My last post may have given the impression that my perspective on the Berlinale leans a little towards the uncritically enthralled side of things. Honestly, I’m well aware of the unsavoury side of this, and all other major film festivals: the commercialism, the pervasive marketing, the typically safe and unchallenging array of films selected for competition, the celebrity worship and the associated press feeding frenzy (with members of the public picking up their leftovers, vying for autographs at the hotel backdoor, some not even knowing who they’re waiting for). Or put another way, the orgiastic (occasionally cannibalistic) media-festival-business-celebrity love-in that makes the film industry what it is. It goes something like this: The press selling festivals selling films selling stars selling products selling festivals. Everybody wins.
At the same time, the cynicism and disdain with which I view most of this carry-on doesn’t mean I can entirely resist its allure. Like the dynamic and ultra-modern skyscrapers of Potsdamer Platz, where most of the festival takes place, the scale and accomplishment of a lot of this bullshit is occasionally thrilling: a certain dazzling heartlessness, maybe. The first day of the festival presented a good case in point: prior to the opening gala screening of Martin Scorsese’s Rolling Stones concert movie, Shine A Light, the filmmaker and the band gave a press conference at the Hyatt Hotel. The questions asked by the attending journalists, and the answers given, really aren’t worth mentioning. That’s not because they were boring, inane, or redundant—some of them weren’t—but just because they were of no particular consequence. It didn’t matter what was said. The cameras, microphones, notebooks and laptops, and the hacks attached to them, we’re going to report what they said anyway (even if in the case of Keith Richards, it didn’t always make sense). Really, the pleasure of this event on a personal level was simply to see these guys in the flesh, particularly the filmmaker (for mixed reasons that I’ve written about before). The function of it on a business level was to sell a film, sell a film festival, sell newspapers and magazines, and hell, why not sell those old guys on stage while we’re at it. I was happy to be there, but I was also unsatisfied.
What else do I expect, you might ask? Within the confines of a set-up like this, nothing whatsoever (“the medium is the message” in press conferences as most other places, no matter how talented the individuals involved are). But what do I want? Well, simple things. Dialogue. Discussion. Debate. Discourse. Questions and answers that are not simply interesting, amusing or lively (and not always utterly safe), but actually matter.
There has been one or two press conferences where the facade rippled and some of those things actually occurred.
Yesterday Paul Thomas Anderson, Daniel Day-Lewis and Paul Dano got the conferential treatment for the flawed but impressive There Will Be Blood. Unlike Scorsese and Jagger, none of them had the smooth and controlled sheen of someone so used to media attention, and so used to using it, that they’re almost indifferent to its gaze (Scorsese is, I think, more savvy in this respect than one might think). Rather, each had their own distinct kind of discomfort: Day-Lewis, as the private and introspective actor dedicated to his craft, Anderson as the still quite young and ambitious auteur, Dano simply because it’s his first really prominent role. Dano is still young enough to be polite and unassuming, answering questions as graciously as he can, but for the other two, beneath their manners you could see their weariness as they try to answer inadequate, uninteresting or unreasonable questions; you could see people who’d rather be having a real conversation with someone. Occasionally the manners subsided, and a request for Day-Lewis to comment (again) on Heath Ledger’s death prompted the actor to say he didn’t want to fuel “a fire that’s already out of control” and contribute further to a “fucking circus”.
The comment was, of course, widely reported along with rehashed details of Ledger’s death, and details of the new film Day-Lewis is starring in.