A film blog by Allan Berg Nielsen & Tue Steen Müller
A film blog by Allan Berg Nielsen & Tue Steen Müller
Anatomy of a mass grave…
Al Houla, Homs, Syria, Earth… today, 2012..
The grave of over 100 killed today in the small town, half of which were under 10 years old.
From the FB page of Orwa Nyrabia, Dox Box festival director, Damascus, Syria
Redaktionen gik på udstilling i den københavnske kunstforenings fine lokaler. Allan Berg, den udstillingskyndige, blev bedt om sin vurdering. Den er generøs for nu at bruge ét af Jørgen Leths egne yndlingsudtryk, sagde Berg, da vi spiste fiskefrikadeller på Diamanten lige ved siden af med udsigt til store fotostater på et plankeværk foran kanalen: Andy Warhol der spiser en burger i ”66 Scener fra Amerika”, Leth selv foran det store lærred i Bombay i ”De fem benspænd”, Bud Powell, et sort/hvid billede fra ”Stopforbud”, det tidlige jazz-værk, han skabte sammen med Ole John.
Det er jo det hele, det næsten samlede værk, fortsatte Berg, digtene, filmene, Moleskinnotesbøgerne, teksterne på plancher, Leths stemme og hans flotte samling af malerier og skulpturer fra Haiti. Det er materialer, og ikke biografi, og det er et rigtigt valg. Et højdepunkt er den lille kulisse, hvor man kan sætte sig ned og se Lene Adler Petersen i ”Ofelias blomster”, en lille ofte overset perle. Et andet er optagelserne fra castingen af unge kvinder til ”Det erotiske menneske”, indimellem hylende morsomt.
En enkelt lille indvending mod den manglende sammenhæng mellem lyd og billede i et rum, hvor der på væggen vises klip fra Leths favoritøjeblikke i hans elskede Tour de France, samtidig med at han taler om disse øjeblikke. Det følges bare ikke ad.
Hvis jeg havde mulighed for det, sagde Berg, der bor i Randers, ville jeg gå ind og se alle filmene én gang til. Det får man lyst til og det kan man nemlig på udstillingen med den nu 75-årige mesters herlige oeuvre.
Åben til 12. august.
… with the subtitle: A Cinematographic Journey with Victor Kossakovsky, and indeed it is, a true pleasure to travel with the director while he is shooting his masterpiece ”Vivan las Antipodas”. The Chilean director frames the film with his own observations and longing for Patagonia, he observes Kossakovsky in action dealing with his crew, organising the shoot, changing a bit on the nature he wants in the picture, communicating with the protagonists, and puts some clever questions to him at the editing, and in breaks of the shooting, or in a car. There is some arguing between the man in front of the camera and the man behind, Kossakovsky can get pissed, you see and hear that, and Klein catches that as well, but the film is first of all a very well made, warm and intriguing meeting with a director at work, and secondly a dialogue between two filmmakers.
Oh, to see Kossakovsky film the scene with the Siberian women singing. The camera stays on the profile of the director at his camera during the whole song, totally overwhelmed emotionally he is by the beauty of the situation and the song. Kossakovsky appears as a director with the ambition to give us, the viewers, something to remember, and feel. ”I just want people to be happy when they watch it”, ”who created this endless beauty” (that he shows us in the film), always in his limited charming English, ”the film is about planet, cows, stones, you just have to open your eyes, and it is all there”, ”I want people to be happy that such people exist”… and so on, so forth.
But also about problems as when music is to be composed… ”in every film I lost a friend”, he sighs, ”we need helicopter”, he says in Shanghai, while the production people make the outrageous budget calculation. Next clip, Shanghai from above! You can keep on quoting Kossakovsky, the emotional bear who jumps around hugging people, expressing his enthusiasm over life and its beauty to everyone at the same time, as he seems to know exactly what he wants. The strong bear who in other scenes appears like a sad, spoilt baby. Thanks to Klein for giving us all this and thanks also for giving us a film that is a must for all professionals and film students, who want to see how passion and commitment look like. As an invitation to discuss documentary filmmaking, it is a must.
Switzerland/Germany/Chile, 2012, 90 mins.
Documentation from Syria taken from FB: Since the beginning of the Annan Initiative, 1,401 martyrs have been documented by the Local Coordinating Committees of Syria (LCCS) in cooperation with the Violations and Documentation Center (VDC). Since the beginning of the ambiguous Annan’s deadline, 1,401 martyrs are documented, including 101 children (83 males, 18 females), 70 women, and 41 martyrs died under torture in the difference Security Branches. The distributions are as follows: Homs paid the heaviest price with 499 martyrs, 243 in Idlib, 176 in Hama,135 in Damascus Suburbs,86 in Daraa, 86 in Aleppo, 77 in Deir Ezzor, and 73 in Damascus.
Regime forces continued to violate the initiative by bombing various cities and towns endangering the lives of the UN international observers. In addition to the widespread torture campaigns, destruction of private property, and torching of homes, regime forces escalated the violence by firing live ammunition on peaceful student demonstrations on University Campuses across Syria
The Danish Cinemateket in Copenhagen hosts May 20-23 the Jewish Film Festival that offers a programme of feature films, animation, short films and documentaries.
I had a preview of the documentary ”Auf Wiedersehen: Til We Meet Again”, a family story filmed primarily in Vienna, where the directors (Linda Mills and Peter Goodrich, 76 mins.) go to look for places and memories of Mills family, including the comments and reactions of her mother and aunt. Austrian historians take part in the revealing of the past of the family’s fate and give the frame of the history about how efficient the deportations to the camps were organised, as well as how many escaped before the war thanks to the Jewish administration. A story about survivors but also about perpetrators.
The festival not only show new films and for the documentary addicts two films stand out: Marc Isaacs neo-classic ”The Lift”, (photo), 24 mins with different people entering a lift to face the camera of the director in an appartment block in London. Lots of funny situations and indirectly a vision of a multicultural society.
The highlight, however, is ”David Perlov’s Diary”, filmed in the years 1973-78, considered a masterpiece in Israeli documentary film history, as it is written at the site of Cinemateket: a testimony of the turbulent reality in a country in constant conclict, threatened by war. Two of six chapters will be shown, 1 and 3.
Text taken from the FB page of Orwa Nyrabia, film director and producer and festival Dox Box director:
“If anyone in the world, including Kofi Anan, wants us to prove with documented evidence that the regime ruling Syria is a ruthless savage despotic regime that should not remain in power, is actually searching for a way not to help the Syrian people. If humanity can still claim it doesn’t know a dictator from the size of his pictures, or from the continuous success he, and his junta, keep on receiving in polls and in elections… then the world is playing around, with Syrian blood.. then the world doesn’t want to learn.”
No photo needed.
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Syria-and-Me-The-Revolution-Chronicles/318536521531396
The exhibition space is limited but the content is excellent. The film museum in Riga, situated in the same building as the National Film Centre of Latvia, in the old town of the Latvian capital, hosts a presentation of the life and work of Herz Frank, a filmmaker so often written about on this site.
Frank himself took part in the construction of the exhibition that includes photos and texts and clips from his work, plus the possibility to see in full duration ”Ten Minutes Older” (1978) and ”Flashback” (2002), just two of the master’s documentaries.
The exhibition, I was told, is running at least until this autumn.
The impressive Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona is a fascinating place to spend some hours. Its collection includes paintings, photographs, and until May 20 also the so-called Military Film Series by Russian master director Aleksander Sokurov, a series that hopefully will be presented in other museums around the world. Here is a small text clip from the museum site:
”In the late nineties, Sokurov made Soldier’s Dream, 1995, Spiritual Voices, 1995, and Confession, 1998, the three films that make up the so-called Military Series. These three titles, which became part of the MACBA Collection in 2004, are shown on this occasion together with Elegy of a Voyage, 2001, conceived as a journey that takes us from Siberia to the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam. This last title, which in the context of the exhibition is seen as an epilogue to the Military Series, is Sokurov’s first production commissioned by a museum. The four films share a new documentary aesthetic that combines the empirical experience of place with a sombre and spiritual lyricism. Soldier’s Dream (a short 10-minute piece extracted from the third chapter of Spiritual Voices), and the five chapters comprised in Spiritual Voices (lasting five hours and 43 minutes), relate a prolonged stay at a frontier military post between Tajikistan and Afghanistan. The omission of factual information, of the type that is common in the media, and the long sequences representing the soldiers’ routines, face the viewer with an enigmatic chain of events. Not even the news on the war in Afghanistan, persistently broadcast, can attenuate the power of these images with which Sokurov tries to create a new event – which is no other than the one that takes place during the contemplation of the film”.
The Latvian national premiere of the 15 Young by Young documentary series – 15 short films of 15 minutes from the former Soviet republics – young filmmakers making films about young people and their lives in today’s independent countries 20 years after the fall of the empire – took place with a galla screening in Riga saturday, followed by a screening in Sigulda, a town one hour from the capital, very well known for its winter sport but also the town that hosted a seminar two years ago where the shaping of the series started with directors and tutors present. I was invited back to Sigulda to watch the films and enjoy the company of the directors. And it was indeed joyful to sit in the cosy cinema in the culture centre of Sigulda, to see the directors being lined up with flowers from the mayor, having an ice cream, a banana and a glass of red wine in the break of the around 3 hour long screening, that was well attended by locals. It reminded me very much of ten years of film festival in Bornholm, Denmark, great unpretentious atmosphere, warm-hearted.
The premiere(s), organised by the producer Ilona Bicevska and her team, also included an outside internet broadcast of a debate (in Russian, the language all directors spoke) that took place in a park in Riga and that you can find online. “Is it Easy to be Young”, the moderator said with a fine reference to the classic documentary of Juris Podnieks. The answers were different depending on the country, the director lives in. Goes without saying that a young person in a Baltic country have better conditions than someone from Belarus or from Moldova or Kirgisztan or… if you talk in materialistic terms.
The series has already been broadcast on arte, hopefully many other channels (and festivals) will also take this unique insight to countries that we need to know more about as they are only present in the media when revolutions or catastrophies happen. Unique the series is also because it presents many different ways of making a short film, from pure observation to fictionalisation, and put together there is freshness and talent to experience. The link below invites you to know much more. With clips to enjoy. Do so! 15 countries. 15 directors. 15 stories. (Photo from the Russian short in the series)
Birte Overlade spørger i en bemærkning (se højre spalte) til et blogindlæg fra 24. marts 2008 om von Lowzows film om Krøyer og kunstnerkolonien i Skagen hvilken stor kærlighedshistorie jeg refererer til, når jeg skriver, at de to medvirkende Jon Holden Dahl og Jette Thage meget bedre selv og alene kunne have fortalt ”den historie om Krøyer, vi alle sammen kender i alle detaljer, én gang til, på en ny måde og med deres værdige varme og ro.” For sådan er det, ”vi hører jo gerne de store kærlighedshistorier igen og igen…”
Jamen jeg tænker da i første række på kærlighedshistorien med Marie og Søren Krøyer. Og allerførst på hvordan de begge skildrer den i deres billeder. Dernæst – og nu kommer de referencer, som er mine, dem jeg lige havde i tankerne, da jeg skrev så kortfattet irriteret efter at have set filmen: Ole Wivel: Rejsen til Skagen, 1977, Jens Smærup Sørensen og Franz Ernst: Lyset over Skagen, 1986 (filmmanuskript), Marianne Saabye: P. S. Krøyers Fotografi, 1990 (udstilling og bog), Jacob Thage, red.: Portrætter fra et ægteskab, 1997 (udstilling og bog).
Marie og Søren Krøyers kærlighedshistorie er en stor kærlighedshistorie, en af dem ”vi” (altså jeg) gerne hører atter og atter. Som Marguerite Duras’ og kineserens (hendes to romaner), som jeg er så optaget af lige nu, hvor Elskeren fra Nordkina er kommet i dansk oversættelse, som Célines og Lilis (skrevet frem i hans sidste romaner), som Harriet Bosses og August Strindbergs (på den måde Lagercrantz skildrer den i sin biografi) og som Goethes og Ulrike von Levetzows kærlighedshistorie (fuld af fryd og smerte foldet ud i Martin Walsers roman Ein liebender Mann, 2008).