DinaView

The first time I came across this advert about two years ago, it was displayed on a full page of broadsheet South China Morning Post (I was visiting Hong Kong*), but I have since seen it in Financial Times and in a variety of glossy lifestyle magazines like Monocle. Back then, I thought for a second, how interesting it is that now older men are being used for advertising. My second thought was that this man looks somewhat like Gorbachev. It was only in the third instance that I realized it not only looked like him, it WAS him! I must admit, it came as a shocking realisation to me. But why? Hasn’t Gorbachev become by now just another one in the line of celebrities like Sean Connery, Catherine Deneuve, Keith Richards, Steffi Graf, and Frances and Sophia Coppola, who posed to Annie Leibovitz for the other adverts in this successful promotional series?

The photo is clearly created for a certain context, but the act of someone like me seeing it opens up a host of other memory frameworks. Why am I still obsessed with this photograph? Maybe because it shows him in a car that is taking him somewhere, away from the Berlin wall seen in the background**. The man is checking out, he is leaving, and thus denying us his assured paternalistic presence. We, the losers, are left alone whatever follows.

Gorbachev announced the end of the Soviet Union and checked out. Communism collapsed. Many people across the Eastern Bloc were ill prepared for the knock-off effect on work and domestic routines that followed. Those who had nurtured an idealized image of western prosperity were startled by the increasing economic disparities within their once egalitarian universes. Confronted with the collapse of ideology and memory frameworks, many were plunged into an identity crisis.

I am clearly not the only one who is obsessed with this photograph. I discover a similarly-titled blog entry, Pourquoi suis-je obsédé par cette photo ?, on the site of a Canadian Francophone writer called Patric Lagace, who evidently saw the photo on the back of his copy of The New Yorker. Remarking that he can barely imagine a more bourgeouis-looking image than the one of the former communist leader turned luxtury promoter, Lagace writes:

Or, voilà, je suis obsédé par cette photo du nouveau « visage » de LV, j’ai nommé l’ancien (le dernier, en fait) secrétaire général du Parti communiste soviétique, Mikhaël Gorbatchev. Je veux bien que Gorby fut l’homme de la perestroïka, l’homme qui a amorcé un virage, mais ça reste l’homme qui représenta, jadis, le monde communiste. Bref, je n’ai de cesse d’étudier cette photo, qui est à l’arrière de mon magazine New Yorker de la semaine. Donc, il y a ça. L’association Gorby-luxe. Mais il y a que la photo est prise devant le Mur de Berlin. Il y a un je-ne-sais-quoi de troublant. C’est peut-être le sac plein. C’est peut-être la légende sous la photo, vaporeuse comme toutes les phrases de campagne de marque. C’est peut-être que ça symbolise une époque formidable de la grande aventure humaine, cette époque dans laquelle on vit. Je veux dire, un ancien chef communiste qui nous vend de la gogosse de luxe, moins de 20 ans après la chute de l’URSS. Vous m’auriez dit ça en 1986, j’aurais ri de vous (enfin, pas moi, j’avais 14 ans, mais vous comprenez ce que je veux dire). Bref, un ex-kamarade qui devient on ne peut plus bourgeois. Je ne serais pas surpris que, de mon vivant, un pape lâche le Vatican pour devenir producteur de télé-réalité…

Lagace’s post has generated eighty three reactions in the comments***. I admit I had no idea that, as one of the commentators remarked, this was not the first array of Gorbachev into advertising. In fact, it transpired, the man had already done a Pizza Hut ad in Moscow, featuring a group of Russians who ave gathered for lunch at the Pizza Hut restaurant near the Red Square and concede that Gorbachev is the man who brought them freedom, so that they can eat this pizza to the end, and shout ‘Long Live Gorbachev!”. Here it is:

The Gorbachev ad run in a number of male luxury lifestyle magazines. My copy of the Monocle from February 2008 displays it with an inscription below the picture, which reads: ‘A journey brings us face to face with ourselves. Berlin Wall. Returning from a conference’. Futher below it says: Mikhail Gorbachev and Louis Vuitton are proud to support Green Cross International (an environmental charity started by Gorbachev). It is a fine, understated advert, which has probably brought some proceeds to the Green Cross, and which is no flashier than the set of Marc Jacobs-designed set of Louis Vuitton trunks (pictured) that were dragged across India by Owen Wilson, Adrian Brody and Luke Wilson in Wes Anderson’s recent Darjeeling Limited.

© Dina Iordanova
2 May 2009

*It happened in October 2007, in Hong Kong, in the afternoon. I was at the at Holliday Inn on Nathan Road, in the very center of materialism, a place surrounded by innumerable shops selling everything imaginable, from Tahitian pearls to h-tech electronics. The buffet at the Viennese Cafe is one of the best deals in town, with mountains of raw oysters, a delicacy of an acquired taste for the local Chinese who mount piles of them on their plates and keep coming for more as soon as more emerge from the kitchen.

** Media reactions to the ad mostly focused on the fact that the magazine that shows from the half-opened bag, alongside the pale-salmon shade of FT, features an article on Litvinenko’s murder. NYT called it a ‘visual joke’.

*** Some of the commentators refer to other situations, like an imaginary Jello ad which plays on the images of an exchange between Dalai Lama and the Pope and somebody else wonders what are Gorbachev’s real motives to do such a shoot, probably not money — precisely like one wondered back then what were his real motives undermining the communist system. Like it is typical for comment press, all sorts of comments and agendas come to the surface here — touching on issues of spirituality, capitalism, aesthetic, commercialism and so on, but there is no unique voice to dominate the discourse. Someone remarks that the ’sfumato’ quality of the image is the reason for triggering a specific unacknowledged nostalgia. Someone who has even copyrighted his comment speaks of Mephistophelian quality of the photo? The post is made on Le Vendredi 21 Septembre 2007, 7h44 in reference to the NYT article Gorbachev Made Me Buy it. on July 26, 2007, pre-announcing it.

As a lover of modern architecture, the dosage of exposure to wonderfully landscaped and designed modern spaces was a feature that defined my recent visit to Columbus, Ohio, as a really enjoyable trip. Led by a stereotypically dismissive pre-set attitude to the Midwest, I had not set my expectations very high, so I was in for a nice surprise. The hotel on the edge of campus, Blackwell Inn, was completely emancipated from the American kitsch that you would normally see at any other hotel in mid-America. The geometry of the pathways and landscaped grass rectangles that I was seeing through my room window was incredibly stylish, and so were the shapes of the new dark brick buildings that framed it. Most of all, I was truly thrilled to realise that the talk which I had come to give, was to take place in the main auditorium of the Wexner Centre for the Arts (pictured), an award-winning modern design achievement by architect and philosopher Peter Eisenman, the man who created the unevenly-leveled blocks of the Holocaust memorial in Berlin. It was a great experience in architectural discovery, as I did not know what to expect, so I was truly pleasantly surprised. It reminded me to an experience more than a decade ago when a visit for a talk to Minneapolis took me to the modern art museum there, on the Mississippi river, and provided my first encounter with the architectural style of Frank Gehry. This was at a time when Gehry was not as widely known as he is today, even before the unveiling of his museum in Bilbao (and many other structures that he did later on). It was some sort of design revelation for me. Same with the Wexner.

I had spent the previous day at the Easton open air mall, engaged in the ultimate American experience — shopping. At the large Barnes and Noble store here, I came across a nicely priced and richly illustrated book entitled Masterpieces of Modern Architecture (Wonders of the World). It would have made for a good gift for my son, who is quite interested in these matters (and who has been to many of the places pictured in the book). Still, I was wondering if I could carry such a bulky and heavy item across continents. While pondering over this, I kept browsing through the pictures in the book, mostly showing buildings in Asia, the Arab world, and Europe. America did not seem to feature very prominently. Yet, as I flipped through the pages toward the end, the book opened somehow ’spontaneously’ on a spread that revealed a panoramic picture of — guess what — the Wexner Center! Looking at the table of contents, I realized that this photograph of the Wexner was one of a total of only five examples that the authors of the book had considered worthy of inclusion here from across North America. Quite a prominent sign! And I was looking at this photograph while standing here, on the ground in Columbus. Of course, it was a clear sight what I should do. I bought the volume; it is now in my home in Scotland, prominently placed alongside the other nicely illustrated albums in George’s collection.

This second photograph shows the interior of the museum, where the reception after the talk took place. To the left is the entrance to the large room which is used for talks and screenings (that night they also screened Andrzej Wajda’s deeply personal Katyn). My talk was entitled ‘History for Losers: Cultural Historiography and Popular Culture in the ‘New’ Europe’. It was given as an opening keynote for the Slavic conference that the Centre for Slavic and East European Studies here organised. Unfortunately, I could not stay on for the conference that was to follow, as I was headed back already the next sunny morning, after a nice walk around the campus. The flight to Newark was great, as the cloudless sky allowed for incredibly clear views over the Great Lakes and then, descending into New Jersey, toward the Manhattan skyline as well as the Statue of Liberty (which one cannot see as easily, normally). In spite the suppressed irritation I was harboring on entry to the US, after having had to fill out scores of forms that no one seemed to have checked as they were asking me all over again for the same details, in addition to taking my fingerprints, I was leaving in a good mood. And yes, to be honest, passing the US immigration took less than ten minutes now (in comparison, two-three years ago it was more like an hour).

Dina Iordanova
28 April 2009

So here we are, having finally convened for what proved to be a really interesting day of discussions on matters of film festivals. This is the ’scene’ of the event, at the Lawrence Levy studio on the top floor of the Byre theatre in St. Andrews. Seated in the picture are, from left to right: Lucy Mazdon, David Slocum, Janet Harbord, Skadi Loist, Marijke de Valck, Richard Porton, Dina Iordanova, Nick Roddick, Ruby Cheung, Michael Gubbins, Irene Bignardi, Lindiwe Dovey and Nuria Triana-Toribio. Stuart Cunningham, who had initially sat on this side of the table, had moved to the audience side as he found the lights too bright (same for me, I wore Nick Roddick’s sunglasses while moderating the first session). The man whose back faces the camera, is John Orr who had come for the day from Edinburgh. Another twenty or so people attended, such as David Archibald, Emily Munroe, Matthew Lloyd, Melanie Phillips, Apple Zhang, Dorota Ostrowska, Victoria Thomas, as well as our colleagues Leshu Torchin, Will Brown, Saer Ba, and the PhD students Yun-hua Chen, Serazer Pekerman (who took all these potos), Yun Mi Hwang and Spela Zajec. Thomas Gerstenmeyer ensured that it all run smoothly. The image on the background, which also carried information on the event’s sponsors, featured a scene from the open air screenings at Piazza Grande during the Locarno Film Festival (one of the most logistically challenges for the festival organisers, as Irene Bignardi, former director of the festival, shared — as it rains almost every night).*

As I have been quite busy with other things, it has taken me quite a long time to come round to do this second post on the Workshop. We have now moved on. The Film Festivals Yearbook I: The Festival Circuit will be out in May 2009, bringing many of the ideas discussed here into the public space and containing a detailed report by William Brown that focuses on the workshop specifically. There are also reports on the workshop forthcoming in Film International, Senses of Cinema, Scope and probably Screen, so it will be covered extensively for those who are interested to read more of the ideas that were discussed during the day (the photo here shows, left to right, Marijke de Valck, Richard Porton and myself, during the workshop). So I have decided not to write a report on the event, especially as I was so involved in it that it would take me quite a long time to cover all aspects. Having read some of the forthcoming reports, however, I thought there is one aspect that needs mentioning here. Namely, the issue that was brought up by Lucy Mazdon and David Slocum on the matter of defining what IS the film festival, or probably coming up with some taxonomy of film festivals, as this would naturally be a good starting point for building the field.

Here are some thoughts on the taxonomy of festivals, mostly triggered by matters related to the incessant proliferation of film festivals nowadays. I thought this could be linked with my view of the festival circuit as consisting of a number of parallel smaller circuits that function independently from each other (they also can be taken as the basis of a possible taxonomy of festivals). We wondered what would it be if festivals were to suddenly stop taking place. What would such collapse mean?

If some key festivals were to fail entirely or in part, such collapse may indeed have dismal consequences for the industry itself, including people and businesses, but it would not really affect much the other festivals, because their modus operandi is not part of a structured network. Similarly, the current proliferation of festivals does not seem to crowd the festival calendar in any troublesome way. It is more about escalation in festivals of parallel type, mostly taking place outside the group of large competitive festivals, not within it. The events that constitute these parallel circuits form pronounced networks between themselves. Thus, while highly ‘porous and perforated’ (Elsaesser), we are also looking at a structure where some parts can easily exist without the others. There is a clear division between the different circuits, and they follow parallel and overlapping cycles over the globe and around the year.

These parallel circuits are so many that it is difficult to even begin listing them. For example, the global circuit of festivals of the Soviet sphere during the Cold War (Moscow, Karlovy Vary, Tashkent, Havana, etc.) existed for decades without much interface or interference with the system of festivals in the West. A list of various parallel circuits could include networks of type (short film, ethnographic film, animation, documentary), genre (comedy, mountain films), target audience (children, seniors), or social concern film festivals (human rights, women’s, gay and lesbian). Then there are festivals of local survey (Brazilian film in Paris), regional survey (East Asian, Eastern European, Mediterranean), diasporic festivals (Bosnian film in Chicago, the network of Jewish Film Festivals around the world), or even events following their own idiosyncratic agenda, like my favourite one in the tiny sardine-factory town of Douarnenez in Brittany, France, which has persisted over more than three decades with its interest in minority cultures from around the world. There are festivals with significant commercial activity (Cannes, Berlinale, Sundance), festivals of festivals (Toronto, London), commercial showcase festivals (Deauville’s American Film Festival), thematic festivals (slow food, fashion), tourism-enhancing festivals (Bahamas, St. Barth, Marrakech), festivals promoting cinephilia (Pordenone, Telluride), festivals promoting film professionalism (cinematography in Bitolja, Macedonia; screenwriting in Cheltenham, England). Wherever there are networks, they are formed around specific agendas that revolve around fostering and showcasing (and not distributing) a certain type of cinematic product.

© Dina Iordanova
25 April 2009

* Another interesting note regarding the open air screenings at Locarno was that they usually attract not the well-to-do high class tourists who frequent the Ticino area of the festival (near Lago Magiorre in Switzerland) but the poorest backpackers. Thus, the claim that film festivals give a boost to local tourism as they bring significant revenues from visitors was put to the test: Bignardi was far from sure that the potential revenues from backpackers would offset the cost of setting up the free screenings on the Piazza.

In the aftermath of the Film Festivals workshop which we held here in St. Andrews on 4 April 2009, my colleague Leshu Torchin sent me a link to an interesting interview which Henry Jenkins had posted on his blog just days earlier. It is called Studying Media Industries: An Interview with Jennifer Holt and Alisa Perren, a posting in two parts, which can be accessed by clicking through to Part I and Part II. This is also the place to note that Jennifer Holt and Alisa Perren are the editors of the new edited collection on Media Industries (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009) shown below.

Even though I believe that the field of Film Festival Studies that we were trying to outline during the workshop is different than Media Industries as it is marked by a range of specific features, I could not help finding the discussion of items in this interview particularly pertinent, maybe because it relates to methodological issues on matters of defining the field. Many of the same and related questions were in the centre of our attention last week as well: What is the role of historical investigation? How can one bring different approaches in dialogue with each other? What is the current state of research in this emerging field? How do the dramatic technological developments affect production, distribution, administration, policy and audiences? Can we study festival production meaningfully without constantly referencing the work on festival audiences? How about integrating the work done on these matters in the field of management studies? How can increase the visibility of important work already being done by our contributors?

And last but absolutely not least: How to highlight the fact that significant work being done outside of the academy by journalists and activists is of particular importance and influence, especially, as Jennifer Holt puts it: ’some of the most insightful and informative analysis of media industries can be found in the popular press, the blogosphere and trade publishing, where journalists and critics have generated a tremendous amount of momentum’. Didn’t this become most obvious by the great interventions that people like Nick Roddick and Michael Gubbins made in the course of the Festivals Workshop last week?

In short, I found all issues that were brought up in the context of this interview of direct relevance to our concerns in relation to the field of Film Festival studies. Read the interview! I am planning to read the book next.

© Dina Iordanova
8 April 2009

…PRESS RELEASE… PRESS RELEASE… PRESS RELEASE…

AROUND THE WORLD IN 2,000 FILM FESTIVALS
Film festivals under the microscope at the University of St Andrews

The global boom in the film industry has resulted in almost 2,000 film festivals taking place all around the world, according to a leading expert in film studies.

Professor Dina Iordanova, Director of the Centre for Film Studies at the University of St Andrews believes that the next decade will see the study of film festivals become just as important as the study of film itself.

The researcher will be joined by film critics, festival practitioners and fellow academics to investigate the phenomenon at a special event in St Andrews this weekend (Saturday 4 April 2009).

The group of experts will gather for the one-day event to examine why a twenty year surge in the interest in films and film-making means that France alone has one festival for every day of the year. The event is part of a two-year project, Dynamics of World Cinema, sponsored by the Leverhulme Trust. The project, lead by Professor Iordanova, is currently looking into the distribution and exhibition of international film.

Professor Iordanova, who is convening the workshop, explained, “Over the past twenty years film festivals have proliferated all over the world. It is difficult to provide an exact figure for the number of festivals in operation, but it is well over 1,000 and more likely around 2,000.

“Just as the study of museums and galleries is central to our understanding of arts and heritage, the study of festivals is central to understanding the true scope of global cinema. It is logical, therefore, to expect that in the course of the next decade the study of festivals, a growing yet scattered field, will become central to film and cultural studies.

The workshop is hosted by the Centre for Film Studies at the University and takes place at the Byre Theatre in St Andrews this Saturday (4th April 2009). The discussion, moderated by leading critics (Richard Porton of the Cineaste, Nick Roddick of Sight and Sound, and Michael Gubbins, former editor of Screen International) and academics (Professor Iordanova, Professor Stuart Cunningham of the Australian Film Commission and Dr Ruby Cheung of the Dynamics of World Cinema project) will evolve around festival programming, distribution, funding, digitisation/new media, and cultural policy.

Other participants include: Irene Bignardi (Film Italia, former artistic director of Locarno International Film Festival), Lindiwe Dovey (SOAS, University of London), Janet Harbord (Goldsmiths College, University of London), Skadi Loist (University of Hamburg), Lucy Mazdon (University of Southampton), David Slocum (The Berlin School of Creative Leadership), Núria Triana Toribio (University of Manchester), and Marijke de Valck (University of Amsterdam).

Professor Dina Iordanova continued, “This workshop provides a rare opportunity for productive conversation about the state of the field and current research agendas. I am happy to see the enthusiastic support from so many renowned film scholars and critics. I hope that this event will inspire more and more related events and scholarly work in the field of film festival research.”

6 April 2009

When we begun planning for this AHRC-sponsored conference with the main organiser, Lars Kristensen, we never expected that the call for papers will meet with such a wide ranging response from among the postgraduate community. We had thought that there would be about twenty or so PhD students who would be interested in attending, but it was more like sixty who sent in abstracts; there were many more who got in touch via the Facebook group and who will now be members of the network that was launched as part of the event. Well done!

Academics involved in the event posed for this picture (except the keynote speaker, Prof. Andrew Wachtel of Northwestern University, who was present only for the opening night). From left to right here one can see John Cunningham (Sheffield Hallam), Ib Bondebjerg (Copenhagen), Ewa Mazierska (Central Lancashire), Brian McNair (Strathclyde), John Orr (Edinburgh), Dina Iordanova (St. Andrews), Fiona Bjorling (Lund), and Lars Kristensen (St. Andrews).

Students had traveled from as far as Latvia, Estonia, Albania, and the USA, as well as from many other countries, to present at the conference. At the end of the beautiful sunny spring day, which they all opted to voluntarily spend in seminar rooms listening to presentations rather than taking a walk on the breezy seaside, the participants posed for this picture. The programme of talks given during the day can be found at this link.

It was encouraging to realise that there is such a wide variety of people working on matters related to the cinema and the visual culture of post-communism. Presentation I attended covered themes from Baltic film industry to Croatian heraldry and Gay and Lesbian Film Festivals in former Yugoslavia, from cinematic representations of Russian migrant women in Turkish cinema to post-communist Czech comedies and Prague as a cinematic global city. Hopefully, we will see more published writing on these matters soon.

© Dina Iordanova
28 March 2009

The IMDb does not list any DVD details, but a nicely produced DVD of this Georgian classic does exist with subtitles in several Western languages. I bought it from a stall at Hong Kong’s Star Computer Arcade, alongside the DVD of the other earlier Abuladze film on which I wrote here some months ago, Verdreba. I remember having seen the film first on its release in my teenage years; it had left a great feeling of cinematic poetic and a memory of fabulous colours. On this viewing, the memory of colours was confirmed, and the feeling of poetic superiority — to some extent as well.

Natvris Khe/Drevo zhelaniy/ Wishing Tree (Tengiz Abuladze, 1976) is based on the work of a Georgian classic, Georgi Leonidze, and the subtitle of the film is marked as ‘Pictures from the Life of a pre-Revolutionary Georgian village’ (in case one may think that the patriarchal mores depicted here could have continued existing after the socialist revolution). By its very nature, most of the film’s humour and stories remain best understood by Georgians, and thus, even though one can grasp some of its charm, it remains of a somewhat limited local appeal. While viewers like myself would probably be able to appreciate many of the jokes and gather that there should be even more endearing qualities to these village stories (as it becomes clear from reading the user’s postings on the IMDb), these are mostly of interest to people who are really familiar with the culture of the region. And as I am not one of them, I must admit that many of the episodes came across as straightforward self-exoticism to me, a quality that makes films from smaller cultures travel among international audiences but ultimately, in my view, operate on the principle of voluntary self-denigration. The humor is occasionally too specific to be appreciated by those who are not in the know.

There is, however, one story of universal appeal: the account of the tragic love between the young Marita and Gedya (reminiscent in many aspects to the love story between Ivan and Marichka in Sergo Paradjanov’s amazing Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors). As soon as Gedya hears that Marita is promised to someone else, he runs to fight the contender, and is killed in the squabble. Marita is promptly married, as planned, a stupefied numb bride who soon grows totally alienated from her husband (once again we see the image of the sad bride, prevalent in the cinema of the Balkans, Asia Minor, and the Caucasus).* It does not take long before, at the end of the film, Marita is forced to mount a mule (seated backwards) and then taken to her death, an act of local popular justice which is meant to punish her for ’shaming’ the village. The inhabitants of the village are shown as good-hearted idiots for most part of the film, but now things have changed and they show a different violent and rough side in practicing their patriarchal justice. It is an exercise in destroying love and beauty, and ultimately, in the context of this film, an indictment of patriarchal society. Some dare objecting, but the community is stronger in naming the victim a villain, as it has been consolidating during all these long ‘pre-revolutionary’ years.

Sofiko Chiaureli, one of the greatest actresses of the region who is also known from her roles in Paradjanov’s Color of Pomegranate and Abuladze’s Repentance, appears here as Pupala, an aging bag lady of picturesque appearance, who keeps telling stories of her great romance with Shiola, a man who loved her so much that it was a matter of life and death. She would sit among a group of black clad village women and entertain them for hours, her exotic rags and heavily made up face in contrast with their austere appearance. In the course of the film Pupala, frequently an unwanted stranger, is revealed as a gentle soul who subtly combats the patriarchy and injustice that are shown to ultimately dominate the lives of local women.

Apparently, all films by Tengiz Abuladze (1924-1994) have had a huge influence and can be considered as stages in the development of Georgian cinema. His Monanieba/Pokayanie/Repentance(1984) was one of the most important films of the perestroika times, and probably the first film to make direct indictment of the totalitarianism of the Stalin/Beria era, a critique which soon thereafter was to become commonplace. Yet another classic of the director is Me, bebia, Iliko da Ilarioni/ Me, Grandma, Iliko and Ilarion (1962), a comedy based on Nodar Dumbadze’s work which again focuses on village life and the endearing aspects of patriarchy.

Ultimately, to me, the achievement of The Wishing Tree is that is represents an exquisit study in the use of colour. I would compare it to the more recent film by Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Gabbeh (1996), which is openly focused on studying colour and carries the name of the specific tapestry from the region. The mountainous landscapes, the blossom of flowers, the picturesque valleys and villages, and some of the scenes are as if taken directly from great masters like Pieter Breughel (a painter whose work Tarkovsky sought to recreate in Andrey Rublev) or like naivist painters from the region. Thirty-odd years after its original release, The Wishing Tree remains an amazingly beautiful film with its vivid colours and its ability to create mode through the tonality of the landscale.

* See my text “Balkan Wedding Revisited: Multiple Meanings of Filmed Nuptials.” October 1998. Working Papers Series of the Centre for Austrian Studies Available on-line: , Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.

© Dina Iordanova
28 March 2009

Buy from Amazon

I came across this interesting item on You Tube, featuring the closing ceremony of Pyongyang’s IFF last September (see also Jamie Bell’s piece on the history of this festival, in a recent issue of Sight and Sound). The festival has been in existence since 1987 and clearly is one of the festivals that has got an idiosyncratic and interesting agenda.

I also re-post here the report that comes along on You Tube, which tells us of the films that won awards — mainly Chinese and Iranian titles (a film by Xiaogang Feng and by Rakhshan Bani Etemad), but also The Counterfeiters (Austria) and Elizabeth I-The Golden Age (UK) and Atonement (UK), as well as Czech Empties. The first two films also won awards at the Oscars and at the BAFTAs, while Jan Sverak’s film got the audience award at Karlovy Vary last year. So, not much difference in the taste of North Korea’s comrades and that of audiences and academies in the West. And the range of exposure to international titles is not much worse than the one viewers at most festivals in the West would get.

Pyongyang, September 26 (KCNA) — The 11th Pyongyang International Film Festival which opened on September 17 was closed with due ceremony at the Pyongyang International Cinema House on Friday. Present at the closing ceremony were Yang Hyong Sop, vice-president of the Presidium of the Supreme People’s Assembly, Ro Tu Chol, vice-premier of the Cabinet, Kang Nung Su, minister of Culture who is also chairman of the festival organizing committee, Pak Kwan Ho, chairman of the Pyongyang City People’s Committee, and others, foreign delegations and delegates and members of the international jury of the festival. Present there on invitation were diplomatic envoys of various countries, embassy officials and staff members of missions of international organizations here. At the ceremony the results of the screening of the films presented to the festival were announced by the jury and awards were conferred upon the successful films. According to the results, award for the best film and directing and technical awards for full-length film were conferred upon the Chinese film “Assembly”, award for scenario of full-length film upon the Iranian film “Mainline”, award for shooting and fine art upon the British film “Atonement”, award for acting upon the actor who played the main part in the Bosnia-Herzegovina film “It’s Hard to Be Nice,” award for acting upon the actress who played the main part in the Iranian film “Mainline” and award for music upon the Indian film “Tale of a River”. Award for directing documentary and short films went to the German documentary “Chamame - Music, People, Poetry”, award for composition to the DPRK children’s film “The Oriole’s Song”, award for shooting to the British documentary “Earth”, special award of the International Jury of the Festival to the Czech film “Empties” and the Chinese documentary “The Imperial Garden”, special award of the Organizing Committee of the Festival to the Russian film “The Irony of Fate ” (continuation) and the Chinese film “The Tender of Feeling”. Awards for special screening were conferred upon the German film “The Counterfeiters”, the Russian film “Mukha”, the Swiss film “Vitus”, the DPRK film “The Kites Flying in the Sky”, the Chinese film “Good Man”, the French film “Aurore”, and the British film “Elizabeth I-The Golden Age”.

© Dina Iordanova
26 March 2009

An e-mail from a British colleague prompted me to prioritize the viewing of this DVD, which I recently purchased for 3 Bg leva in the Sofia supermarket near where my parents live. As I promised to lend him the film, I thought I should view it before sending it off, just to refresh my memory of it and see if the feeling of serious reservations that it had left me with on first viewing (now nearly 30 years ago!) would change.

The British colleague is interested in Binka Zhelyazkova’s work in general, and for a good reason: she is one of the major feminist directors from Eastern Europe, but, unlike Vera Chytilova or Marta Meszaros, she remains virtually unknown. The man had tried to approach the cinematheque in Sofia to check if they would consider making Binka’s work available, and had received a polite response written in good English which was informing him that, yes, they could produce copies and DVDs and in general help with availability, only they would do this if he could please make his own arrangements toward presenting them with letters from two other Bulgarian institutions that would give the cinematheque authorisation to go ahead with making the material available. Needless to say, the colleague dropped it all at this point (as most other researchers would); seeing this correspondence gave me an interesting glimpse into the absurdities in treating cinematic heritage that everybody working on these matters is constantly confronted with.

Now about the film itself. I still think i is a really week one; I could not help it being truly annoyed by the cartoonish characters, the slow pace, and lack of dramatic tension. If I remember correctly, the plot of the film is based on a real story. During the shooting of a film set in ancient Thrace, a bunch of friends organise a midnight swimming party on the seaside set. Drunken, they decide to play a game where one of them climbs on a stone with a rope on his neck and a sickle in his hand. The others are dancing in a circle and at one point somebody kicks the stone underneath the hangman; to save himself he is supposed to manage cutting the rope with the sickle. Two of the ‘victims’ make it, but in the third instance the young man does not manage to cut the rope and hangs. This is the culminating event in the film, which is preceded by a long (and tedious) build up of what are supposedly character studies of those involved, and is followed by an equally tedious investigation. It is all supposed to expose the drunken and promiscuous environment and the moral decline (of mature socialism) that leads to the sad loss. One of the subplots is the love affair between young gorgeous Ninel and Sava, a relationship that is seriously tested by their class differences (something that would normally not be supposed to exist under socialism). Another subplot tackles ‘The Little Prince’, the son of a highly placed party apparatchik who has just been demoted (so all speculate how their friend will be affected), yet another story included to expose the moral corruption within socialism. All protagonists are good looking, well-to-do, successful, and sexy; yet their problems are not deeply suffered and there is no dramatic development to build up to the moment of the hanging; the 150 min. length of the film can hardly be justified.

Golyamoto noshtno kapane (1980) is scripted, like Binka Zhelyazkova’s previous film, Baseynat/Swimming Pool (1977) by her husband Hristo Ganev, who is responsible also for the script of A byahme mladi/ We Were Young (1961), a film that won the top award at the Moscow International Film Festival but was nonetheless shelved afterwards and created a number of problems both for the director and the screenwriter.* One should immediately say that the script is probably the film’s biggest liability. It is supposed to have been a daring statement of sort, as Hristo Ganev enjoyed the reputation of a dissident writer, and it is probably not politically correct to declare his work weak (especially, as I can imagine, he has probably seen at least some of his work suppressed by the authorities). However, i simply cannot help it calling the script what it is: a feeble work of screenwriting. While it is clearly intended to critique the moral decline that reigned over mature socialism, as revealed here through the disorientation of this lost generation, the film is heavily dominated by small talk dialogue that should have been cut down in order to allow the director use at least some of her imagination. A pity that she does not appear to have had the strength to resist the weak script and take charge.

The second liability is the poor acting. Not much could have been done there, however, provided the heavy dialogue dominates it all. The actors are selected from among the promising new generation of VITIZ gaduates: Nikolay Sotirov (a Mathew Modine look-alike), Yanina Kasheva, Tania Shahova, Lyuben Chatalov — all actors who showed promise but were then affected by the downturn in cinema that came about at the end of the decade when they had launched their careers. For who knows what reason, there are two foreign actors in the cast (not that their presence is logically required, nor that they contribute anything to the performance, as they are both more than boring): Polish Malgorzata Braunek who plays the jaded masseuse Zhana, and Lithianian heart-throb Juozas Budraitis, whose supporting role barely has more than ten lines. I would speculate that the reason these two were in the film is that they simply wanted to spend a paid vacation on Bulgaria’s Black Sea coast. The main ‘acting’ is in the heavy dialogues between Nkolay Sotirov (Sava) and Yanina Kasheva (Ninel) and is meant to expose the rift between profound inherent values of carrying morality that is still intact in the provinces (he is taking care of his ill mother in the beautiful mountain hamlet of Melnik) and the inherently corrupt mores exemplified by English-language-school graduate Ninel and her friends, an urban crowd from the capital (new bourgeoisie, so to speak).

There are moments of greatness in this film, however, remnants of Binka Zhelyazkova’s trademark avantgardist brilliance: the occasional low camera shot, the bird-eye view scenes, the filming of animals (killing of birds and crabs), the drum, the dry tree on the stony seaside. These are, however, too few, to compensate for the overwhelming boredom. With the abundance of close up shots of beautiful semi-naked bodies among sand dunes, this film somehow kept referencing in my mind to a relatively recent Vera Chytilová work, the equally weak Vyhnání z ráje/ Expulsion from Paradise (2001), which, even if made more than twenty years later also evolves around sand dunes and relationships, and looks very similar in its beach stories, aesthetics and concerns.

I must confess to taking a profound dislike to all novels and films that feature a group of similar protagonists, and where the focus is on the group dynamics — be it taking place in a boarding school, a student dorm, in a madhouse or, like here, among a group of young people on their summer holidays. It is a large topic that I am not going to go into and which I am mentioning mostly because, strangely enough, it seems it was this kind of group dynamics films that dominated the early 1980s of Bulgarian cinema. The earliest one seems to be Binka Zhelyazkova and Hristo Ganev’s Baseynat/Swimming Pool (1977), about a bunch of young people confronting issues of moral decline, very similar and equally dialogue-heavy as The Big Night Bathe. Then there were films such as Vulo Radev’s Adaptatsiya/Adaptation (1981), probably the best of this range (about a bunch of young people belonging to a psychoanalysis group), Lavina/ Avalanche (1982), based on Blaga Dimitrova (a bunch of young people forced to confront their moral foundations when challenged by nature), and Rangel Vulchanov’s A sega nakade?/And Where Do We Go From Here? (1986), about a bunch of young people searching for a moral compass in life. The cycle probably came to an end with Ivan Andonov’s Vchera/Yesterday (1988) where the bunch of young people affected by a moral crisis put it all squarely on the vicious socialist system. What is noteworthy is that all these films scrutinizing the moral decline in the young generation were made by members of the older generation, directors and writers born in the 1920s and the early 1930s; members of the generation that was being scrutinised (my generation actually, born in the 1960s) simply never had the chance to make films on these matters as by the time we came to maturity, the end of socialist funding for cinema hit and severely limited the chances to develop robust and prolific filmmaking careers. Thus, we never had the chance to give a cinematic response to the diagnostic that older filmmakers were imposing on us.

When I look back now, I realize that I probably hated these films as my life was not particularly different from what was shown in it. We had all adapted to the socialist system which we were not finding particularly onerous, as long as we could go abroad once a year and spend three weeks by leisurely exposing our naked bodies on the cliffs near the village of Varvara, where, for many years, the dry tree used as a prop for the hanging in The Big Night Bathe was still standing. We were passing by it every day, on our way to the nudist beach, and then also on most nights, on our way to the late night parties that were full of alcohol, locally sourced and prepared food, and heterosexual sex: pretty much the same stuff that is seen in the film.

* See my piece on these matters: Iordanova, Dina. “Binka Zhelyazkova” In: Censorship: A World Encyclopedia (ed. Derek Jones), London/Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publ., 2001, vol 4, pp. 2705/6.

© Dina Iordanova
10 March 2009

Last week I took part in the round table featured on this photo. The event took place at the Sava Center, the modern and somehow anonymous site in the new part of Belgrade, Serbia (across the river from better-known popular quarters like Kalemegdan and Skadarlija). The project was developed on the initiative of director Slobodan Sijan (of Ko To Tamo Peva/Who Is Singing Out There fame), and the visit to Belgrade was really a great chance for me to meet with this hugely important cinema visionary from the region. It was also a chance to get an update from old friend Dusan Makavejev, who is in great shape and spirit. Besides people like Ron Hollway, Bernd Buder and Silke Rabiger who, like myself, had arrived from abroad, or Pavle Levi from Stanford, who is spending his sabbatical leave in his native Belgrade, the round table brought together some female filmmakers as well, like Melina Pota-Koljevic or Carna Manojlovic and scholars Nevena Dakovic, Milena Dragicevic-Sesic, and Ivana Kronja. Of course, festival director Milos Paramentic and artistic director Mica Vuckovic were also there; it was great to catch up with Vida Johnson, a US-based specialist on Russian cinema, who has decided to finally do some work on Serbian cinema and is preparing a special issue for the on-line journal Kinokultura.

I see that Ron Holloway has already published the study he presented at the Round Table. In the context of our preparation, we also worked collectively to come up with a list of female filmmakers from the region of South East Europe. I am posting here a version of this list which contains 63 names (but it is constantly growing, and I am aware that many names of filmmakers from Greece and Turkey in particular are still to be added). It is great to see that some attention is finally being paid to these filmmakers. I remember that more than 15 years ago I had tried to put in an application to some US-based foundation to finance my travel to the region so that I can explore more the work of female directors. The application was rejected on the basis that I would be exploring something non-existent. Well, the list below would probably help if someone would consider making a similar application nowadays.

SEE WOMEN FILM DIRECTORS – JANUARY 2009
Working List – 63 SEE Women Film Directors – English Titles

Albania – 1
Elezi, Iris (Suicide Inc, USA 2001, Disposable Heroes, Kosovo, 2005), short films

Bosnia and Herzegovina – 7
Begic, Aida (Snow, 2008), Cannes Week of Critics Award
Ljubic, Vesna (Posljednji skretnicar uzanog kolosijeka, 1986)
Majstorovic, Danijela (Counterpoint for Her, 2004, The Dream Job, 2006)
Milosevic, Ivana (Never Been Better, 2006)
Svilicic, Vanja (See You in Sarajevo, 2008), short feature
Vajraca, Sabina (Back to Bosnia, 2005, with Alison Hanson)
Zbanic, Jasmila (Red Rubber Boots, 2000, Grbavica, 2006, Golden Bear Berlinale)

Bulgaria – 17
Aktasheva, Irina (Monday Morning, 1966) (worked in tandem with Hristo Piskov)
Andonova, Milena (Monkeys in Winter, 2006)
Evstatieva-Biolcheva, Mariana (The Prince and the Pauper, 2005)
Grubcheva, Ivanka (One Calory of Tenderness, 2003)
Koseva, Nadejda (Ritual, in Lost and Found omnibus film, 1995)
Milotinova, Milena (The Saved Ones, 1999), documentary
Nikolova, Elka (Binka, 2007), documentary on Binka Zhelyazkova
Peeva, Adela (Whose Song Is This?, 2003), documentary
Pesheva, Sylvia, (Shantav den / Crazy Day, 2004)
Petkova, Roumiana (The Other Possible Life of Ours, 2007)
Petrova, Svetlina (She, 2001), animation
Sophia, Zornitsa (Mila from Mars, 2004)
Tosheva, Nevena (Bulgaria: Land, People, Sun, 1966), documentary
Traykova, Eldora (Of People and Bears, 1995), documentary
Triffonova, Iglika (Investigation, 2006), Cottbus Grand Prize
Tsotsorkova, Svetla (Life with Sophia, 2004)
Zhelyazkova, Binka (The Tied-Up Balloon, 1967)

Croatia – 4
Budisavlejevic, Dana (Everything’s Fine, 2003)
Cakic-Veselic, Biljana (The Boy Who Rushed, 2002)
Juka, Ivona (Facing the Day, 2005), documentary
Tribuson, Snjezana (Three Love Stories, 2007)

Greece – 6
Angelidi, Antouanetta (Thief of Reality, 2001)
Dimitriou, Alinda (Birds in the Mire, 2008), documentary
Malea, Olga (The Cow’s Orgasm, 1997)
Marketaki, Tonia (The Price of Love, 1984), died in 1994; major figure)
Rikaki, Loukia (Symfonia haraktiron, 1999)
Tsangari, Athina Rachel (The Slow Business of Going, 2000)

Hungary – 6
Elek, Judit (Awakening, 1995)
Enyedi, Ildiko (My 20th Century, 1989)
Fekete, Ilboya (Bolshe Vita, 1996, Chico, 2001)
Gyarmathy, Livia (Escape, 1997)
Kocsis, Agnes (Fresh Air, 2006)
Meszaros, Marta (Adoption, 1975)

Kosovo – 2
Zeqiraj, Lendita (Exit, 2004), codirector
Zeqiri, Blerta (Exit, 2004), codirector

Macedonia – 2
Mitevska, Teona Strugar (I Killed a Saint, 2004, I Am From Titov Veles, 2007)
Zarevska, Dragana (Grandma’s Villlage, 2007)

Montenegro – 1
Perovic, Marija (Pack the Monkeys Again, 2004)

Romania – 5
Bostan, Elisabeta (A Telephone Call, 1991), children’s films
Domin, Andrada (The Lamenters, 2007), documentary
Niculescu Bran, Tatiana(For God’s Sake, 2007), documentary, codirector
Radu, Corina (Bar de zi and Other Stories, 2006), documentary
Ursianu, Malvina (What a Happy World, 2003)

Serbia – 7
Balas-Petrovic, Eva (Panonski Peak, 1989)
Boskov, Gordana (What’s Up, Nina?, 1984, Flashback, 1997)
Ceramilac, Ratiborka (Virtual Reality, 2001)
Kapic, Suada (The Trap, 1988)
Maric, Marija (Heartsick Youth, 1990)
Stojkovic, Andrijana (An Island, 1996), Home, 1996, The Box, work-in-progress)
Vukomanovic, Mirjana (Three Summer Days, 1997)

Slovenia – 2
Slak, Hana A.W. (Blind Spot, 2002)
Weiss, Maya (Guardian of the Frontier, 2002)

Turkey – 3
Esmer, Pelin (The Play, 2005), documentary
Ipekci, Handan (Hidden Faces, 2007)
Ustaoglu, Yesim (Waiting for the Clouds, 2003, Pandora’s Box, 2008)