Film is manipulated and condensed time. It involves two revolving worlds of mutual incomprehension -- one, the spinning reel of processed, tabulated, balanced and edited footage, the other the inexorable spinning wheel we live on, the rotary saw of time severing us from our last moment. The lights hung in place shift across the sky as the globe spins in space; the impossibility of a fixed point, the inscrutable linkage between time and this hurtling action through space -- all of it finds its way into that great synthesis, the motion picture. Thematic links and cinematic revelations thread through the Documentary Section of Ljubljana's Film Art Fest, binding together the 13 films being presented in a package so coherent and compelling that I have no hesitation in calling it the most intellectually rigorous presentation of contemporary films I have seen. As such, it is a particularly fitting birthday present to the medium itself. One hundred years after film first flickered silently into life, it has so efficiently infiltrated (and changed the course of) civilization that it is virtually impossible to imagine life without it. High time, therefore, for a subtle and highly nuanced look at the medium using the language best suited to the task -- film itself; the synthesizer, the destroyer of worlds. One of the most pleasant surprises contained within the Documentary Section's relatively short duration (it runs from the 2nd to the 14th of November) is how effectively this medium -- the same one which has served as the instrument of so much manipulation -- can be employed in soul-searching self-analysis. We are two months short of being directly at the center of a decade rife with too many images, cooked over the slow fire of too many political agendas. We live in the garbage of crashed utopias. There are good reasons for pessimism. Still, these films are a welcome antidote to the mindless consumption of moving images, fired into the retina to satisfy the interests of those best served by a "willing suspension of disbelief." They constitute an unexpected reward. Before anybody is scared off by the "documentary" label, it should be made completely clear that these films are stuffed with the classical filmic pleasures. They are unambiguously, devastatingly, cinematographically interesting. They are also filled with performances worthy of an Oscar. As Marlon Brando said to Larry King last week (on "the world's news leader"): all of us are actors. The truth of this statement is directly evident in these films -- from the charismatic populist gusto of kinetic campaign strategist James Carville (the "Ragin' Cajun" who, in The War Room, delivers Bill Clinton to the highest office of a superpower), to the intricately self-condemnitory revisionisms of Leni Riefenstahl (who, in The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl, spends 182 minutes focussing all her formidable propagandist's skill on what has clearly always been the most interesting subject for her: Leni Riefenstahl). The actors within these films, in fact, are so alive and so fascinating to observe that they exert a kind of direct influence over those other figures -- the ones populating the devised dramas of even the best fictional cinema. Despite the vast economic and social gulf dividing what has traditionally been called "documentary" from "dramatic" or "feature" movies, the characters populating these films manage to render more symmetrical the lopsided artificial division between the genres. In line with Brando's observation, "fiction" and "fact" return here to either side of the numismatic film-reel -- two sides of that same rolling coin which constitutes both the history of film and the history of the century (as Godard has pointed out). The stars of the Documentary Section are surrounded by a constellation of fascinating supporting players, themselves frequently worthy of full-length treatment. In Michael Moore's blackly humorous Roger and Me, for example, we come across Tom Kay, a smooth-talking public relations professional who spends much of his time justifying the closure, by General Motors, of eleven auto factories in Flint, Michigan in 1987 -- an action throwing tens of thousands of employees into poverty and homelessness. By the end of the film, with the car-maker having moved the bulk of its operations to low-wage Mexico, Flint is home to "more rats than people" -- and the services of GM's local apologist are no longer required. So Kay too is unceremoniously fired, joining the rest of GM's discarded work-force -- just another left-over tool of a defunct American dream. (Flint, no longer assembling cars, is last seen industriously constructing new jails in an attempt to contain the post-GM crime explosion.) Alive and breathing to the East, on the other side of a wall which now stands only in memory, we find another grouping of souls -- these defining a different, and certainly no less destructive, ideological system. Chris Marker's brilliant study The Last Bolshevik is constructed as a series of "letters" to the late great Soviet director Alexander Medvedkin, who stands as a giant within this document -- and one far too talented not to get into all kinds of trouble with the Lilliputians of a Stalinist cultural bureaucracy more interested in conformity than innovation. Although the vanished Medvedkin could easily have filled the sails of this film all by himself (as he did many another), we nevertheless find, animated and articulate, another of the fascinating "minor" characters the festival is studded with: cinematographer Yacov Tolchan. Standing uncompromisingly within the shadow of his director, Tolchan -- like Medvedkin, born at the turn of the century -- explains their formula: "You capture news in 3 stages: the event itself - that's one! Absorbing it mentally in a flash - two! Pressing the button - three! If you could, within 2-3 seconds, execute this triangle, then you have the know-how to be a true chronicler..." Watching the image of the old man on the screen, a realization dawns: these were truly the pioneers, the first to think in this way -- the first in history able to capture moving reality at the press of a button, before satellites, sound-bites, handi-cams and "photo opportunities." Later in the film -- after we see a film camera mounted on a rifle butt, used by Medvedkin to "shoot" Nazi troops during the war -- a grainy slow-motion image of Stalin flickers on the screen, and Marker closes the hunting metaphor. Tolchan explains how he spotted the "Chief-and-Guide", walking alone in the Kremlin. Before he could help himself, the cinematographer says, Medvdekin's formula kicked in -- and he found himself running across the courtyard to capture the image on film. A more hazardous idea could scarcely have entered the head of any sane Soviet citizen. Tolchan, needless to say, survived the incident and got his shot as well. "That was the last time that I did filming of that kind," he says. "It had become too dangerous... and I never filmed Stalin again." All these greater and lesser characters -- each functioning as a kind of crew-member within the larger purpose of their respective film -- in turn populate a no less purposefully designed structure: that of the Documentary Section itself. The festival's meticulous selection was no accident. With the exception of one film, it is the work of local resident (and Belgian expatriate) Koen Van Daele. In 1989, as the Berlin Wall crumbled, Van Daele and a colleague were founding Argos, the well-respected Brussels-based distribution and production company specializing in art-related films. Van Daele, who was head of the audio-visual department of the Flemish Theater Institute before Argos, brings to his curatorship ten years of combined experience programming films. He likes to quote Trinh T. Minh-ha: "There is no such thing as documentary." At the opening of his festival, Van Daele has situated the devastating short Island of Flowers. It functions as a kind of key to the subsequent works. In thirteen minutes, Brazilian director Jorge Furtado succeeds in reeling the unsuspecting viewer up a glinting, diamond-hard chain of associations and dictionary definitions, past rotten tomatoes, perfumed sales-women, mouldering garbage, and foraging pigs, to the kind of in-your-face revelation of the human condition capable of leaving an audience shaken and speechless. Then, he removes the hook -- and casts you back into the sea. "Freedom is a word that the human dream feeds on, that no one can explain, or fail to understand", are the last words of the film. This, a precise definition of a word through a failure of definition, constitutes the still point from which three spokes unfold. They reveal the outlines of a spinning film-reel: the Documentary Section, comprised of a trio of basic subject-catagories, each sharing themes and aspects of the others, and all converging on one basic point (definable, undefinable): freedom. To begin with, we have films which deal with manipulation, propaganda, and the power of the image -- a category in which Riefenstahl, Medvedkin, and Noam Chomsky, each occupying one slice of the century's ideological pie-chart, fit handily. (The festival's penultimate film, Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media, trails "America's leading dissident" through Canada, Japan, the US and Europe, and focuses on the methodologies of propaganda in democratic societies.) Second, sharing the above concerns but distinct as a theme, there is a grouping of films dealing with "images of transition." These include the East Germans being assimilated, willingly or unwillingly, by their biological twin in November Days, by Marcel Ophuls; the frozen tableaus of Russians, static as statues within an arrested revolution, waiting, waiting -- for something -- in D'Est, by Chantel Akerman; and the frenzied image-soup of Videogramme einer Revolution, by Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujica. Each in its own way deals with the colossal global paradigm shift best marked by the Berlin Wall's destruction, exactly five years ago this month. Finally, the third spoke of the reel -- again, sharing the above concerns but quite distinct -- contains what Van Daele calls "portraits of a free society." These are the American films, and they provide a much-needed corrective to Hollywood style Socialist Realism. Roger and Me, directed by Michael Moore, The War Room, by Chris Hegedus and DA Pennebaker, and Route One/USA, by Robert Kramer each function as a set of lenses, throwing into unexpectedly sharp focus an American Reality far more disturbing (and entertaining) than anything coughed up by the Dream Factory in recent years. Route One, a brilliant road movie tracing the "blue highway" of the title through east-coast heartland, may be the best single evocation of the contemporary United States I have ever seen. As befits the birthday of film, it's best to end with one which -- through a simple, yet chilling, device -- ends at its own beginning. Videogramme einer Revolution reveals the stormy five-day course steered by Romanian television from state control, through the chaos of images broadcast by Televiziunea Romana Libera, to the unsettling calm waiting at the other side of the tempest: state control again. Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujica stay entirely within the universe of pictures transmitted during this televised revolution, and it only gradually becomes clear that most of the action is, in fact, taking place around the TV station itself. Videogramme reveals a kind of real-time October; defense of the revolution becomes defense of the organ creating an ongoing image of revolution; that image in turn consists of extended footage of the TV station, which is defending the revolution; and the cycle starts again -- inexorable as a rotary saw, or film reel. Although it supplanted historical reality with ease, Eisenstein's magnificent storming of the Winter Palace was in reality a sleepy police action; the noisy chaos of the Romanian revolution likewise masked a quiet transfer of the levers of power within an established inner circle. And this, of course, is the key unlocking secrets of the image palace. Televiziunea Romana Libera's multiple kino-eye camera-men, buzzing through euphoric crowds to document fire-fights with chimerical opponents, are no threat to the Regime. They are simply providing the sceneography, the pictures, the stuffing of history. It is not for them to do the stuffing. Perhaps that is why cinematographer Yacov Tolchan, instinctively running towards the century's greatest mass-murderer, wasn't shot dead in his tracks. He was no threat. On the contrary, he was just another miniscule atom of granite in the pillars of the state -- an invisible component of the architecture of power.
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