolucci’s ”1900” and Pasolini’s ”Mama Roma” (or was it another film?). ”1900” won 5-2 and the actress Laura Betti, always close to PPP, proudly carries the trophy. One film I have never seen, ”Ricotta” (part of Ro.Go.Pag), with Orson Welles, a film that sentenced PPP to prison for blasphemy. The exhibition includes clips from the film and one with the judge, who decided to sentence the director. Great exhibition, have no idea where it goes from Berlin, as it has been at the three locations/organisations that have created it: Cinemathèque Francaise, Palazzo delle Esposizione in Rome, the CCCB in Barcelona and Martin Gropius-Bau, Berlin. Wheredoes an exhibition like this with all its brilliant elements end up, when it has taken its (first hopefully) tour to Paris, Barcelona, Rome and Berlin? Thanks to the curators Alain Bergala, Jordi Balló and Gianni Borgna for their work! There is a fine 10 minutes video intro on the website of the CCCB, see below.

https://www.dhm.de/ausstellungen/raf.html

http://west.berlin/exhibition

http://www.cccb.org/en/exposicio-pasolini_roma-43159

 

 

Joshua Oppenheimer: The Act of Killing

På filmskolen i København på fredag og lørdag skal jeg så blandt meget andet formodentlig høre Werner Herzog uddybe sin meget citerede udtalelse om ”… Oppenheimer’s depiction of power and violence: ’I have not seen a film as powerful, surreal, and frightening in at least a decade… unprecedented in the history of cinema.’ ” De ord fangede mig virkelig dengang, og så fulgte Errol Morris lige efter: ”… he praises Oppenheimer’s portrayal of violence and cinematic imagination: ’Like all great documentaries, ‘The Act of Killing’ demands another way of looking at reality. It starts as a dreamscape, an attempt to allow the perpetrators to reenact what they did, and then something truly amazing happens. The dream dissolves into nightmare and then into bitter reality. An amazing and impressive film.’ ” (blogs.indiewire.com)

Når Herzog og Morris siger sådan, bliver jeg mere end interesseret. Og fra jeg som det første så traileren på Vimeo var jeg rystet, helt bogstaveligt rystet, selv om jeg forstod, det var rekonstruktioner, jeg så. Men det var heller ikke fiktion, nej, det var omhyggelige genskabelser af erindringsbilleder og ikke af blotlagte fortrængninger, men iscenesættelser af de mest forfærdende hændelser og gerninger, disse medvirkende lever med som deres liv. Som noget selvfølgeligt, forstod jeg? Jeg skulle se den film om de indonesiske dødspatrulje-gangstere, som myrdede kommunister for magthaverne midt i 60’erne. Jeg ville egentlig ikke. Og nu skal jeg så høre Hezog og Oppenheimer tale om sådanne spørgsmål i to dage i træk! Det bliver sindsoprivende.

Read more / Læs mere: Joshua Oppenheimer  

Read more / Læs mere: Werner Herzog 

Werner Herzog: Lessons of Darkness

Året begynder for mig med en begivenhed. På filmskolen skal jeg fredag og lørdag lytte til forelæsninger af Werner Herzog og Joshua Oppenheimer. Lidt om Herzog først, Oppenheimer senere:

Mit første møde med Herzogs film var sent. Det var på Tue Steen Müllers arbejdsværelse hjemme hos ham og Ellen Fonnesbech-Sandberg i Nørre Farimagsgade. Jeg var gæst, boede der (jeg kan finde på at blive længe), jeg var omgivet af hans kæmpesamling filmkopier, det var morgen, han skulle på arbejde på EDN, fruen skulle på DR, også arbejde, jeg havde fri, så han gav mig lektier for: du skal se den her og derefter er du forandret. Og det blev jo stort. Jeg har kun et notat i min lommebog bevaret:

”Rekviem for en ubeboelig planet” hedder filmen på dansk. Vi både ved og ved ikke, vi er i Kuwait, efter Golfkrigen -> rekviem, dødemesse, elegi, klagesang, smerte, sorg. Er det ikke tankerækken? Hvem var fjenden? Filmen angiver ingen politisk adresse. Værket interesserer sig alene for sorgen og så derefter handlingen (oliebrandene slukkes). Ikke moralsk som et samfundsmæssigt alternativ, men amoralsk som den kunstneriske modvægt til klagen. Altså KLAGE og HANDLING som et æstetisk balancesystem. Det er fravær af budskab og meddelelse, nærvær af konstruktion og værk. Det er messe i kirken. Det er statuarisk på torvet.

Siden har jeg ikke sluppet Herzog. Siden har jeg beundret ham i ét og alt. Min fascination af manden blev låst fast, da jeg på filmskolen i 2006 deltog i et seminar, en mesterklasse eller hvad det var (blot vidunderligt). Jeg skrev også de dage noget om den film ned i lommebogen, ikke noget jeg tænkte, denne gang noget, Herzog fortalte:

Det var i anekdotens form (Herzog fortæller i anekdotens form); han brugte anekdoten som en foredragsholder bruger powerpoint fotoet, men langt dybere end en sådan illustration. Herzogs anekdoter fæstner sig i forelæsningens løb som kapitler i hans film. Disse skrev jeg ned:

1) I ”Lessons of Darkness” findes ikke én scene, ikke én optagelse, ikke ét eneste billede af et stykke jord bevaret uskadet. Det indledende Pascal citat forklarer det, men Pascal har ikke skrevet den tekst, kunne ikke have skrevet den. Herzog har skrevet den selv, og han har, ja, det sagde han, gjort det for at nå en dybere sandhed. ”Pascal kunne ikke have skrevet det bedre”, siger han leende.

2) Cinéma vérité hører 60’erne til. ”Depict on Reality” kræver nu (i 2006) ganske andre greb. Herzog ved, han er oppe mod både dinosaurer og redskaber som photoshop og manipuleret reality, og han synes kendsgerninger (facts) er uinteressante, kedelige.

3) ”Lessons of Darkness”er ”highly stylized”, den er mytiske landskaber, iscenesatte landskaber. Kuwait nævnes ikke, Saddam Hussein nævnes ikke, tilbagetoget nævnes ikke og sådan videre. “Satan skaber en illusion for os, olien, som er flydt ud overalt, ligner vand.” 

Det her er blot lidt fra mine notater. Lars Movin derimod skrev en omhyggelig artikel om Werner Herzogs æstetik, “Bogholdersandhed versus poetisk sandhed”, hvor han blandt andet refererer Herzog seminaret i 2006. Det var i Kosmorama 242/2008; link nedenfor. 

“Lessons of Darkness” (Lektionen in Finsternis), Tyskland 1992, 52 min.

http://www.wernerherzog.com/113.html 

http://www.kosmorama.org/Arkiv/242/Artikel2.aspx 

Online is Great/Don’t Forget the Quality DVD

First text of 2015. Happy New Year to all our readers! I sit in the armchair of my room, the place to be when football is to be watched on the small tv screen, or documentaries on the computer via links sent to me or books or magazines to be read. Including the DOX Magazine that we have advocated for to stay in (at least once per year) a printed version. Let it happen in 2015.

Books are on the wall to the left, dvd’s are on the wall that separates my room to the one of my wife. It’s been like that for years, the bookcase is full of dvd films. There used to be a lack of space at the time of vhs, but I threw them all out, except for some crown jewels that I knew would never be available on dvd.

And now I very seldom receive dvd’s. It is much easier to send vimeo links of new films and with the great idfa docs for sale, the east silver library, the new DOKLeipzig online initiative, the formidable DocAlliance, the festival scope, the Filmkontakt Nord online catalogue – I can easily do my job as festival consultant and selector, and reviewer on filmkommentaren.dk, combined with visits to some big cinema screens, when I am present at festivals or go to press screenings in Copenhagen.

So from a practical point of view a fine development – you can get what you want to see quickly and the quality is ok, yet of course it can not compete with the big screen. Back to the dvd’s. A couple of days I received a gift from Lithuanian Giedrė Beinoriūtė, who had managed to have her “Conversations on Serious Topics” published in a fine dvd with the film itself, chaptered so you can choose what you want to see, extras with material (conversations with kids) that did not make it to the final film, “from the shootings”, all very nicely put together in a box that I am happy to have in a room where there are also books and dvd boxes – one with films by Chris Marker, the fine series with films by Jørgen Leth, one with Jon Bang Carlsen films (there should be more), Marcel Lozinski, Kieslowski, Johan van der Keuken… Yes, more dvd boxes please in 2015, more quality presentations of finished films that should stay as  – let’s be a bit French – oeuvres in film history. For documentaries there will definitely be a need for financial to make this digitization happen. An obligation for the film institutes and maybe a project for the Creative Europe of the EU?