Memorable images, moments, qualities, techniques and scenes from the 2023 Berlinale.
Samsara (Lois Patiño, 2023) © Señor y Señora
When Daniel Kasman covered the Locarno Festival on Notebook in 2017 he hit upon a great way of engaging with standout work. In his introduction, he explained that he would be “looking for specific images, moments, techniques, qualities or scenes…that grabbed me and have lingered past and beyond the next movie seen, whose characters, story and images have already begun to overwrite those that came just before.” This seemed like a great way to engage with the creative work in a milieu like a festival - to concentrate on that which lingers rather than attempting to highlight everything. As such, we’ve shamelessly pilfered this very technique for the ALT/KINO festival reports.
On this occasion, Patrick Gamble went in search of memorable ideas and aesthetics from the ever-fascinating selection of experimental work included in the various sections of this year’s Berlinale programme.
Allensworth (James Benning, 2023) © Courtesy of the artist and neugerriemschneider, Berlin
The poetry of Lucille Clifton in James Benning’s Allensworth
Watching James Benning’s landscape films, you’re often made aware of the off-screen space. It might be the sound of a passing train, the bark of a dog, or the ring of a church bell. However in Allensworth, a film about the California municipality where Col. Allen Allensworth - a former slave and retired Army chaplain - built a utopian town for black Americans, it’s what’s missing from these scenes that’s most notable. Structured as 12 five-minute static shots, one for each month of the year, it isn’t until August that we see a human being. A young black girl, dressed in period clothing, stands in a dilapidated school building and reads a poem by Lucille Clifton. Much like Benning, Clifton’s work is also notable for what’s missing, with her politically charged poems about race in America often lacking capitalisation and punctuation; her prose so pared down that its spaces take on substance. The same could be said of Benning’s work; his fixed-frame shots, with their scant margins of movement, convey the strangeness of this deserted landscape, and force the audience to consider why this utopian vision of Black liberation failed.
Exhibition (Mary Helena Clark, 2023) © Mary Helena Clark
“I’m not a woman. I’m a doorknob.” The refusal of subjecthood in Mary Helena Clark’s Exhibition
Why do museums and galleries collect artefacts and what is it about these objects that triggers our desire to gather, sort, and display them? That’s one of the questions at the heart of Mary Helena Clark’s Exhibition, an enigmatic montage film about objects and how they assert their presence on us. Organised as a series of vignettes coupled with narration – Clark described the film as her first “talky” – the film weaves together multiple biographies and texts. From Eija-Riitta Eklöf-Berliner-Mauer, the Swedish woman who married the Berlin Wall, to Mary Richardson, the Canadian suffragette who attacked Velásquez’s The Toilet of Venus with a meat cleaver, Clark has created a cinematic museum of unreliable objects. By compiling all these artefacts into one ‘exhibition’, alongside quotations from Sigmund Freud and abstract painter Agnes Martin, whose aforementioned quote spoke to her desire for anonymity regarding how her work was perceived, Clark has curated a strangely haunting film about the uneasy relationship between meaning and perception.
Hello Dankness (Soda Jerk, 2022) © Soda Jerk
A memetic study of American politics in Soda Jerk’s Hello Dankness
It’s hard to imagine anyone better than Soda Jerk to depict an era of political discourse dominated by conspiracy theories and deep fakes. Opening with an unedited version of Kendall Jenner’s controversial Pepsi commercial, which demonstrates the extent to which reality has become stranger than fiction, the film reassembles hundreds of pirated audiovisual samples from popular American films and television series in an attempt to make sense of the surreal spectacle of American politics from 2016 to 2021. From a Bernie Sanders supporting Tom Hanks (The ’Burbs) living opposite a Hilary Clinton loving Annette Benning (American Beauty), to The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles explaining Pizza-gate, the film beautifully mirrors this strange political epoch, in which simulations of reality often seem more authentic than reality itself.
Home Invasion (Graeme Arnfield, 2023) © Graeme Arnfield
The all-seeing eye of domestic surveillance in Graeme Arnfield’s Home Invasion
Look on YouTube or any community WhatsApp group and you can find hours of footage captured by video doorbell cameras: attempted burglaries, disgruntled delivery drivers, or the nocturnal activities of animals. This footage has even been used by law enforcement to help solve crimes, leading to a culture that is completely obsessed with the self-policing of neighbourhoods. But is it worth the erosion of our privacy? Jumping off from the prevalence of doorbell cameras and their role in making surveillance technology ubiquitous, Arnfield’s film charts the entwined history of technology and the curtailing of our civil liberties. From the story of Marie van Britten Brown who invented the first doorbell camera in 1966 to keep herself safe, only to become obsessed with the images she observed, to the role the telephone played in D.W. Griffith’s use of parallel edits to build dramatic tension, the film explores the various ways that these technologies have invaded our homes. Choosing to shoot his essay film through the voyeuristic frame of a peephole, Arnfield embraces the paranoia of our times, and uses it to explore how home and neighbourhood surveillance technologies have been normalised in the name of safety and security.
If You Don’t Watch the Way You Move (Kevin Jerome Everson, 2023) © Kevin Jerome Everson
The four and a half minutes of quiet deliberation in Kevin Jerome Everson’s If You Don’t Watch the Way You Move
Everson’s latest film begins with trap group BmE laying down their latest track in a Columbus Recording studio. As the men leave the booth to listen to the playback the sound suddenly drops out and their session is interrupted by an impromptu performance of John Cage’s 4’33”. Blending fiction and documentary, Everson's cinematic portraits of African American lives often explore aspects of black identity by focusing on everyday acts of labour and leisure. Here, he not only celebrates Black excellence, but gives space for us to contemplate stereotypical depictions of Black male rap artists in popular culture. Cage’s 4’33” is often referred to as the composer’s silent opus, but in reality it is a performance piece; one in which the audience is forced to consider the environment around them. Here Everson uses silence in much the same way; prompting questions about representations of black masculinity and the role music has played in amplifying the voices that society seeks to silence.
Last Things (Deborah Stratman, 2023) © Deborah Stratman
The beauty of Soy Sauce Crystals in Deborah Stratman’s Last Things
Combining passages from J.-H. Rosny’s 1910 novella The Death of the Earth, with microscopic imagery of Mitochondria and the rock formations of Chondrites, Deborah Stratman’s enigmatic essay film blends science fact with science fiction to depict the end of the world through a non-anthropological lens. Footage of natural phenomena like the crystallisation of salt in soy sauce, are accompanied by geophone recordings of the low vibrations made by minerals, creating a landscape that looks alien, yet feels familial on a cellular level. By tracing various evolutionary paths, Stratman expands our understanding of the world and in the process has created a film that tempers our collective anxieties about climate change with the reassuring knowledge that long after humans have ceased to roam the planet, life will find a way to endure.
Samsara (Lois Patiño, 2023) © Señor y Señora
The six lights of the Bardo Thödol in Lois Patiño’s Samsara
There’s a moment in the middle of Patiño’s latest, a film that explores the cycle of birth, death and reincarnation, in which the Spanish director asks the audience to trust him. Positioned between the tale of a young Laotian man who crosses the river every day to read the Bardo Thödol to an elderly woman and the story of a young girl in Tanzania and her pet goat, the 15 minute sequence sees Patiño transfer the film from the screen onto an entirely different canvas, one alive with our own projections. A moment of pure cinematic immersion, Patiño leads us through a sensory pathway, of pulsating lights and disorientating sounds as we cross a series of physical and spiritual borders. It's a hypnotic, transformative, and genuinely life affirming moment of cinema that will live on for generations.
The 2023 edition of the Berlinale ran from 16-26 February 2023
Patrick Gamble is a writer on film and culture, whose work has featured on Hyperallergic, BFI, Calvert Journal and Kinoscope. Further links to his writing can be found at patrickgamble.contently.com.