"No two eyes can witness all the splendid film presentations that occur in a year here," Brian Darr offers by way of introduction to his impressive Hell On Frisco Bay line-up of contributions from film writers on their 10 favorite Bay-area repertory house screenings. I was honored to contribute my tip-of-the-hat tribute to 10 retrospectives programmed by Pacific Film Archive in 2008. Spectatorial diversity ensues as Ben Armington, Robert Davis, Adam Hartzell, Michael Hawley, Ryland Walker Knight, Frako Loden, Carl Martin, Miriam Montag, Shahn, Lincoln Spector, Marisa Vela, Jason Wiener, and Austin Wolf-Sothern join Brian in listing their favorites.
Continuing with his articulate generosity, Michael Hawley offers The Evening Class his write-up on films from Berlin & Beyond that he's caught on screener. Thanks, Michael!
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"When I left Havana, nobody saw me but me."
And so begins the most oft-recorded song in the history of music—Sebastián de Iradier's ode to desire, wanderlust and melancholy—"La Paloma." Composed in Spanish Basque country in the 1860s, the melody has been adapted by scores of countries and cultures over the past century and a half. Over 2,000 recorded versions are known to exist, which is the subject of Sigrid Faltin's lovely bit of movie musicology, La Paloma—Longing Worldwide, my favorite of the films previewed for this year's Berlin & Beyond film festival.
The documentary begins, appropriately enough, at the Havana Music Museum, with a version played on an enormous 19th century music box that belonged to the wife of poet/writer/revolutionary José Martí. From Cuba, the song's popularity quickly spread to Mexico, where it became the beloved favorite of Emperor Maximilian. The film features some choice clips from William Dieterle's 1939 film Juarez, including Bette Davis' Empress Carlotta on a Chapultepec Castle balcony, listening wistfully as the tune drifts through the night air. Flash forward to contemporary Mexico, where "La Paloma" has become a rousing nationalist anthem decrying election fraud and social injustice, as interpreted by singer Eugenia Léon.
The film's globe-trotting continues with stops in Hawaii (Elvis crooning his version titled "No More"), Germany (as performed by a concentration camp combo known as the Ghetto Swingers) and Romania, where the song has become a brass band funeral dirge. The most distinctive interpretation is discovered in Zanzibar, Tanzania, where it's traditionally sung at the end of weddings to wish the bride, groom and all their guests farewell. Sung in Swahili and set to a swaying Orientalist rhythm, it contains these two wonderful closing lines: "Forgive those who said anything nasty. Nobody should be offended or sad."
"La Paloma makes you open up and feel yourself. It's the great song of life," proclaims one interviewee—a sentiment this documentary does a nice job of affirming. For those who aren't sure how the melody of "La Paloma" goes, I offer a clip from 1961's Blue Hawaii. La Paloma—Longing Worldwide contains an Elvis clip, but it's big-haired, bell-bottomed jumpsuit Elvis. This is Elvis in a pair of white swim trunks crooning alongside a quartet of bongo-playing beachcombers. Incidentally, the film's website is also well worth a look. Among other things, you can watch the trailer, listen to song clips, read translated lyrics and even download a "La Paloma" ringtone.
Another Berlin & Beyond documentary I thoroughly enjoyed was David Assmann and Ayat Najafi's Football Under Cover. This rousing film documents a frustrating, but ultimately fruitful endeavor to stage an all-female soccer match in Tehran between an amateur Berlin team and the Iranian national women's team. Right at the start, the organizers are told that in Iran, "nothing is possible and everything is possible," a dictum that holds true right up until game day. It takes a year of bureaucratic hoop-jumping to make the event happen, during which time the filmmakers shoot a series of poignant team member portraits. Most memorable of these is Niloufar, a David Beckham-obsessed young Iranian woman who prides in her ability to masquerade as a boy in order to clandestinely practice soccer in a public park. In one of the film's few ominous moments, she's mysteriously cut from the team at the 11th hour.
Game day arrives and the German team struggles with their cumbersome, skin-covering uniforms. As only women are permitted into the stadium, the film's two male directors are thrown out and forced to watch through a crack in the fence. (The film would make a great double bill with Jafar Panahi's Offside, about a group of girls who run afoul of the law when they sneak into a soccer stadium disguised as boys). Freed from the glare of patriarchal oppression, the jubilant Iranian spectators get loose and rowdy, cheering their team with shouts, chants and dancing. It's really a thrill to watch. At half time they're reprimanded over the loudspeakers, and reminded that anyone whose veil is askew will be removed by the "moral guardians" patrolling the crowd. "If you want to dance, go to a disco." As if… These admonishments only makes the crowd more agitated, and they start chanting in unison, "We women only have half the rights!" Fortunately, no one appears to get hauled off to jail, and the game's final score is a diplomatic 2–2.
As with all the films at Berlin & Beyond, Football Under Cover only gets one screening during the week-long festival, and it's at the unfortunate time of 12 noon on a Wednesday. If you can take a long lunch, I'm confident it would be worth your while. If not, the trailer below offers a small taste. Finally, it's interesting to note that this film won the Teddy Award for Best Documentary at last year's Berlin Film Festival. The award is given to films of LGBT interest, and unless I missed something, the queer connection to Football Under Cover is strictly a presumptive one.
I previewed five narrative features in the Berlin & Beyond line-up and my clear favorite was Dennis Gansel's pop political allegory The Wave. Inspired by a 1967 Palo Alto high school social experiment in autocracy, the film considers the question, "Is fascist dictatorship within the realm of possibilities for modern day Germany?" A week-long autocracy class is taught by the coolest teacher in school, Mr. Wenger (we know he's cool because he wears a Ramones t-shirt, lives on a houseboat and has a Fuck Bush sticker on his mailbox). By mid-week he's goaded his class into adopting a group uniform and salute, and stands by as they ostracize those who refuse to conform. They name their movement The Wave and spread their message via a MySpace page. (Mr. Wenger also coaches the school's water polo team, whose dynamics parallel the classroom autocracy theme). Needless to say, by week's end the experiment gets completely and somewhat ludicrously out of hand. It's all a bit much, but I was never less than fully engaged by the films tight script, energetic direction and attractive cast.
In Micha Lewinsky's sweetly unsettling The Friend, a sad-eyed, milquetoast-y young man is asked to be the pretend boyfriend of a rocker chick he's secretly in love with. When she kills herself by electric shock (she removes the ground wire of her guitar amp), he surprisingly finds himself able to comfort the girl's family in his own odd, unassuming way. This leads to a new assertiveness, a new girlfriend (the dead girl's sister) and a new ability to stand up to his passive/aggressive mother. The Friend tells an uncommon tale of how the dead can sometimes bestow the gift of life upon the living. This is Switzerland's submission for 2008's Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, and director Lewinsky has won the festival's MK Award for Best First Feature.
Cross cultural misunderstandings as they pertain to courtship and marriage is the leitmotif for Sinan Akkus' lightly comic Evet, I Do! In four tangentially connected storylines, four couples find their love lives in conflict. A German man wants to marry his Turkish girlfriend, but must first convert to Islam and be circumcised. A Kurdish radio DJ and his Turkish on-air partner find their respective orthodox and secular families at war with each other. A gay Turkish car mechanic has a German boyfriend, but his parents have set up an arranged marriage. And finally, a poor Turkish immigrant needs to secure a green-card marriage, but the prospective bride is hardly the one of his dreams (and he's no prize himself). Not particularly great stuff, but agreeable and reasonably entertaining nonetheless. The same can almost be said for André Erkau's Come In and Burn Out, a comedy or sorts about misfits working in a new-economy call center. Some of the characters are interesting, but their individual, disparate storylines are strained and fail to integrate into any kind of meaningful whole.
Last and least we have Wim Wenders' Palermo Shooting, a film that was universally reviled when it premiered last year at Cannes. Variety's Todd McCarthy pretty much summed it up when he called it "both pretentious and inconsequential." Twenty minutes have been excised from the Cannes edit for this, the film's U.S. premiere, but to little effect. German pop singer Campino stands in as the director's alter-ego, an "art" photographer suffering some kind of spiritual crisis as the result of too many trendy fashion shoots. At the urging of a very pregnant Milla Jovovich (playing herself), he travels to Sicily where he's hounded by a bow-and-arrow shooting apparition of Death (Dennis Hopper). Loaded with clunky dialogue and voiceovers of the protagonist's tortured inner musings, the film is borderline it's-so-bad-it's-good. The best thing I can say is that it's beautifully shot and will look spectacular on the Castro Theater's huge screen (which is where I caught the press screening). It's truly unfortunate that Wenders is coming to San Francisco for a tribute and this is the film that will accompany him.
As per usual, I've saved the films I'm most anticipating for a big-screen experience at the festival proper. These include Revanche, Jerichow and Cloud 9, which I briefly described in my Berlin & Beyond line-up post. I'm also hoping to catch the new 35mm print of Wenders' 1976 New German Cinema classic, Kings of the Road, as well as the English language version of Josef Von Sternberg's The Blue Angel. Also as per usual, Berlin & Beyond is bringing quite a number of filmmakers to the festival, including the directors of Cloud 9, Evet, I Do!, Football Under Cover and The Friend. Legendary German actress Barbara Sukowa will also make the trip with her latest film, The Invention of Curried Sausage. Another special guest is former Palo Alto high school teacher Ron Jones, whose story inspired The Wave.
I've been fortunate enough to view Steven Soderbergh's Che twice; first when it premiered at the 2008 Toronto International Film Festival (where I wrote it up) and then again more recently in anticipation of its theatrical release. I was disappointed when I watched the theatrical print to discover the excision of the introductory maps which situated each film's narrative. Thus, I'm heartened to hear from Michael Hawley's write-up that the roadshow doesn't tamper with the film's original presentation.
Soderbergh is once again making the rounds in preparation for Oscar consideration. I was struck by his interview in this month's issue of Esquire. Asked if he felt art makes the world a better place, Soderbergh responded: "What tragedy has it kept from happening? Tell that to the 13-year-old girl from Somalia who got stoned to death last week after being raped by three men and then convicted of adultery, buried up to her head, and stoned in front of a crowd of 1,000 people. If the collected works of Shakespeare can't keep that from happening, then what is it worth? Honestly?" Unflinching words from an uncompromising auteur.
My thanks to Michael Hawley for sharing his focus on Che's traveling roadshow with The Evening Class.
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As you may know, Steven Soderbergh's 2-part, 4½ hour Che epic was scheduled to open across the country last Friday, January 9 as two separate films requiring two separate admissions. At the last minute, however, IFC Films changed its game plan and will now release it a week later in the "Special Roadshow Edition" that played to sold-out crowds in NYC and LA in December.
Nine U.S. cities have been selected for this exclusive one-week presentation, including San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Minneapolis, Seattle, Philadelphia, and Washington D.C. But here in San Francisco we're getting something extra these other cities are not, and that's the opening night appearance of director Soderbergh. He'll be on hand to do a Q&A at the 7:30 show on Friday, January 16 at the Landmark Embarcadero Cinema. Soderbergh's Q&A in NYC was reported to be a lively, contentious affair that went on until 1:00 in the morning, and I'm predicting this screening will be one of the Bay Area's biggest, not-to-be-missed movie events of 2009. Admission is $18.00 and advance tickets can be purchased here.
Anyone younger than 50 is probably wondering just what the hell's a "Special Roadshow Edition" anyway. Well, back in the 1950s when the advent of TV spelled potential disaster for movie theaters, Hollywood came up with a number of gimmicks to attract audiences. These included new widescreen formats like Cinerama and Cinemascope, 3-D and the limited engagement Roadshow release, which sought to duplicate the experience of attending live theater. Blockbusters like The Ten Commandments, Ben-Hur, Lawrence of Arabia or The Sound of Music would open in a handful of large cities with reserved seating, a pre-screening musical overture, an intermission, exit music and a printed souvenir program. Occasionally the roadshow version of a film might even contain extra scenes that would be cut for the film's general release (note to self: it's time to finally watch the roadshow DVD of South Pacific I purchased two years ago—with 20 extra minutes not in the version I've seen a zillion times). Wikipedia has a terrific entry on the whole roadshow phenomenon.
As I understand it, the roadshow edition of Che will be shown without trailers, PSAs or artsy Stella Artois beer commercials beforehand. An overture is played before each of the two films, during which time an on-screen map provides a brief geography lesson for the country in which each film takes place—i.e., Cuba for Part One (a.k.a. The Argentine) and Bolivia for Part Two (a.k.a. Guerrilla). There will be an intermission inbetween, and every ticketholder receives a nifty 32-page souvenir program (16 pages per film that meet in the middle thanks to a reverse, dual cover design).
Che world-premiered at last year's Cannes Film Festival, where Benicio Del Toro won the Best Actor prize for his portrayal of Ernesto Guevara. I caught it at a press screening two weeks ago, and found it engaging enough to warrant a second look—especially in its roadshow presentation with Mr. Soderbergh in attendance. Some people will be disappointed that Che isn't a straight-up biopic, although Part One leans somewhat in that direction. Instead, as Michael Guillén articulated in his review of the film from the Toronto Film Festival, it's more of a discourse on revolutionary philosophy and guerrilla warfare tactics. In the two films we get to experience how these ideals succeed brilliantly in one environment (Cuba) and fail disastrously in another (Bolivia).
If you're unable to attend the opening night screening with the director in attendance, the "Special Roadshow Edition" of Che will continue at the Embarcadero Cinema through Thursday, January 22, with two shows daily at 1:30 and 7:30 (the matinee tickets are $15.00). Starting January 23, the two films will be shown separately at regular ticket prices.
Worth a look:
IFC Films Che website, which includes the U.S. trailer. Wikipedia entry for the film, with extensive material on the film's development, screenplay, financing, shooting, distribution and critical reaction. Michael Fox's write-up at SF360.
The eleventh issue of movieScope is on the stands. Online, readers can access an abbreviated edit of my conversation with Arnaud Desplechin (ah, wordcount!), as well as Adam Thursby's profile of actor Stephen Rea. Liz Hobbs writes up the Old Vic Theatre and explores the collaboration between stage and screen.
A portion of the cover feature on Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler is available by way of editor Eric Lilleør's introductory editorial. At the "Fading In" sidebar Andy Conway wryly riffs on "Fundophobia, Draftophilia and the ADDP."
In the Insiders P.O.V. sidebar of the print issue, Mick Southworth & Martin McCabe reminisce on the bygone era of movie poster art in their essay "Coming Soon: The Art of the Quad." Director Ron Oliver offers tips on directing children in his piece "Alligators Have the Right Idea." Rick Drew recruits Seth Lochhead as a case study of what's involved in selling a script and building a career in his article "What Happens After Your Big Break?" With "¡Viva Producing!", Leopoldo Gout shares how a multi-cultural and multi-medium background can enhance a producer's eye. And Kieron Connolly profiles Oscar®-winning Brit film editor Anne V. Coates in "Film isn't the End of Everything."
The Features sidebar includes Adam Thursby's dispatch from the 2008 British Independent Film Awards. Chris Patmore catches up with actress and human rights activist Nandita Das at The Times BFI 52nd London Film Festival where she screened her directorial debut Firaaq. Patmore likewise profiles Tulpan director Sergei Dvortsevoy. Athos Kyrus focuses on Michael V. Lewis, CEO and co-founder of the world's leader in 3-D projection technology. Liz Hobbs follows up and updates her 2008 list of filmmakers to watch. And Rich Bradley elicits a survey of African cinemas from Burkina Faso's most prolific director Gaston Kaboré.
It took four years for Israeli director Ari Folman to complete his animated documentary Waltz With Bashir, which was entered in the competition for the Palme d'Or at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival. Though—despite predictions—it did not win that honor, Waltz With Bashir went on to win six awards from the Israeli Film Academy, including Best Picture. It had its North American premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival and its US premiere at the 46th New York Film Festival. The film has been submitted as Israel's entry for Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards, as well as for Best Animated Feature. Predictions for an Oscar win look optimistic, judging from its recent Golden Globe for Best Foreign Feature; the first nonfiction film in Golden Globe history to claim that honor. Concerned with the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre, the film came highly praised at its Cannes premiere as one that would "leave its mark forever on the ethics of war films in general" (Screen Daily). Variety hailed it as "something special, strange and peculiarly potent." Time magazine asserted that "the message of the futility of war has rarely been painted with such bold strokes." It was with considerable respect that I sat down to converse with Ari Folman.
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Michael Guillén: First of all, Ari, Waltz With Bashir is a remarkable film. It's a film that confirms that—by diving deeply into the personal—a filmmaker can achieve the universal, the philosophical, the political. I consider the commensurate practices of psychotherapy and filmmaking to be sibling practices, having both appeared on the scene at relatively the same time, and both practices are continually evolving. You've frequently been asked about the therapeutic effect of Waltz With Bashir in healing your own psyche, but what do you hope will be its therapeutic benefit for others, not only in Israel but worldwide?
Ari Folman: First, I'm not a great believer in psychotherapy. If it's evolved, as you say, it has evolved to the point of being a quasi-religion, almost a cult. If you are a believer, it can work for you. If you are a non-believer, it probably will not work for you. I say that after—as you can imagine—having experienced long terms of psychotherapy. That's my general opinion of the system and how it works.
Guillén: It's an articulate indictment of psychotherapy, which might interest you.
Folman: My belief is that any kind of filmmaking is therapy; but, it's dynamic. You're actually doing something. It's not the masturbatory ritual of meeting your shrink once a week. You travel, you meet people, you record them, you listen to and deal with what they have to say, you write a screenplay, you film your subjects, you imagine and invent things from scratch, a new dimension of memory, you do real work. Sometimes in psychotherapy you don't do real work. It's not as strong as creative expression. And it doesn't have to be filmmaking. It can be writing, painting. Waltz With Bashir is—I don't know, maybe it's too pretentious to say that it works as psychotherapy for other people—but, it works. My life has changed tremendously in the last seven months since Cannes; and what's happened is I can't go to public events anymore because in the end I find myself sitting in the corner, very gloomy, and someone I've never seen before sits beside me and tells me all his horrific war stories—there have been many wars so it could be any one of them—and then he says, "I can't help it. This is coming out of me because I've seen your film and it's encouraged me to talk, so I want to talk to you because everyone in the film talks to you." So the film admittedly motivates people. I predicted that but I didn't predict hearing from so many women that Waltz With Bashir was the first film that really showed them what war is. Not that they had anything against war movies in general; but, they never understood the experience through film. Waltz With Bashir was the first time for them to understand a lot of things about their husbands, about their sons, and about the little children who might be soldiers someday. I don't know why this film specifically appeals to women—much more than any other war film—but this is what I've been repeatedly told.
Guillén: The film's narrative structure, its structured subjectivity, is comparable to how narratives are structured in so-called "objective" documentaries and, thus, Waltz With Bashir achieves an equation between subjectivity and objectivity.
Folman: I don't believe in objectivity. There is no objectivity in filmmaking. Logically, it cannot exist. The basic fact that you go into an editing room with 200 hours of footage and by the end of the editing process come out with a film that is 50 minutes or an hour negates objectivity.
Guillén: In all honesty, I agree. Waltz With Bashir is a subjective statement by which you have created an understanding of yourself. Its intense subjectivity has thinned the membrane between the personal and the political and, thereby, has engendered a historical document about how a nation or a culture has created an understanding of itself. Yet it's also thinned the membrane between filmmaking and the psychological process of editing. History making, filmmaking, selfmaking.
Folman: I agree with you and you have phrased it like no one ever has to me. When you go on a very personal journey, in the end you hit all the political points that you didn't think you would. It's true. And I think by utilizing the personal, you achieve more because audiences sense that your initial inspiration was not just to do an anti-war film. When you are honestly personal, an audience feels less manipulated.
Guillén: Waltz With Bashir's anti-war statement is evident—that is its obvious surface—but, what intrigued me the most was the psychological process of editing: how you make a film, how you remember your life, how you remember history. The fact that it's animated, and starts right off with animals, gives it a double whammy of anima. A soufulness immediately launches and situates the film. It grounds it.
Folman: That was planned.
Guillén: You have recounted many times how you achieved your animation design, and I know one critic wrote about how your particular style of animation leaves the viewer unmoored, floating somewhat. How did you develop that aesthetic of being slightly afloat?
Folman: The animation was dictated by the design of the film. At the beginning I was obsessed to make a film where the design was as realistic as possible, meaning putting in more shadows on the characters, more wrinkles, shapes, contours. However, the more details you have, the more complicated it becomes to move the characters in cut-out animation, which is actually the simplest animation. We took it to the most extreme level. On the way, I saw the down side of the technique. Slow movement was the most complicated thing to achieve with this technique. Just a person walking slowly down a corridor was the most complicated thing to capture; contrary to the big action scenes with shooting and the movement of armored vehicles. Basic movement killed us. There was one moment where I decided, "Let's make everything in cut-out, but the lower part of the body will be classic animation. From the knees down, it will be frame-by-frame." The resulting look had something unique, disconnected from time. It released you from time, which I rarely see in filmmaking. For example, in David Lynch's movies, you lose a sense of time.
Guillén: With regard to timelessness in your creativity, then, you enter the terrain of mythmaking. So along with selfmaking, history making, filmmaking, we add mythmaking. I feel a need to stress these multiple equivalent threads in your film. I study a lot of mythology. I study a lot of cosmogonies from various cultures around the world and there are two basic principles I've observed with regard to cosmogonies; two approaches that are engaged in the process of a creation myth. They either see it and it becomes or they say it and it becomes. I bring this up because it's my understanding that Waltz With Bashir was largely predicated upon sound and that sound is the driving creative force behind this film.
Folman: For me, always. The only tough part about creating a film for me is the writing, which I treat as my main profession because it's real work. I'm sometimes embarrassed by how much fun I'm having with all the other stuff involved in filmmaking. I don't want to admit the truth that I'm just having fun and not working, you know? The most fun for me is doing the sound. It's miraculous. For example, in the opening scene with the dogs we had 102 tracks of animal sounds. We had wolves, lions, tigers, etc. The sound was engineered in a studio in Berlin that had formerly been the gym of the Nazi hierarchy. It was an incredible place. The sound designers were very talented German engineers. I told them to go wild. There are a lot of things I say about the war in the film but one of the basic ways I envisage it is as a bad acid trip. You might know that in a bad acid trip you go on a journey where you never know what's next, which I think is a lot like filmmaking as well. Hopefully, it's not predictable. Everyone talks about visions when they talk about LSD, but really it's more about sound, and rarely do you see that truth expressed in filmmaking. In the 10-12 minute Mardi Gras scene in Easy Rider—which I think is an incredible scene—it's all about sound, nothing about visuals. I felt that I had to take the audience immediately into that dimension, to strike them with the opening sequence, shock them, and then let them fly into the film. So we went really wild with the sound and put a lot of effort into it.
Guillén: I would have to say as stunning as the visuals are in Waltz With Bashir, its sound design is what I consider its presiding achievement. It's the sound design that captured me and stayed with me long after seeing the film and which, in my opinion, best approximates the recollective process of memory. I know exactly what you're saying about LSD. I actually studied with Stanislav Grof who, you might know, conducted extensive research into the therapeutic usage of altered states of consciousness through a career's worth of experiments with LSD. Grof was the one who discovered through his research that LSD was a serial experience that progresses upon repeated usage and that the visual hallucinations usually associated with LSD were merely the first stage of the acid trip, followed by a more pronounced and enduring stage of aural hallucinations. Returning to the cosmogonic principle that sound manifests, if you place—let's say—iron particles on a drum skin and strike a tuning fork, the vibrations will arrange those particles into mandalic patterns. In other words, sound creates form.
Folman: You're totally right. I completely agree with you.
Guillén: And, of course, the Biblical cosmogony follows suit with God speaking and creation becoming manifest. I'm very clear that the form of Waltz With Bashir, its manifest structure, relies heavily on its sound design. The visuals were arresting and, as stated earlier, unmooring; but, it was the film's sound that gave me the best handle on the film's themes. Cosmogonies aside, who did you work with to create the sound design?
Folman: The sound designer is Aviv Aldema, who I've always worked with in Israel; but, the whole sound team—the mixer, the sound effects designer—were German. Then I brought in a British composer Max Richter who I think is brilliant. I had never met him but I used to listen to his albums while I was writing. He was truly inspiring for me. I wrote the script for Waltz With Bashir in six days, listening only to Max Richter's albums. I didn't mean for that to happen like that, but it just happened. When I finished the script, I thought, "This guy has, in effect, written the soundtrack for the script." Because scripts have soundtracks. Think about it. If you listen to Bach for a month while writing, Bach will emotionally influence the writing. Nothing influences emotions more than music. As a former resident of San Francisco, Frank Zappa, used to say: "Music is the best." [Chuckles.]
Guillén: I'm convinced music is the highest of the arts. Without question, Waltz With Bashir has served the purpose of informing audiences of the Sabra and Shatila massacre, of which many of us were unaware. As history, as information, that has merit in and of itself; but, the film's most visceral effect is in its simulation of the very real process of active imagination. Any artist or, for that matter, any person who is grappling with memory, attempting to individuate through memory, attempting to reconcile memory, anyone who is looking into themselves, is engaged in active imagination. I can understand why—when you go to cocktail parties—everyone wants to come up to you and tell you their war stories because you have unleashed a therapeutic device. It may not be psychotherapy or the talking cure; but, it's a creative device by which people can cope with selfmaking. One of the most interesting critiques of your film, which I've had to sit with, is the notion that Waltz With Bashir is the shadow of the Holocaust. Can you speak to that?
Folman: Yeah, yeah. I have no problem at all speaking about it. First, I'll tell you that—since the film was released in Israel—I have never been asked about the Holocaust at all. For a very simple reason: because the comparison was obvious. It's in the DNA of the Jewish people in Israel. Whenever they see newsreel images of any kind of mass murder—Sabra and Shatila, Srebrenica in Bosnia, Armenians, Rwanda, it doesn't matter—for them it strikes immediately and flies them into the past. I never mentioned The Holocaust in the film but it's referenced two times. First, when we entered the camps I was asked, "Do you remember the famous photos from the Warsaw ghetto?" And I say yes. And my other friend the therapist says, "It's not the Sabra and Shatila camps; it's the other camps." It's as if Waltz With Bashir is speaking in code. Never in the history of my country has there ever been such a demonstration of outrage such as took place the day after the Sabra and Shatila massacre. I'm not even sure people fully understood why they were taking to the streets. Israeli troops didn't directly participate in the massacre. They've done terrible things but in this case specifically they didn't do the shooting. The Israeli people had never demonstrated to such an extent before nor afterwards. But when they saw the newsreels, which I incorporated into the end of Waltz With Bashir, they freaked out. They protested that there was no way that the Israeli government could be connected to such an atrocity, taking into consideration what had happened to the Jewish people during the Holocaust.
As I've traveled with the film, people have found it very hard to understand how I could make the comparison; but, it's not a comparison. Some things can't be compared. They can hardly be understood. Can you understand what happened during the Holocaust? There's no way to understand it. There's a 90-minute film called Massaker that's about Sabra and Shatila. It's about five Phalangist soldiers, filmed in silhouette, who recount what they did in the camps. It's nothing but them speaking. As you listen to them, you can't believe that any human being could have done those things. You just can't believe it. You say, "No." And then in the end you say, "What? Did they invent these stories? Why would they do that?" The point is they did it. Some things just can't be explained. For us it's easy to make the reference; but, in some places, they just couldn't figure it out at all.
This is actually one of the most interesting discussions I've had on the film. I want you to consult with me on my next film. I think you could help me. It concerns all these areas that we're discussing.
Guillén: It would be my honor. Thank you for taking the time to speak with me today.
Cross-published on Twitch. Waltz With Bashir is currently playing in San Francisco at the Clay Theatre, 2261 Fillmore Street, San Francisco; (415) 267-4893.
The cover article of the November 2008 issue of Film International (Vol. 6, No. 5, pp. 60-67)—"The Arn Franchise: Launching a Small Country Blockbuster"—authored by the issue's guest editor Erik Hedling argues that "with the advent of Arn, Sweden has obtained its first fully fledged Hollywood-style film franchise in the manner of Lord of the Rings, complete with bestselling books, thus far a highly successful historical epic, and an aspiring tourist industry, drawing heavily on the books and films." Acknowledging that the film has set a new standard, Hedling proposes: "In Arn, a particularly powerful historical fetish—the very foundation of Sweden as a country—can be discerned lurking behind the whole project."
As reported at Wikipedia: "Arn–The Knight Templar (original title in Swedish: Arn–Tempel Riddaren) is a 2007 epic film based on Jan Guillou's trilogy about the fictional Swedish Knight Templar Arn Magnusson. The film was released in December 2007 and the sequel, Arn–The Kingdom at Road's End (Arn–Riket vid vägens slut), was released August 22, 2008. While the film is mostly in Swedish and most of the production was made in Sweden, the film is a joint production between Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland and Germany. With a total budget of around US$30,000,000 for the whole production, it is the most expensive production in Scandinavian film history." An international version—a single film comprised of parts from the first two films in the trilogy—will be launched in the autumn of 2009.
Svensk Filmindustri, the co-producers and Swedish distributors of Arn, encapsulate the plot as follows at their website: "The film about Arn and Cecilia is set in Sweden as well as the Middle East, and offers a rich gallery of brave knights, powerful queens and treacherous kings. It is a tale of war and intrigue, friendship and betrayal, but also an unforgettable love story. Arn Magnussson [portrayed by relative newcomer Joakim Nätterqvist] is born in 1150 on Arnas farm in West Gothia in the western part of Sweden. He grows up to become an educated young man and a skilled swordsman. He meets Cecilia [Sofia Heflin], the love of his life, but a cruel and jealous world forces them apart. Cecilia is imprisoned in a convent and Arn is sent away as a Knight Templar to the Holy Land, where war is raging between Christians and Muslims. They both have to fight to survive, they have to learn how to confront evil and overcome physical hardship. Their painful separation causes their faith in God and his goodness to waver—though not their faith in each other and their confidence that they will one day be reunited. When Arn returns home he has to fight for his love and what has become his life's mission: to unite Sweden into one kingdom."
Based on Guillou's Crusader series of novels, The Road to Jerusalem / Vägen til Jerusalem (1998), The Knight Templar / Tempel Riddaren (1999) and The Kingdom at the End of the Road / Riket vid vägens slut (2000), which have sold more than two million copies in Sweden and have been translated into multiple languages including English, Spanish and German, Guillou—an avowed atheist well-known for his pro-Palestinian views—has admitted he felt compelled to write the trilogy in response to the "War on Terror." As Hedling has reported, in Guillou's epilogue to the 2007 edition of his novel, the novelist opined that "already by the mid-1990s one could see that the big war—what we now label as the 'War on Terror'—was approaching. …Everywhere, Arabs and Muslims were depicted as demons. In precisely that way, the first Holy War, the mediaeval crusade to Palestine, was initiated. …And now, on our way towards the third millennium, the Holy War was to start again, as if we had learnt nothing from history. Thus, I have to write the story about how this war appeared when it was first fought."
This political admission complicates the Arn franchise with a compelling relevancy. As Hedling has researched: "In the preface to their anthology The Medieval Hero on Screen [published by McFarland], Martha W. Driver and Sid Ray claim that the popularity of the kind of film represented by Arn is due to [the fact] that 'reference to the Middle Ages seems to grant films license to present extreme forms of masculinity and to justify, even celebrate, war'; the authors also allude to the War on Terror by invoking the idea that the Gulf War (1990) 'was a bonanza for medievalists' as American politicians depicted nations in the Middle East as fiefdoms of the Middle Ages and cast themselves as the crusading hero of democracy' (Driver and Ray 2004:9)." Compounded by Guillou's frank self-confessed motives for writing the trilogy, Hedling points out that Guillou's admission adheres "to Driver and Ray's theory regarding the appearance of films with mediaeval settings in the 1990s—albeit from exactly the opposite point of view." [Emphasis added.]
Despite being highly anticipated by Todd Brown at Twitch—"Looking forward to it? You bet."—some growsing ensued in the comments section about grand, epic battle scenes becoming tiresome and that some new and different stylization was required to keep the genre fresh. First, I would query: "Fresh for whom?" Western audiences already saturated with trilogy franchises? Does that not demean the projected and actual success of marketing the Arn trilogy as a franchise, first for Scandanavian audiences, and now—securing that achievement—international ones? Secondly, reading the film with the above-stated political intentions is arguably a "fresh"—perhaps even necessary—perspective on the mediaeval epic. Notwithstanding, I'll concede the complaint bears some legitimacy. As Boyd von Hoeij has written at european-films.net: "Though the books have been bestsellers in Scandinavia and several other European countries including Germany, it remains to be seen whether the cinema-going public is ready for a Crusades epic so shortly after the lukewarm reception of Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven, in which heartthrob Orlando Bloom was sent off to the Holy Land."
"Kingdom of Heaven," Hedling points out, "draws on the same historical circumstances and the same historical figures as Jan Guillou's Arn trilogy regarding, for instance, the representation of the Holy Land…. Both works also contain representations of Salah ad-Din, the mighty warrior-sultan of Syria and Egypt, who eventually won the struggle for Jerusalem." It will be fascinating to monitor how Guillou's "opposite point of view" will be received by non-Scandanavian (i.e., Christianized Western) audiences, given statistical evidence that—as of 2005—85% of Swedes do not believe in God, which might account for their embrace of Guillou's literary perspective.
As for whether the shifting of the books' dramaturgy towards "standard swashbuckling antics" via a more simplified, marketable "masculine spectacle" (the story of Arn's beloved Cecilia has been greatly reduced in the films) will, indeed, prove tiresome for being overly familiar, only time will tell. Like Todd, I'm eager to decide for myself whether director Peter Flinth (Mastermind, 2005) and screenwriter Hans Gunnarsson (Evil / Ondskan, 2003) have succeeded in their filmic adaptation of Guillou's Crusaders trilogy.
As for the rest of the November 2008 issue of Film International and its focus on the "new wave in Swedish cinema", Hedling has historicized Scandanavia's contributions, most notably with the art-house classics of Carl Theodor Dreyer and Ingmar Bergman, the contributions of such Danish auteurs as Lars von Trier, Susanne Bier and Tomas Vinterberg, and Finnish auteurs Aki and Mika Kaurismäki. Cognizant that the hope for the emergence of a new wave of Swedish cinema inspired by the work of Lukas Moodysson's Together (2000) and Josef Fares' Jalla! Jalla! (2000)—to name just two main examples—has, perhaps, peaked in this last decade and "slightly faded", Hedling nonetheless solicited contributions from film scholars working at the Department of Film Studies at Lund University in southern Sweden, just across the strait from Copenhagen in Denmark. In his introductory editorial, Hedling synopsizes those contributions.
In "A New Deal in European film? Notes on the Swedish regional production turn", Olof Hedling analyzes the drastic industrial changes in Swedish film production during the last decade. In "The Black Pimpernel: The Biopic as a mediator of the past" Tommy Gustafsson traces the history of Harald Edelstam, Swedish ambassador in Santiago during the Pinochet coup d'etat in 1973. Although The Black Pimpernel failed at the box office, Gustafsson's article "draws attention to the biopic in particular by discussing the 'genre' of the biopic in general and also touches upon the question of why some biopics succeed as mediators of the past when others do not." In "Cinematic Sex Education in the Twenty-first Century: Narration, Reflexivity, and Sexuality in Kärlekens språk (2004)", Elisabet Björklund investsigates the Swedish sex education film, particularly the remake of Kärlekens språk (1969) in 2004. Mikael Marcimain, the young director nominated in December 2007 for Sweden's prestigious Dagens Nyheter Arts Prize, is at the center of Mats Jönsson's discussions in "Marcimainstream? History in two contemporary Swedish TV-series." Finally, in "Hollywood in Sweden: Cinematic references imagining America", Ann-Kristin Wallengren looks closer at the direct influence of Hollywood cinema on Swedish film, both in terms of genre and, above all, the explicit use of filmic characters, stereotypes and common images and ideals.
Romance at the Castro Theatre might be silent on Valentines Day, at least as far as films go, but—over at the Victoria Theatre—the romance will be raucous! As the indefatigable Marc Huestis declares: "It's time to take the wig out of the box and join the fabulous John Cameron Mitchell performing live for this ultimate Valentine's event! Mitchell sings selected songs from Hedwig, as well as other romantic ditties expounding on the origins of love, sex, and…. Followed by screenings of his cult classics Hedwig (Saturday, February 14 at 7:30PM; Sunday, February 15 at 8:00PM) and Shortbus (Friday, February 13, 8:00PM and Saturday, February 14 at 11:00PM). The screenings of Hedwig on February 15 and Shortbus on February 14, 11:00PM will include a live director's commentary on the sexy behind-the-scenes happenings and other tidbits on making these totally rockin' flicks. There will be special guest hosts for each show. So hold on to each other ... hold on tonight."
Tickets are $25 each or $45 for two shows and are available by calling (415) 863-0611, at A Different Light Bookstore, 489 Castro Street, or online at Ticketweb.
