ira friedberg*
ZEITPUNKT:
A TOO-LATE, TOO-SUBJECTIVE, AND TOO-BRIEF MEMORY OF THREE FILMS FROM THE 75TH BERLINALE
The film festival is the most transitory of phases in the already brief life of cinema. The festival event flickers, to be forgotten soon after its staging. Its vibrancy rests on its novelness, its nowness, in the premiere and in the filmmakers’ eager or anxious introduction. The films live on, and yet the two weeks of their frenetic watching are put aside; not least when another festival sweeps in to claim the narrow allowance of attention. The lovingly constructed program is slid into the recycling bin between cartons of oat milk and DHL packaging, and the meticulously planned schedule is recalled perhaps only by those who programmed it, if they haven’t already started work on the next iteration.
This tendency to move on too quickly is propelled by the ceaseless entertainment news cycle, a voracious appetite for the new and the next. So here, now, why not attempt a slow, retrospective approach to the film festival? With the 2025 Berlinale more than two months in arrears, and other prominent festivals approaching with haste, I’d like to perform an impressionistic post-mortem on a still-fresh corpse, and in so doing, perhaps revive its spirit, to see what, if anything, lives on after a festival’s closing night, when all the awards have been granted, the red carpets have been rolled up, and the venues been reappropriated for the next state-funded arts festival. Can a festival remain in our minds as a significant, personal, lasting event? Which moments remain?
This will be a necessarily personal approach. Having been unable to watch every film in a triple-digit program, my experience of the festival will be unique in its makeup, a slice of possible options. I see this as indicative of the festival experience; it is something of a choose-your-own-adventure. Most festivalgoers are not critics, and most are only able to squeeze in a handful of films. It is these choices, made amidst a vast catalogue, that define the festival, rather than the jury’s ultimate verdict. It is this empowering of the subject, to create a personal program among a vast assemblage of films, which defines this unique period of film-watching in contrast with the remainder of the year, when one’s choices are limited by declining theatrical releases and streaming platforms of dwindling quality.
The particular relationship between the viewer and their selection of films at a festival is of interest to me, this give-and-take between the programmer and the viewer, as each interlocutor make claims for the films worth seeing at this moment in time, this Zeitpunkt. The choices are not made with total intention; they are influenced by the schedule of the viewer, the availability of the films, the descriptions found in the program and the scant media surrounding the selection, the film’s language and its subtitling, the cinema’s accessibility, the familiarity with the filmmakers, the mood of the festivalgoer, the idiosyncratic appeal of a title or an image, and so on.
For me, the 75th Berlinale began only a couple of days after I moved to Berlin. It was fate, or charming coincidence, a meet-cute between an eager student of film and one of the most prominent festivals in the world.
The frantic 10AM purchasing of tickets was the first hurdle, which I tripped over on the first attempts. Another factor overriding the notion of autonomous choice: the online queueing system which arbitrarily affords the opportunity to purchase tickets, often throwing you into a market for tickets already stripped of its wares, like an abandoned saloon in a declining old West town. Eventually, I was able to secure tickets to a few films of lesser demand, then got wiser and quicker with my mouse to secure those hard-to-get sessions. Of the eight-odd films I managed to see, three stand out in my recollection:
Peter Hujar’s Day by Ira Sachs, at Urania. Charlottenburg, a shopping district and ageing neighbourhood which I would never have visited so soon, without the rationale of the Berlinale. It’s worth it to see the KaDeWe building from the outside, and so too the Wittenberg U-Bahn Station, with their monumental Willhellminian style. Urania itself is a modernist cube with sheer glass walls, having crashed UFO-style amidst the stuccoed surroundings. We squeeze into the row fourth from the front, having arrived too close to the start time, shoving our burdensome coats beneath the seats. A Berlinale representative takes the stage and welcomes us. The festival logo explodes in celebratory gold glitter. The film begins: seventy-six minutes of an interview between Peter Hujar and Linda Rosenkrantz, reenacted. Hujar, played by Ben Whishaw, smokes and rambles as Rosenkrantz presses him gently for details of his quotidian life. Every so often, she fiddles with her tape recorder, or makes coffee, or takes Hujar to the rooftop. Sometimes, the film crew is rendered visible--a boom guy patiently aims his microphone at Whishaw, playing Hujar, sat on the windowsill in yellow evening light. It’s a performance, an enlivening of recorded text, and yet these reminders of artifice bring us closer to the reality of the subject. Whishaw’s performance is rhythmic, searching; Hujar is more committed to an interrogation of his own habits than is his interlocutor. With each vocal strain or run-on sentence, one holds the real subject against the performance, both kept in mind--we are made aware from the opening epigraph that each word is taken from the real transcript. The actors appear as vessels for the real people, not just reflections or impressions. As Hujar so insistently analyses the content of his day, he and his interviewer try to understand the twenty-four hour unit, how little or much one can get done, and the relevance of the day as a revelatory tool becomes apparent. This is no biopic that extends over days, weeks, or years. How we spend our days is how we spend our lives, and here, the single day tells us all, or if not all, enough, as much as we need or will ever be able to know. Rather than perform a probing autopsy, Sachs takes a respectful glimpse into one instance of the routine of a figure who can very much speak for himself, just as his work already does.
Kontinental 25 by Radu Jude, at Berlinale Palast. All the contradictory glamour one expects from a festival: a crowd anxiously awaits a largely unknown cast and a relatively obscure director. Only at a film festival or in Romania could Radu Jadu be given such a reception. We settle into the highest edge of the too-large theater, the screen now an off-kilter, diagonal slice. It’s a rotten view, but it’s fine, we’re eager enough after being stuck in the lifeless Potsdamer Platz for hours between screenings, sipping overpriced cocktails in an overexposed food court. A live camera stalks the front row, introducing each member of the cast present. Their faces mean nothing to me, but soon, they will be irrevocably informed by their performances: reprehensible, sympathetic, morally dubious. The film opens with a semi-homeless vagrant wandering a park filled with mechanical dinosaurs, digging for returnable bottles as a raptor releases a repetitive electro-screech. This dry, slow, sad, funny sequence perfectly prefaces the film ahead. Shot on a few iPhones, the film continues Radu Jude’s quest for contemporaneity; his films could come from no other era than our own, in style but also in content, as his long, drawn-out conversations explore the conflicts and crises of right now. With few setups, long takes, and a commitment to total verbal processing that would make Éric Rohmer’s protagonists quake, this is fictional direct cinema without restraint. The performances are anguish-inducing in the best way, and as the director humbly put it at the screening; if this has any value at all, it is because of the cast. Jude needn’t admit to his own brilliant satirism or risk popping a gently growing bubble of genius. Made on a meagre independent budget, this slice of reality is a ray of light in the cloudy sky of dwindling film financing.
What Does That Nature Say to You? by Hong Sang-Soo, at Haus Der Kulturen Der Welt. In what was once West Berlin’s Congress Hall, built in the Interbau architectural competition of 1957, we throw our half-drunk coffees into a bin, informed of the theatre’s restrictions. Of course, we are two minutes late, and one usher threatens not to let us in. Fortunately, as she makes a similar threat to another anxious patron, a more generous employee gives us a hurried wink and a gesture, letting us slip into the darkening theatre. We find our way to empty seats seconds before the Berlinale logo appears on-screen. The conversations that unfold afterwards are of a similar kind to Radu Jude’s, in their unflinching naturalism, uncut by new angles of view. Yet these conversations are apolitical, they are concerned with values, with how one shoud live their life, the same interest of Sach’s earlier reenactment. Here, we dwell on matters of the heart, of responsibility: what does one owe to their parents or their partner, in contrast to their own conviction? Ha Donghwa is a poet and son of a respected lawyer, who wishes to live life by his own means, even if that means failing to provide for those closest to him, respect others’ values, or control his temper. Swept into a lengthy meeting with his girlfriend’s parents, he espouses views which appear admirable and sensitive until they become grating. Towards the end, his father-in-law, who has been more than forthcoming, sits in a small den abutting his mountain home, all built for his mother. He discusses with his wife the behaviour of this guest. The perspective shifts completely from Donghwa to them, without any to-do. We go from observing Donghwa singularly, to following the intricate assessment of his hosts and comparing them with our own observations. It is documentarian, recording the actions, feelings, and thoughts of all involved, passively. The camera takes Ha Dongwha’s blurry-eyed perspective, but does not remain in his constructed worldview. When he drives away, alone, we are left uncertain and critical of the attitude he carries, yet hopeful of the spirit within his idealism.
Were these three films similar because of my own profile and taste, because of the programmers’, or because of a general movement in filmmaking? Long conversations; one artistic and historical, one contemporary and political, one philosophical and romantic. All films were made with low budgets, in a descending order of resources and crew. Hong Sang-Soo’s film was made almost entirely by himself, even down to the music and editing. If the film were to take the same metafictional move as Peter Hujar’s Day, the scene beyond the camera wouldn’t look much different from the film itself.
This was my takeaway from the 75th Berlinale; as budgets and opportunities dwindle, film is being forced to return to reality. Despite the spectacle of the festival itself, the films of note were small, human, barely comfortable in the over-filled and overblown concert and event halls. These films felt designed for thirty-seat micro-cinemas, or for bedroom nights-in on the glow of a Macbook screen. While the festival might then seem unfitting as a mode presentation, it is actually the only arena in which this shared truth can be constructed. The event, with its sprawling venues, can feel like an apparatus designed to squeeze its films of their life. But if one avoids the fanfare, the container becomes not a mode of comppression, but a grouping-together that reveals what film is attempting to do and say and be, at this moment in time, now past.
I will remember the container of the 75th Berlinale well, even when it has been entirely emptied, scrubbed, and repurposed for the 76th.