Rotterdam feels a bit like a copy of itself. Since my last visit in 2009 its
runaway love affair with the worst excesses of steel 'n' glass neoliberal
architecture shows no signs of abating. It would be hard to imagine trade had
ever depended on toil at all, so complete is its recuperation (or effacement)
of its industrial heritage; the city now sits like a shiny specimen in a
postmodern museum. This sense of virtuality is most ruthlessly visited upon
everyday transactions, with the whole city seemingly rejecting cash outright in
favour of very convenient (and conveniently unpainful, for a city stuffed with
financial corporations) contactless payments.
While the International Film Festival
Rotterdam, itself now an historic institution in the city, also betrayed a maddening
fixation with all things cashless, its programme offered a welcome counterpoint
to the immateriality of the place, with, as always, a salutary breadth of
activity, from mainstream releases to expanded cinema performances.
As part of the festival’s focus on the craft of the propaganda film
in the Everyday Propaganda strand, a pair of Soviet agitprop documents played,
bookending the span of the USSR. Today (Esfir Shub, 1929) was a remarkably crisp, sophisticated film – here
accompanied live by DJ Kevin Toma – which employed an arsenal of political
devices from simple emotional pleas to rhetorical tricks,
designed to catch the Western viewer unawares. What was perhaps most surprising was the variety and extent of footage shot in the West: mocking our
bourgeois captors with what seemed an impressively subtle sense of the class
system imposed by capitalism, not cajoling or deriding us but setting up a
sense of equanimity, offering a way out of the grip in which we are caught.
Bitter Lake dir. Adam Curtis
Also part of the propaganda programme, Adam Curtis’ new film Bitter Lake, which has since been released
on BBC iPlayer, was signally taut and impressive, its exegesis suggesting that not faith,
but faithlessness, will prove to be the West’s problem. The film, which tesselates
thematically with his earlier work The
Power of Nightmares (2004), traces the current chaos in Afghanistan back to
a fateful deal between the US and Saudi governments, which guaranteed oil
exports to the West at the expense of leaving the extreme Islamic doctrine of
Wahhabism (which still forms the backbone of political and religious ideology
in Saudi Arabia) unchecked. The oil flowed, but religious fundamentalism,
alongside a growing resentment of the US and its allies, also flourished.
After
Britain’s disastrous recent foray in Helmand, it became clear that its strategy
rested on establishing and pursuing a reductive and dangerous binary
of Taliban vs non-Taliban, while in effect this was a plural battle, and most of their assailants were
regular Afghanis who saw that Britain and its allies were only reimposing the
corrupt system they had fought to dismantle. As Curtis’ film and James
Meek’s recent piece for the LRB demonstrate, of the manifold issues Afghanistan faces today, most
have their roots in the British intervention of more than a century ago, also motivated entirely by profit. And the UK’s tacit support
of Wahhabism is still strong, as the recent arguments surrounding King Abdullah’s
death confirm.
The Dragon is the Frame, dir. Mary Helena Clark
Shorts programmes were hit-and-miss, with much of the stronger work
screening in non-competitive programmes. This is unavoidable to some extent at
any large festival which fields thousands of submissions, but is perhaps also
symptomatic of the way IFFR’s shorts appear to be programmed by committee – a
shame, as the validation and context an individual curator’s name would lend
each programme would benefit filmmakers and make a stronger case for
programming decisions. One strong programme was The Dragon is the Frame,
which included Seamus Harahan’s new film your
silent face (fucking finland series) (2015); Luke Fowler’s new LUX / BBC Scotland commission Depositions (2014), The Dragon is the Frame (2014) by Mary Helena Clark, and Beatrice Gibson’s F for Fibonacci, which opened
at Laura Bartlett Gallery last November.
A series of filmmaker-focus screenings accompanied the group
programmes, including Egyptian filmmaker Basim Magdy and Romanian artist Irina
Botea, whose films, based around the corollaries between music and
music-making, and statehood or nationalism, were an interesting discovery. American
artist Bruce McClure had also been invited to give a series of his signature
projector performances as part of the Signals strand, which didn’t seem an
altogether novel curatorial decision as McClure seems to have been involved in
the festival for most of the last decade: it feels as though this section of
the festival could benefit from some spring cleaning.
The three Canon Tiger Awards for Short Film of €3000 each were taken
by Safia Benhaim, for La Fièvre, Ben
Rivers for Things and Ben Russell
for Greetings to the Ancestors. The
jurors, artist Beatrice Gibson, Koyo Yamashita of Image Forum in Tokyo and Dutch
curator Xander Karskens, presented the awards with a citation for each film.
Short Film Award winners Safia Benhaim, Ben Russell and Ben Rivers
This year’s Signals strand Really? Really. focused on Surrealism. While it didn’t seem exactly surrealist, The Performer, featuring
Polish performance artist Oskar Dawicki as himself, was an intriguing and well-realised
feature-length film directed by Maciej Sobieszczanski and Łukasz Ronduda
(curator of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw), which functioned at once as a
narrative piece in its own right and as a framework in which to link several
key works of Dawicki’s. The effect of the disjuncture between document and
outright fiction it sets up was vertiginous, especially given Dawicki’s
appearance on stage in the cinema after his apparent death on screen.
Benjamin Cook’s presentation of three reels of Anne Charlotte
Robertson’s Five Year Diary, lodged since the filmmaker’s death at the Harvard Film Archive, was
unsettling, unsparing and had no happy ending – but was powerfully affecting and,
if not redemptive, certainly affirmative. Here, if anywhere, was the real. Despite
Robertson’s desperate struggle with depression and bipolar disorder, what
emerges is the effort with which she sought to undermine it and at the resolve
with which she approached this unique epistolary project – filmmaking as
therapy, perhaps; as compulsion, as essential as breath. There is a sense, above
all else, of the filmmaker’s presence:
her pain, her anxiety, but also her endurance, her continuance; her remaining
in the world.
Claustrophobic, granting access only to Robertson’s immediate
environment, the films manage nevertheless to conjure an assorted army of
others just off-stage – the medical establishment in particular - and clothe
them more vividly than any single representation might achieve. Robertson’s is a world crippled
by pharmaceutical drugs, contested benefit claims and corrosion at the hands of
psychiatrists. It is also a lonely place, in which lovers never materialise,
parents are at arm’s length, true friends seem few and – the last twist of the
knife – those close to her die. The last of the three reels shown in Rotterdam
was a paean to Emily, the filmmaker’s niece, who dies as a result of heart
complications, and the lacuna left by the little girl in Robertson’s world is painfully
present.
Five Year Diary, dir. Anne Charlotte Robertson
Unsurprisingly, the Five Year
Diary is difficult at times to watch, not least because of the economy it
establishes, given Robertson’s situation, of the viewer as voyeur. But its very
humanity and sense of integrity is captivating, particularly in the face of so
much work made about so little; as urgent a portrait of an individual’s life as
it is an indictment of the way we commonly address mental illness.
Away from the cinemas, the Art:Film convocation on Monday 26 January
introduced new projects by Hala Elkoussy, Agnieszka Polska and Phil Collins, as
well as reporting on the progress of a previous Art:Film-enabled project by
Mark Lewis. A typically engaged, sensitive yet unstuffy project, working with a
band created from inmates of New York state’s notorious Sing Sing maximum security
prison, Collins’ Mr. Sing Sing in
particular sounded fantastic: timely and necessary, and perhaps most worthy of funding.
An invited audience of producers, distributors and programmers heard from each
production team, with the idea that as opposed to a formal pitch this was an
opportunity to hear about work seeking finance in a more relaxed and generous
arena (in terms of time, at least) and it seemed as though such an exercise
would continue to be useful for artists making the leap from short-form to
long-form films.Whether or not they receive finance as a direct result of the
meeting is not so much the point, more that they make the necessary connections
to start to build the networks they will need to secure finance eventually. And
if not hard cash, they would doubtless accept a contactless payment.