 Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne: The Promise 99 KByte |
a story - it is not the icebergtthat is most interesting...At the end of the last century, in the year of 1898, a novel by a certain Morgen Robertson was published, under the title Futility. Robertson tells the story of the sinking of a giant steamer, called Titan - the deck of which was populated by dignified passengers, which on a cold April night ran into and iceberg and went to the bottom. Fourteen years later the steamer Titanic was put on water, the length, the displacement tonnage and the accommodation capacity of which was very-very similar to that described by Robertson, and where enough life-boats have been neglected just like in the case of Titan. The Titanic then, on a cold April night, ran into an iceberg and went to the bottom.What is this? The power of fantasy or the playfulness of fate, a warning sign again that the writer, the painter, the film-maker, etc. does have an insight into the future...?
where is the steamer heading for?The Budapest Titanic is not a steamer, but a festival, but we believe to grasp the implications of that title. More and more people are crowding on the deck - this time ten thousand viewers {!) and forty film-makers. And many dozens of cult- and scandal films, documentaries, clips and low budget productions, the moving pictures - in different genres - of American, Canadian, Norwegian, Hungarian, French, Belgian, Russian directors, all sinister "film-reports" (using the term coined by Grunwalsky) about the European-Asian-American civilisation - living in fear of the final count-down.Does this Titanic emblem tell us anything about the "sinking", the deterioration of the art of film? Yes and no. The film of the 90s, in the manner of the mature genres of art of decadent ages, is sophisticated, precise, alluring and professional. It discovers nothing, but knows everything that is to be known about the relationship of the camera and the world. “Its is raining in Brussels, and I am fifteen years old. - so does Alain Berliner, the excellent Belgian director present himself in My Life in Rose. I discover the Film Museum, and continually read about films, directors, actors, I like Godard, Melville, Louise Brooks, Peter Lorre, Michael Snow, the spaghetti westerns, and film noir. I spend entire nights with weighting the merits of this or that.... I am a movie-maniac, and I play in a punk rock band, and I want nothing more in my life, for all that this has no future....” All film-makers must have started like that, i.e. like movie-maniacs. Like the New Wave forty years ago in the Film Museums, adoring the Great Masters and the increasingly classical box office hits. During the Titanic show, the common heritage was precisely palpable. Everett Lewis, Abel Ferrara, Atom Egoyan, Attila Mispál or Alexander Sokuroff were arguably raised on the same classics of film. Yet one still does not feel them to be revolutionaries or visionaries of film, - like Godard, Jancsó or Tarkovski had been. The film-maker of the end of the century simply does his duty. He methodically, patiently and with perseverance pans the world with his camera. He shoots with the budget that he has, onto the raw-material that happens to be available. He collects rolls through decades. The director of The Champagne Safari George Ungar - with Hungarian origins - for fifteen years collected documents concerning the life of the person who invented the famous- and ill-famed - "beaudeux-system", in order to make the portrait of one of the most emblematic figures of the century, Charles Beaudeux. Beaudeux very early - at the same time with Fritz Lang who created Metropolis - understood the grave problem of our age, i.e. the phenomenon of mass life. His conclusions, however, threw him on the wrong side, i.e. to those collaborating with Fascism. The Champagne Safari is very close to being the documentary sister of the Citizen Kane, with the difference that Ungar stops at the conventional documentary, and does not search for avant-garde or innovative forms to go with his extraordinary material, as did for example Welles. And this is generally true about films. The directors of the representative show of Titanic are art professionals. The distinction between the artisan/artist, or the Hollywood/ European film is no longer a valid one, The borderline between them has become increasingly vague. It is common knowledge that since Hollywood became saturated with its own success, to pick up innovative ideas its directors go to the festivals of the independent. And Sundance swarms with sensitive and sophisticated experts of film, knowing what it is that be used of Bergman, Godard or Fassbinder today. These people were tutored by Kusturica, Miklós Jancsó and Yvett Bíró at the Academy, but who - should the occasion present itself - will not fail to accept a proposal by Metro-Goldwin or Fox. There were a number of discoveries from Sundance at the Titanic, directors uniting the best of American and European traditions in their films. Everett Lewis' Skin & Bone , discussing the tragic speediness of the fall of men living off providing sexual services, is just as cruel, factual and almost sociologically exact, as is Living Life, to which it is a thematic twin sister. Ira Sachs, who was personally present, mentioned his indebtedness to his tutor Fassbinder. His Delta on 16 mm film, narrating the relationship between a middle-class American boy and a married Vietnamese man with sensitivity and intentional jerks is rough and sentimental at the same time, as is Fear Eats Up the Soul or The Italian. The latest family movie of Atom Egoyan, the Canadian star of the most dignified of film festivals, The Sweet Hereafter which films the pain of a settlement in Canada whose children have been lost through a bus accident, is as precise as an Eastern-European documentary. Yet the "twinpeaks" atmosphere that creeps through this exact constant is already the characteristic of the new North-American movie, the creation of Lynch, the Cohen-brothers and Egoyan himself. No director, however, dares to think today - not even on this side of the Atlantic Ocean - that the social importance or some brilliantly executed avant-garde idea will sell his film. The European - i.e. Hungarian, Belgian, French - director of the 90s is no longer poking fun at the audience, and respects the narrative inclinations of film. Ildikó Enyedi in Tamás and Juli tells the story of the love of two young people in a mining town in as straight and regular a manner as a nursery school teacher would do - with a beginning, a middle and an end. Belgian The Promise, the story of father and son living off the misery of immigrants - one of the best films of the Titanic Festival - can rightly be considered a successor of The 400 Blows, without any side-tracking or hidden dramaturgy in the fabric of the story-telling, with nothing but a tight causal network, on which our heroes eventually get caught up, and a short cut ending. Even the most form-breaking adventure, - balancing on the borderline between theatre, action and movie, i.e. András Jeles's Revizor , - in which the director embarked on the impossible and wanted to have Gogol's play performed by the homeless of Budapest, took a decisively tactful shape during editing. We barely perceive the failure, that Jeles gave it up at one point.
what does the steamer carry?During the breaks between screenings, if the traveller strolled into the book-store next door, he may have bumped into ominous texts about this “Titanic century”. In Ágnes Heller's Alien the author writes the following: “The constellation of the 20th century is a diabolic one. ...Instead of an elevated being above man, what we have is a creature below man, culture has been destroyed and not saved, the society of united production forces and of realised humanism has become the world of forced labour, murder and starvation. The principle of prejudice and tolerance has been turned into racism, modern technology gave us the gas chamber and the atomic bomb.... The 20th century is the century of man-made disasters...”The majority of film-makers has the same view of our world - it is a disaster area. Directors were mostly interested in the third class travellers of the world-steamer, those expelled from the end-of-the-century deck luxuries, i.e. the immigrants, and the cruel exploiters of immigration. (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne: The Promise). They were interested in male prostitutes, and the exploiters of sexual misery (Everett Lewis: Skin &BBone). In serial killers (John McNaughton: Henry), simple homosexuals (Ira Sachs: The Delta) homeless, (András Jeles, Gábor Havas: The Revizor), the blind small town teenagers, verging on debility (Bruno Dumont: The Life of Jesus). As if we were meant to understand fate through their endless sufferings, physical and spiritual blows, unreasonable deaths. The giant steamer that was advertised as unsinkable, - what a perfect symbol for our world! - and the disaster on that clear and bright night of the passengers who fell prey to the commercial.... The stories of the unredeemed expelled often follow forced routes. Many a “déja vu” film made a go at the festival. In Bruno Dumont's The Life of Jesus, which was given a Jean Vigo-Award, there were the motives and silence of Kaspar Hauser and Balthazar . Small town, with its very own ritual stupidities. Relationships limited to barren, rough gestures, and the great nothingness between events. The single stimulating element is the foreign (here Arabic) boy, whose pure existence is a challenge, and who serves as the shunting of inarticulate passions. From the very time of his appearance we know that this boy will be a meaningless victim. Bresson, Bunuel, Fassbinder, Jeles, Herzog have all said the same, and perhaps better: we live in a god-forsaken place, and only human stupidity surpasses human cruelty. What a tedious prayer-wheel, but it has to be repeated again and again until something happens. However, the Inspector by Jeles and the homeless seems to have pushed the cart a bit further down the slope. The director turns his back on his struggling homeless actors with a half-made performance, designating the whole attempt as truthless, false, or simply useless. And we have not yet accustomed to having our belief in the redeeming power of art this much weathered. "One upon a time there was a bridge that led nowhere” - could one continue with Heller. ...If we once again look back upon the previous representative centuries, we shall not find a single one that in fearfulness and terror would surpass our own.”
is this the future already?1997, in some calculations, is already the next millennium, which perhaps will not repeat the crimes and follies of this. In that next millennium, there will be eternal present, where man on his own planet will create the tidy reserves, separated from the overall environment that was devastated by him. Man will create sea-shores unthreatened by sharks, where the salt content of the water is just right. Virtual ozone-filled skies for free gliding. The Korean director of the American documentary Synthetic Pleasures, Iara Lee, throws himself happily into the mechanised pleasures of the third millennium alongside with countless characters - media gurus, Internet-believers, programmers that develop synthetic, problem-free sex programs and their users, - that , thanks to technology, managed to change their sex or just their smile. These pleasures promise to have eliminated all sexual, ethnic, minority problems, inferiority complexes, and profess that even ecological problems can be remedied. If the sea is polluted, let us whirl in an artificial one. Should the snow melt on this increasingly hot planet, why not simulate skiing tracks on computers or in virtual space. What Iara Lee says in this film is that masses of people already believe in this brave new world..What helps whom dissolve these typical, end-of-the-millennium anxieties? Mine are still best dissolved by the "soul-film". The film that does not endeavour to devastate everything in me. Of which - and it is no fault of the directors' (see Ágnes Heller) there are fewer and fewer even at the best of festivals. At the Titanic show, say Ildikó Enyedi's and Nick Cassavetes' somewhat “démodé” films. Tamás and Juli, this, tranquil, clear, simple love-film, which says that telling someone about our feelings will be no more complicated at the dawn of the next millennium than it used to be any time in the past. And that on New Year's Eve in 2000, the world will not explode, perhaps a mine, as it happened so many times in the past. And Unhook the Stars, the common movie of Cassavetes's wife, Gena Rowlands and his son, - making his debut as a director - which is filled with the same old matters that the father of the Cassavetes family has elaborated for decades. i.e. how to adopt the minor, delicate motions of the soul on film, where does a gesture go wrong, where is a decision made? The description of absolutely uninteresting everyday victories that yet are of cosmic dimension, the slow cleaning of the silted soul of an ageing woman. A number of trivialities. A finding closed in celluloid, for coming synthetic, wild, or perhaps mild - who knows what - ages, if ages will come. The nervation of an extinct plant species. |
 Alain Berliner: My Life in Rose 124 KByte | |
 Everett Lewis: Skin & Bone 130 KByte | |
 Ira Sachs: The Delta 120 KByte | |
 Atom Egoyan: The Sweet Hereafter 80 KByte | |
 Ildikó Enyedi: Tamás and Juli 125 KByte | |
 András Jeles: The Revizor 117 KByte | |
 Bruno Dumont: The Life of Jesus 140 KByte | |
 John McNaugton: Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer 158 KByte |
