Panorama 40: The Soul of the Programme

For the 40th anniversary you have undertaken to bring nothing less than the “soul” of the Panorama to the big screen...

Wieland Speck: A rather esoteric proposition that cannot be proven – except by 38 years of experience. I chose the idea of the “soul” because we’re presenting an eclectic programme that’s far too small to be truly representative of an entire 40 years’ worth of work. We’ve chosen films that have been important to the Panorama and independent cinema.

How did you go about making the selection?

Andreas Struck: The choices were really made by gut instinct. Wieland drew up a pre-selection and then we met in the summer. I gave him my feedback and thought about which films had really stuck in my memory. We allowed ourselves to be led by the power and joy of discovery.

WS: You need a lot of chutzpah in making choices, putting aside reservations and taking what intuitively comes to the surface. We had a pool of 1,800 feature-length films and 600 shorts to choose from. With this amount of films, you could curate 20 such programmes. We began with the idea of taking a retrospective look to give us a solid grip on a programme that has been constantly evolving over the last 40 years.

Then and Now

The Panorama was originally created to introduce a greater sense of freedom and the radical into the selection of films, in contrast to the Competition. Last year the highly controversial Touch Me Not by Adina Pintilie won the Golden Bear. Has this distinction between the Panorama and the Competition changed?

What qualities do you need to be a curator?

WS: I advise young people who want to become a curator to “get a life first”. Curating is a typical job for people who are changing careers. You need to have a lot of experience on a variety of levels. These days, it is becoming professionalised and a job for which you can be trained, but with the result that pure theory is determining who sees what, simply because this flood of images has to be managed.

AS: The impressive visual nature of the films in the Panorama 40 programme really stands out, even in a digital world where we are overwhelmed with images and films. The works we’re screening from the 1980s and 90s possess an extraordinary intensity – particularly the short films. For Girl from Moush (1993), Gariné Torossian cut up images and then reassembled them and laid them on top of each other in a cubist fashion. Using picture books and the oral traditions of her ancestors, she cinematically imagines Armenia - the land of her parents – before she has even set foot in the country.

Explosive Topics

What was it like to attend the Berlinale of 40 years ago? Many topics were “shocking and unheard of” in the festival scene of that time, as you stated in your press release...

AS: A topic that came as a real bombshell was AIDS. It was a death threat that totally convulsed the gay community in the 1980s. Affected by this situation, directors immediately made films – with a great vulnerability. It had an entirely different dimension then than today, so it’s important to confront the current generation with films like Buddies (1985) by Arthur J. Bressan Jr. and Les nuits fauves (Savage Nights, 1992) by Cyril Collard. I can remember how shaken and shocked I was by the image of being completely at the mercy of this illness. Cyril Collard reacted as an artist, by creating a film with a power, fever and passion that overwhelms the viewer. He himself played the main role. I am eager to see how the present-day audience will connect with this film.

In the world of film, such reactionary developments are not yet making themselves felt, but they will do. The Right is still assembling itself, but it will soon be much more present. And that will be reflected in the film programmes. In the last few years I’ve had a couple of films that dealt with right-wing topics where we already had to have security watching who was coming in and out. This type of edginess that the right wing is currently feeding off – it’s something we will have to deal with in the future. But this is also a consequence of diversity. I think Jon Reiss’s A Bitter Message of Hopeless Grief from 1988 provides an important contribution to the discussion about diversity, even though the protagonists are robots rather than people.

AS: That film doesn’t pander to the audience. It presents the topic of diversity in a very emotional and sensuous way. You can immediately interpret it as a metaphor for our own times, with its horrors and the machinations of power between highly creative robots tearing themselves and others apart.

Visibilities

With regards to the visibility of homosexuality, I find the conjunction of Blue Diary (1997) by Jenni Olson and Fear of Disclosure (1989) by Phil Zwickler and David Wojnarowicz fascinating. Both films are about sexuality, but they handle it in very different visual ways...

AS: You can indeed draw a useful comparison between these films. Both of them provide a dialogue between the images and the voice-over. In Blue Diary, a lesbian woman spends the night with a hetero woman; in Fear of Disclosure, an HIV-positive man meets an HIV-negative man. But the two films handle their images very differently. Blue Diary is rather meditative, showing deserted streets in San Francisco. To me, the dead-end streets reflect the emotional state of the protagonist. Fear of Disclosure works with different visual moments, chiefly between two go-go dancers: male bodies as they check each other out, circle each other, semi-naked, thus revealing their vulnerability. When the film came out in 1989, it caused a sensation. Both directors, Phil Zwickler and David Wojnarowicz, died from AIDS-related illnesses not long afterwards. It takes a great amount of courage to expose yourself in this way. Fear of Disclosure is a deeply moving legacy to the world.

Has the Panorama been criticised for the, at times, very explicit visibility in the films?

WS: There were always voices in the press that railed from the edges of the right wing. But they were remarkably few in number, because in those days a different tune was being played, from further to the Left. Now that the Right is becoming stronger, more criticism is to be expected. In politics, that’s already happening. Questions are being asked like: Why are queer projects being financed? Endless enquiries from the Right intended to paralyse initiatives and institutions.

AS: Filmmakers have always been finding ways to show things that are not permitted to be shown explicitly. In Sto dnei do prikaza (100 Days Before the Command, 1990), Khusein Erkenov depicts 20-year-old soldiers who are being suppressed and drilled in the Russian army. They have a suspicion that they will not survive this for long. The film uses incredible imagination to reveal how they find something to hold on to in their fantasies and how they establish connections with their emotions and their bodies. Homosexuality comes alive in this film, without it being shown directly. Sensorily, visually, via the images – there’s not much dialogue. Wieland’s film, Das Geräusch rascher Erlösung (The Sound of Fast Relief, 1982), is also about a brutal hierarchy and a patriarchal structure of violence. And here, once again, the power to resist lies in imagining how alternatives can be created. The flight into one’s own world of imagination takes on a creative element.