Godard and Other Monuments Rise at FIFA

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Parent Category: Film Festivals

Category: Reviews

Published on Sunday, 11 April 2010 13:34

Written by David D'Arcy

Every year I go to the International Festival of Films on Art in Montreal, Canada, to see movies I'd never see anywhere else. For one thing, much of what shows at FIFA — its commonly used acronym, short for its official French title, Festival International du film sur L'art —which was held this year from March 18-28, 2010, isn't actually shot on film for theatrical release, but on video for television, and are usually an hour long. They rarely play on American television. It's our loss.

This year's top prize at FIFA went to Archipels Nitrate, a documentary produced for the 70th anniversary of the Cinematheque Royale in Brussels. It traced the visual education of the film's director, Claudio Pazienza, in a compilation of excerpts from the early days of moving pictures. The oddness of early film seemed a logical step up from the art of Belgian symbolism and experimental photography at the time, and pointed toward surrealism, another art movement with deep roots in Belgium. FIFA also screened a biography of Rene Magritte, who bridges both movements: Magritte Day and Night, by Henri de Gerlache, a film made to commemorate the opening of Brussels' new Magritte Museum.

This year's revelation in the cinema section of the festival, which has grown in recent years, was the collection of television work by the veteran documentary director Andre S. Labarthe, best known, a la JFK or LBJ, by his three initials, ASL. A Cahiers du Cinema writer in the 1950s, he was rare for that crowd in that his focus was documentaries. Separately, Labarthe's film about the theater of Antonin Artaud also screened at the festival.

Labarthe's documentaries about the cinema deserve to be seen more widely in the English-speaking world, not least because they offer conversations with American and British directors who haven't been given their due on American television. His films  tend to be short-format talks, with the longest being The Dinosaur and the Baby: Dialogue in Eight Parts between Fritz Lang and Jean-Luc Godard (1967). By that time, Lang, who fled the Nazis, had already endured disappointments in the U.S., and a young Godard had won over the critics and also learned some harsh truths about commercial cinema; he addressed some of them in his 1963 fiction film Contempt (Le Mepris), which starred Lang as a veteran European director shooting a film on the island of Capri and compromised by his crass American producer (Jack Palance). It's a discouraging exchange about the future of cinema, but one that stresses cinema's centrality in society. Disagreements about sports and politics can exist in a marriage, Godard says, but if those disagreements are about films, he argues, the relationship is doomed.

In Hitchcock and Ford: The Lion and the Lamb, Labarthe films a deaf and surprisingly humorous John Ford in bed. Ford, wearing an eye-patch, tries to speak French to his interviewer, who shouts questions to the aging director. Asked about Stagecoach, Ford responds, "It was just a Western," noting that his real concern in making films was supporting his family. Overstatement meets understatement, with cinematography by John Cassevetes stalwart Seymour Cassel. Hitchcock, also interviewed by Labarthe, was more discreet when discussing his role in the film industry, but no less illuminating.

For more on Godard and on the pivotal role of Contempt in the evolution of his work, the festival showed Once Upon a Time….Contempt (It Etait Une Fois….Le Mepris), a documentary by Antoine de Gaudemar, a former editor at the daily newspaper Liberation. The film was produced by a company that includes Serge July, another former editor there.  Godard, in typical understatement, discussed his experience of directing the world's leading sex symbol, Brigitte Bardot, whose blonde haired was piled on her head. Godard found the hair grotesque and offered Bardot a deal: He would walk on his hands for every centimeter that she lowered in the height of her hair. To demonstrate, in an interview with a television host in France, he got up and walked on his hands around the studio.

Skeptics might question my enthusiasm about these interviews. Can't you get the same thing from a director's commentary on most DVDs these days? With Hitchcock, Ford and Lang, Labarthe got to the directors before it was too late. And even with living directors, these vintage interviews provide a direction that prevents rambling, lack of focus or other problems with such commentary.

Of course, that's not always necessary. When, for instance, Labarthe talks to Martin Scorsese, the director of Taxi Driver takes over and gives with 20 minutes of commentary on character and dramatic development in that 1975 film.  In Taxi Driver Broken Down by Martin Scorsese (1995), Scorsese discusses how he skirted censorship on the film, and about setting up the final attack by Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) on the apartment where the pimp handling teenage hooker Jodie Foster operated.  Seeking to evoke the feel of those times' black-and-white tabloid newspapers, the director softened the color to forestall an attack from the censors, yet still turned revenge into what he calls "the psychopath's second coming."  Instead of glaring, the colors oozed. I suppose the censors thought that was permissible, since we saw it. Scorsese said the blood-fest was his Catholic version, which he transformed from the Protestant austerity of screenwriter Paul Schrader.

Turning from film directors to other topics, the German documentary Expansive Grounds (Ein weites Feld) focuses on the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, an expanse of concrete slabs of varying height and size just a short walk from the Brandenberg Gate and right behind the Kempinski Adlon Hotel, a favorite of the Nazi elite. There was a huge debate over the form that a Holocaust memorial would take, with some complaining in frustration that too much was being made of the country's guilt decades later.  The film's director, Gerburg Rohde-Dahl, brings a background to the project that adds new ripples to its story. She was a young girl whose family settled in the Polish city of Gdynia after 1939. She doesn't remember seeing any suffering during the war before her family evacuated back to Germany. (She's lucky. The Germans who couldn't flee Gdansk and Gdynia on the northern Polish coast were massacred once the Nazi troops left.)

As the director mulls her own place in this history, she talks to a sampling of people on the site – from the American architect Peter Eisenman to  teenagers and young adults who jump from slab to slab and tell her how much fun it is. There are also sunbathers. We hear all sorts of talk about a changed Germany, in which the younger generation is said to understand the crimes of the past, and some young Germans wonder whether their country has learned anything. Others come with their skateboards. Are they so far beyond the past that they can turn a Holocaust Memorial into a playground?

This antidote to the typical civic architecture infomercial makes you wonder what a monument is, or should be. Is it a sacred place that makes you stop what you would ordinarily do?  Is it part of the tourist industry, an engine of economic activity? Or is it just another Berlin park, where Germans do what they always do when the sun comes out – take off their clothes. Images of blithe Germans who invade the expanse and sprawl atop funereal concrete slabs remind you that memory, like democracy, requires vigilance.

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