Best of Berlinale 2018

“Jahilya” by Hicham Lasri

What do cockroaches dream of? The brief prologue in Hicham Lasri’s “Jahilya” tells us: of not being squashed by humans, but rather dying a natural death. Nothing is openly said as yet about the dreams of people in this. If we consider a person’s dreams to be their guiding principle, then Hicham Lasri gives us nothing good to surmise about them: Here men tyrannize women, children adults and the powerful their inferiors.

In “Jahilya” Hicham Lasri paints a sad picture of Moroccan society, characterized by contempt for women, hopelessness and oppression. Lasri weaves six plotlines into a surrealist mélange, which altogether creates a story about outcasts and their suppressors: a rape victim, a suicide, and an unmarried, pregnant woman. In pictorial terms, and the vocabulary is as symbolically charged as it is violently down to earth, the film is reminiscent of Buneul’s later surrealist works like “The Phantom of Liberty”. Lasri herself also sees “Jahilya” as a head-on attack, as a film that cries: That’s enough! The work is the completion of her dog-themed trilogy and is preceded by “C’est Eux Les Chiens” (2013) and “Affame Ton Chien” (2015).

Guy Maddin, the Canadian experimental filmmaker whose works make it into cinemas relatively regularly, and Evan Johnson have taken apart classics of film history and reassembled them such that the crucial correlations do not obviously play out on the screen. And thus the film noir, to which they pay homage here (as they do to the entire history of relevant Hollywood classics) is robbed of its essential components: scheming men, whose pursuits never end, sagging crooks, villains and detectives, who always notch up one more scene. Is this not once again a kind of “anti-homage”?

The experimental arrangement is driven by a Hitchcock classic and thus also by San Francisco, the northern Californian city in which it all began: “Vertigo” is the pivot of the action, retold here roughly as a collage – with excerpts from such unrelated works as “Sister Act 2”. This makes “The Green Fog” all the greater an accomplishment, although you don’t necessarily have to get the reference to appreciate the scary green fog in the scenically beautiful, eerie San Francisco. The roundel of media references doesn’t stand still for long here in any case: Towards the end, the nineties boy-band NSYNC even appears in the image on the black-and-white tube television.

“Notes On An Appearance” by Ricky d’Ambrose

A young man returns from a holiday abroad and goes to stay with a friend in Brooklyn. He helps his friend with his academic thesis about a recently deceased controversial philosopher, evaluating private video material and various writings by the thinker. Suddenly the young man disappears without trace and his friends set off on a search for him. “Notes On An Appearance” by Ricky d’Ambrose is a one-hour chamber play about documents and evidence. Time and again, personal objects belonging to the protagonists appear in front of the camera in close-up shots: a postcard, a passport, newspaper articles or diary entries.

The detailed shots and basic design language are strongly reminiscent of the French cinema of the nouvelle vague, particularly the pictorial idiom of Robert Bresson’s “Pickpocket”. Detached from any material space in which objects otherwise develop their uses, the young American heaves them onto the grand stage in his first, Kickstarter-financed experimental feature film. “Notes On An Appearance” appears to be on the hunt for what objects can say about their owners. The protagonists thus remain remarkably monotone and robotic in their conduct and their speech, and there is something less human about their bodies. What remains are things, as well as some distant sounds that gradually fade out.

“Premières solitudes” by Claire Simon

Claire Simon, the French screenwriter, actress and director, also gives the spoken word the greatest conceivable scope. In “Premières solitudes”, she has young people report plainly and simply about their everyday lives. They are called Tessa, Anaïs, Catia, Manon, Elia, Hugo or Clément, and are all in the eleventh grade and from a suburb of Paris. As a viewer, it’s hard to believe that these are young people actually reporting openly and freely on their lives here, and not actors playing from a script, for example. Simon herself cannot be seen or heard. Nor does she give her young protagonists any thread to follow in their speech. Her camera is literally a silent observer as the students chat in small groups about their hopes and desires, about their broken homes, their first loves and their first woes. 

It is surprising how carefully considered, unpretentious and how self-confidently they interact with one another without any shyness in front of the camera. One boy initially begins shamefacedly, but then talks ever more openly about the messed-up relationship with his father, until he eventually cries and is comforted by his friends. There is something inexplicably magical, human in the very best sense, about how Simon shows us the young people in “Premières solitudes”.

“6144x1024” by Margret Honda

By far the longest experimental film of the whole festival, “6144x1024” comes from US artist Margret Honda, who considers it an homage to “11x14” by James Benning. Here, Honda shows the 6,144 color shades multiplied by the 1,024 brightness levels, which together make up the entire spectrum covered by the projector, in complete silence: One color after the other fills the entire screen, as one shifts seamlessly into the next.