berlinale 2010

the apartment o the fuhrerbunker













arsenal




delphi

the church


























cubix

nanna




marx and engels memorial


altes museum


tv tower

holocaust memorial


the lobby of the arsenal

angie

shelley

brandenburg gate









treptower park

nanna


teddy

nanna and me

madhu and the kaushiks

nicole and me



marx cafe / elina and nicole

philharmonic





mies







hansaviertel / jewish museum


checkpoint charlie


krier housing

bauhaus museum



philip and merle


forum party

berlinale palast

reichstag


delphi


alexanderplatz


it was cold. even for the berliners. that was some small consolation as we struggled with our multiple but yet always insubstantial layers to be able to deal with the sub zero temperatures and the biting cold wind while at the same time trying to keep our balance on the wet ice on the ground. it snowed many days and when the sun did come out towards the end of our trip we basked in the little light that it did give. cinema city set up 7 installations in 3 spaces in 4 and a half days across berlin. saki, kausik, madhu and me lived in an apartment building that happened to be built on the fuhrerbunker (where hitler died) and whose windows overlooked the tiergarten in the distance and the holocaust memorial (eisenmans field of gravestones)- merely two perpetual reminders in the city of its traumatic history. if bombay is haunted by an impossible future- berlin is by its past. every corner bears a reminder of what once was. a city whose people have to bear the burden of a perpetual guilt of fascism and the embarrassment of being divided over communism. red lines across maps mark the wall. this side and that side. till today – even though the boundaries are tending to blur, new ones are emerging. some areas are gentrified while others are the heart of the subculture- a well articulated ‘other’. gay, punk, brown all in kreuzberg where restaurants sell turkish food until late at night and where almost everyone we know lives.
but enough for know with my own ramblings on the city- more about cinema city- the reason we were there. the berlin film festival and its 60th anniversary. the first space was the ‘arsenal’ the center of the forum- where the arthouse section of the film festival resides- experimental films and video art. in the lobby we set up pushpamala’s phantom lady, the sweat shop video installation and a small workshop desk for the ‘cinema city lived’ book. this was the first two days. then we moved to cubix- where in a multiplex mall- all glass overlooking the railway station and the tv tower of alexanderplatz we set up the pila house booth, the calendar booth and the gorgeous bioscope. it really is too bad that the motors of the bioscope blew over the next two days. but while it lasted it was sublime. the next day saki and me ran over to the art deco (sort of) delphi theater in the west where we set up a booth for zubins photographs. red curtains behind the blue of the bar.
the opening was on the 12th. it all went of fabulously. thanks to all the help from nicole, nanna, angie, dorothy, uli, sanol and alexia.
over the next few days we tried to catch a few films but we always got out of the house a little too late and then spent more time running around adjusting things and meeting people than watching films. and even when we did our adrenaline rush was too strong to be able to slow down to the pace of the long languorous takes. germans are very good film watchers. they can sit through the longest slowest film and then ask intelligent questions about it and then discourse about it for 2 hours after that over wine. the parties went on forever. the arsenal lobby being the center of it all. but there were other dance parties- the forum party at a beautiful theater in the old east and the teddy party in a factory shed. while the first was a rocking good time, the second had rather terrible music. nicole and me still did our best to dance though.
i was living with nicole after we had to give up the apartment once the kaushiks and saki had left for bombay. elina was ill for most of the time i was there so nicole and me ended up walking a lot across the city as she showed me kreuzberg and the socialist memorial at treptower park with its socialist realist murals which reminded me not very pleasantly of the free books we used to have in our school library courtesy the soviet state. the panel discussion we had was well received overall. we spoke of memory and memorialisation, of conflict and representation and desire.

busy-ness / harishchanrachi factory . natrang

after a long time i feel like i need to post. this in spite of the fact that there has been a lot- almost too much going on- most of it connected with the fact that we leave today for berlin- presenting cinema city at the berlinale- or the berlin international film festival. kausik is making his bioscope; i have been working on a book; and then there is all the other stuff- calendars, interactive maps, etc.
meanwhile some film updates- this time two films from the marathi film renaissance- ‘harishchandrachi factory’- which is feel good fluff. not as slapstick and not really as funny- but adamantly heartwarming- and yet manages not to get sickly sweet. the girgaon reconstructions were too set like for my own tastes. i much preferred the gender sexuality complexity of ‘natrang’ at least while it was complex. atul kulkarni is perfect as the wrestler turned nachya and the music is pretty good- especially the lavni. the background score though owed too much to sanjay leela bhansali. it tells us what emotion to feel- like a sign. too luscious for the narrative.
Anyway- more from the berlinale much later- 21st is when I am back.

top hat . hairspray . chance pe dance . anvil- the story of anvil . blood

i love musicals. with their over- the –top song and dance set pieces and their characters full of charm and wit easy to love and laugh with. top hat’ is this classic fred astaire and ginger rogers farce from the 1940’s. some mindless plot about about mixing up identities is merely an excuse for some gorgeous dancing in pure white luxurious hotel rooms styled in florid hollywood art deco or in pavilions in the rain, and that lovely dance sequence in an italian hotel. and the conversations between the players are funny and sexy. ‘hairspray’ is john waters super camp tribute to college films of 1980’s looking back at the fab 60’s- think ‘grease’. while ‘grease’ could be seen as a classic to uphold all of the heteronormative values of the american dream- waters exaggerates these to show just how gay middle america really is with its big hair and over the top smiles. subversive but so endearing. nothing like that can be said of the awful ‘chance pe dance’. while shahid kapur and genelia try to make the best of it by being unwaveringly charming and perky the film plods along the same old same old route- delhi boy comes to bombay to make it big… and eventually through reality television does. and you know something is wrong in a dance film when you cant remember a single song. having hear raves about this film about a metal band which having had its 15 minutes of fame (by playing beside bon jovi, of all the people, in japan) in the 1980’s disappeared into nothingness; i thought it would be more than merely a rockumentary from vh1- it was not. except that it was also a reality tv show that follows the band as it scrounges together the money to record their 13th album. ‘blood’ which i just saw early morning today was a gorgeously made anime set in post-war japan. the last vampire is hired by the us to kill the shape shifting monsters. it all happens one halloween night. nothing earth shattering in terms of plot- in spite of the shallow metaphor regarding war thrown in at the end – how we kill each other in wars- but so so beautiful. to watch.

top hat . hairspray . chance pe dance . anvil- the story of anvil . blood

i love musicals. with their over- the –top song and dance set eices and their characters full of charm and wit easy to love and laugh with. top hat’ is this classic fred astaire and ginger rogers farce from the 1940’s. some mindless plot about about mixing up identities is merely an excuse for some gorgeous dancing in pure white luxurious hotel rooms styled in florid hollywood art deco or in pavilions in the rain, and that lovely dance sequence in an italian hotel. and the conversations between the players are funny and sexy. ‘hairspray’ is john waters super camp tribute to college films of 1980’s looking back at the fab 60’s- think ‘grease’. while ‘grease’ could be seen as a classic to uphold all of the heteronormative values of the american dream- waters exaggerates these to show just how gay middle america really is with its big hair and over the top smiles. subversive but so endearing. nothing like that can be said of the awful ‘chance pe dance’. while shahid kapur and genelia try to make the best of it by being unwaveringly charming and perky the film plods along the same old same old route- delhi boy comes to bombay to make it big… and eventually through reality television does. and you know something is wrong in a dance film when you cant remember a single song. having hear raves about this film about a metal band which having had its 15 minutes of fame (by playing beside bon jovi, of all the people, in japan) in the 1980’s disappeared into nothingness; i thought it would be more than merely a rockumentary from vh1- it was not. except that it was also a reality tv show that follows the band as it scrounges together the money to record their 13^th album. ‘blood’ which i just saw early morning today was a gorgeously made anime set in post-war japan. the last vampire is hired by the us to kill the shape shifting monsters. it all happens one halloween night. nothing earth shattering in terms of plot- in spite of the shallow metaphor regarding war thrown in at the end – how we kill each other in wars- but so so beautiful. to watch.

avatar. beaches of agnes. man on wire. the return

decidedly under whelmed by the pull-out-all-the-stops spectacle of avatar, i am not sure as to why some of the mega-budget did not go into writing a tighter script- or even imagining an alternate world a little more creatively. after all aren’t pandora’s strange blue people merely another version of hollywood’s neo-colonial obsession with the purity of untouched nature and those tribals who have this supposedly intimate connection with it. weirdly (and typically) this romanticism against technology is played out through a cinematic shock and awe juggernaut like you haven’t seen before. if only the imagining of the ‘other’ world went beyond the 'saawariya' blue and the floating mountains with some jurassic park creatures thrown in for thrills.

in ‘beaches of agnes’, agnes varda looks back on her life through the beaches that she knew growing up. often moving in the beginning, the film traced her history thorugh the people she knew, anecdotes about people she knew and staged installations thorugh which she wanders on the beaches. unashamedly sentimental, especially when it comes ot speaking about her late husband, some parts, i must admit made me cringe. but isn’t that going to be so when someone speaks straight ot the camera about the obsessions that have driven them so far. two images stand out from the film. the first, right at the beginning when a complex mirror game si set up on a beach; and the other at the end when she takes us to a pavilion completely made of film strips.

the build up to the tightrope walk between the two towers of the world trade center is described way too long- interspersed with stories of and from the team of madmen who planned it. thankfully in ‘man on wire’ 9/11 is not mentioned, except elliptically. the whole film is a straightforward talking heads documentary with a few staged historical shots hrown in for good measure. but everything does not seem to matter when he steps out into the sky and hangs suspended over new york, or between the towers at notre dame or from the sydney bridge. this is a strange kind of terrorism that makes beauty awe inspiring. i don’t mean to make too harebrained a parallel but was it a similar kind of feeling when we sat and looked at the wtc collapse? disbelief at the obsessions that leads ordinary men to such extremes to challenge the status quo?

the ‘return’ seemed to be an allegory. from the authoritarian father who has disappeared from the lives of the two boys and returns to teach them to be men, to the journey across the water to a deserted island where more tests of manhood are waiting, to the fear that leads to the tragedy at the end and the water beneath which everything is buried. maybe these were over-readings prompted by the few tarkovsky references thrown i at the beginning; maybe not.