The consensus over the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) is that no two spectators experience the same edition in the same way – it is simply too big and diverse, holding together several divergent approaches to programming, with too many films of different filmmaking traditions for anyone to see the whole picture in the twelve days it takes to unfold. The 45th edition reportedly had 250 feature films and 200 shorts, ranging from already established titles to the world premieres of debut- or second time features. Of the latter, it must be said that the Tiger Competition as well as the Bright Future section focus on emerging filmmakers, a daring option in a worldwide festival landscape that focuses more and more on ‘confirmed’ filmmakers and leaves little space for fresh voices. Of the former, one must only list the 2015 festival darlings included in the Rotterdam selection: Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s The Assassin, Miguel Gomes’ Arabian Nights trilogy, Jia Zhangke’s Mountains May Depart, José Luis Guerín’s La academia de las musas, plus Charlie Kaufman’s Anomalisa and Whit Stillman’s recently released Love & Friendship.
This was my third consecutive attendance of IFFR and my relationship with the festival has evolved to lower inclusion and greater freedom. I discovered Rotterdam in 2014, through a Young Critics’ Trainee Project where the main duty was reporting for the Daily Tiger (which also meant I had the equivalent of a VIP pass in addressing IFFR guests and crew). I returned the following year as a journalist, gradually migrating to films I found of thematic interest while getting used to the thought that I could never, ever possibly discover all the hidden gems in the selection. In the past year I’ve become increasingly intrigued by essay cinema (i.e., briefly put, recontextualized images) and Rotterdam turned out to be just the place to find it.
Take Canadian filmmaker Dominic Gagnon’s compilation of the North, which puts together amateur footage shot somewhere within the Arctic Circle, of people putting on a show or surviving in extreme weather or just having fun against a snowy background, with occasional nods to continental pop culture. If there’s any caveat against seeing this as an anthropologically useful cross-section through the lifestyles of the (disparate) population in this area, it’s the fact that these images are self-produced rather than impartial accounts. The director himself, during the Q&A, stated that he doesn’t simply show people, but rather he shows people shooting themselves, thus adding a thin layer of exhibitionism. The same holds true for A Crackup at the Race Riots, presented as part of the Critics’ Choice program, an ‘adaptation’ by the Belgian artist trio Leo Gabin after a novel by Harmony Korine. YouTube-sourced videos of anonymous teenagers or bemused observers give a collective portrait of the selfie generation (which, judging by these clips, is also the ‘Dancing with Myself’ generation), as well as a growing impression that these images are vital to them in building their identity; in turn these images give viewers a sense of what this identity might be.
If anything, this accumulation of found footage that I’ve browsed through during my week in Rotterdam started at times to feel too immediate, too familiar, too much like a daily Facebook scroll and unlike a prompt for greater clarity. Ukrainian director Serghei Loznitsa’s The Event came as a welcome disruption. Although the technique is the same (uncommented compilation of found footage), it inherently produces historical distancing by showing archival images shot in Saint Petersburg in August 1991, during the days that marked the end of USSR. Neither a didactic film nor a triumphant one, it shows the masses of St. Petersburg taking the streets in a moment of widespread confusion: nobody knew if the regime would change and just how much freedom and reform the near future would bring. Since it’s not shot in Moscow, where the attempted anti-reformist coup took place, this footage is by definition peripheral, a witness only to the civilians’ somewhat aimless revolt. The contrast between the northern city’s majestic architecture and the precarious aspects of the citydwellers’ clothing invites further skepticism that they could possibly be the agent of social change in a continent-wide empire lasting for decades that demanded absolute obedience. Something big was about to happen, but what was it?
While my best efforts to consistently follow a certain program were mostly unsuccessful, I did watch a fair share of a curated section called ID: Community Cameras, part of this year’s Deep Focus – a thematic assembly that loyal festivalgoers might remember from past years by the name of Signals. The Event and of the North were to be found here, as well as a Romanian film titled Chuck Norris vs. Communism and the Italian nostalgia piece Porno e libertá – both, informative though less-than-lucid explorations of how a certain form of popular culture found an echo with the people that no government-sponsored form of culture would allow. It’s always revealing (and fun) to look back on past and outdated forms of censorship and note how the forbidden images did not cause society to collapse when they became permitted. In this sense I’d recommend both films to any pop-curious cinephile. And yet, since they rely on talking heads who essentially recount their memories from the eighties while unironically positioning themselves as spokesmen of history, both Chuck Norris vs. Communism and Porno e libertá leave no breathing room for critical reflection. Were US action movies a more accurate social representation than socialist realism and did they stir their Communist subjects to rebellion? Was the proliferation of porn directly connected to greater personal freedom for women? Any familiarity with the historical context of these films suggests that the answer is ‘no’, even though the films indicate ‘yes’.
In a related thematic program, ID: The Generic Self, a 2004 film by Jem Cohen goes a long way to show how our view of society is directly influenced by our place within it. (Cohen is an Afghanistan-born underground filmmaker whose 2012 Austrian-backed Museum Hours has made him slightly less underground; he has the cultural relativism to understand perspectives.) Entitled Chain, this earlier work is ostensibly set around a US mall, though the bulk of it is guerilla footage shot in many different parts of the world – and the fact that this substitution is remotely credible makes for an argument of just how pervasive the capitalist transformation of the world has become. Its protagonists are a working-class North American woman and a Japanese company representative who makes it her job to research amusement parks in the US. They wander through the same (impersonal, consumer-oriented) space and appropriate it by wholly different perceptions. Occasionally oversimplifying (especially with the Japanese woman’s character) and inadvertently sentimental (the lack of narrative evolution is overcompensated by voice-over exposition and comments), it always contains enough tension in the contrast between its protagonists. All the more striking for being made in the same year as Paul Haggis’ Crash, Chain picks up on a fact largely ignored by network narratives, which is that people inhabiting the same space have such diverging emotional trajectories that it makes meeting each other impossible.
A more openly manipulative appropriation of real events is Penny Lane’s half-animated, half-documentary film NUTS!, retelling the story of a medical pioneer (or quack, by contrasting accounts) by the name of John Brinkley. In the 1920s, Brinkley made a fortune by transplanting goat testicles to his distressed patients, claiming that it will solve their potency problems, and he subsequently put a lot of effort into building his own legend to the extent that historical truth is hard to discern – building a radio station is just one item on the list. Programmed in the Bright Future section, NUTS! mixes archive footage with different types of animation and talking-head testimonies to give a play-by-play account of his life. However, information doesn’t equal objectivity, and here the film plays its cards exceptionally well: just when we thought that its central figure emerged in clear sight, beyond the limited perceptions of his contemporaries, it pulls the rug from under us. The sometimes better alternative to the filmmakers’ non-interference with the events they describe is self-denouncing interference – proving that a subtle cue can shape a wealth of information into a univocal discourse.