Munich International Festival of Film Schools 2007
By Leslie Weisman, DC Film Society Member
The Munich International Festival of Film Schools, the first and still foremost fest to offer the world’s movie-going public a tantalizing glimpse of the filmmakers of the future — onetime participants include Oscar winners Caroline Link and Florian Gallenberger, and Golden Palm winner Lars von Trier — is, like its celebrated hometown, an unlikely but uniquely successful amalgam of disparate elements. Where else can you find, almost side by side, a cinematic tribute to the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights comprising 26 award-winning films, and a trophy (sweetened with a €10,000 award) for the best beer commercial? Like the city’s elegant Residenz and legendary Hofbräuhaus, the two co-exist in happy harmony, fostering a spirit of fellowship and making the concluding awards ceremony — about which more below — not so much the be-all and end-all of the competition, but more an occasion for mutual congratulations, as each nominated film (or part of it) is screened for an appreciative audience.
Some 3,300 films have made their way to the festival since its inception in 1981, with 51 films from 28 film schools and 20 nations represented this year. Five were from the U.S., one of which, You Should Have the Body (Michael Masarof, 2007), a timely tale of a young Muslim couple who receive a disturbing visit from Homeland Security, won first prize in the Human Rights short film competition. Following precedent, in this 27th year virtually every film was sold out, including repeat screenings. (This was happily facilitated by the decision four years ago to return the fest to its original autumn time slot, after five years of running a parallel summertime track to its “big brother” Filmfest München.)
The best films I saw ran the gamut from interesting and imaginative to challenging and astonishing, with some following the paths of established directors with a surprisingly sure hand and others making full use of the latest technology, either to explore new territory or to re-examine cinematic tropes from a wholly new perspective. And while these were nominally student films, some have already won prestigious awards at other festivals; the fact that they were not feature length — ranging from 2 to 53 minutes, with most averaging around 20 — was sometimes, but not always, a defining factor. For some, the strength in narrative and character development belied expectations, while others excelled precisely because their themes or concepts worked best in miniature. Some highlights:
The Secret in the Wind (Fon Jon De Mi Mi; Wang Yen-Ni, Taiwan 2006) is at once a sensitive portrayal of family tensions and a skillful cinematic utilization of light and darkness, silence and sound. It begins with a little girl of about six who comes home from school, finds the kitchen empty and, thinking to surprise her mom, springs opens the bedroom door with a playful “Gotcha!” — only to find the room empty and a note instructing her to make dinner for herself: mom will be late. Nonplussed, she makes dinner, sets the table and, as the hours pass and the shadows darken into night, falls asleep. Her almost uncanny maturity is subsequently gainsaid by the sweet and childlike “revenge” she gets later (although any actual connection is left to the viewer) when, ordered to light the tapers for prayer, she does so... as they explode in a glorious, irreverent cacophony of light and sound.
As surely as the dining room in the opening sequence, so the film itself slowly darkens: we learn that the child stubbornly (and we suspect desperately) refuses to admit that her father is dead, while the mother, dealing with her own demons, angrily frustrates the little one’s attempts to “resurrect” him at every turn, seemingly untouched by compassion. In the end the child comes to terms with the truth, the mother finds a way to deal with her daughter’s pain, and the film closes with a lovely cinematic metaphor of the need, and the ability, to let go.
In a Q&A after the film, the director, who took from her own life experience in creating the film, was asked what the fireworks signify. In Taiwan, Wang told us, when a relative passes away, you pray with incense sticks, as a show of respect. The little girl thinks that if she refuses to accept them, and instead sets them off as fireworks, it may make her father “not dead.” When later she goes outside and observes the holiday fireworks in the sky, she makes the connection, and begins to understand that her father’s death is real.
What sounds like fireworks is all too often the sound of firearms, and death is all too real, in a land that lies a continent and a culture away. But that does not make the demise of a cherished animal companion any easier to bear for those whose childhood is but a distant memory, and who also cannot seem to make their family members understand their pain. The Death of Shula (Mota Shel Shula; Asaf Korman, Israel 2007), which won the Special Prize of the Jury President, cinematographer Michael Ballhaus (about whom more below), even goes a step further: not only are the events based on the director’s personal experience; they are portrayed in the film by his own family.
The film brings us achingly close to a very private matter and takes us step by step, if not necessarily through the stages of grief, then through the stages of trying to get others to understand and share it. The superbly photographed arid desert landscape forms a metaphorical backdrop for what is, for the old man, the puzzling failure of his family, wrapped up in their own lives and concerns, to join him in his grief for their elderly and ailing dog, Shula, whose death is left in his hands.
Grief and grieving of quite another kind, form the subtext for Marçal Forés’s Friends Forever (United Kingdom 2007), which portrays the impact of the sudden death of a teenage boy on his best friend. Like the little girl in The Secret in the Wind, George is having a hard time coming to terms with this death; like her, he appears unwilling to admit what is clearly a fact, and suffers the taunts and jeers of his classmates as she does the impatience of her mother. Unlike her, however, his inability to let go is not so clearly psychological, but rather has undertones of both the psychic (his persistent visions of, and interactions with, his bruised and bleeding but seemingly none-the-worse-for-wear friend, are so real as to seem almost an uninterrupted continuation of their friendship) and the psychedelic, with the two boys getting high from licking cannabis leaves. We are never sure what is real, and what is part of George’s imagination. Yet we are unprepared for the ending, which not only doesn’t clear up the confusion; it leaves us stunned.
As is not uncommon in teenage friendships, the two boys in Friends Forever are conspicuous in their differences: the nerd and the rebel. The same can be said for an even more unlikely pair of companions whose friendship ends not with a bang, but with a whimper: Mig & Che (Che & I; Morten BH, Denmark 2007), whose respective white-bread and hippie parents have each managed to raise the sons the other might rightly have expected to get. While the premise seems simple and straightforward, its cinematic articulation is complex, sometimes intriguingly so, but at others, to a point where it becomes confusing for the viewer. Unfortunately, the director was not available for after-screening discussion; I would have loved to have heard the questions (and asked a few myself).
Questions aplenty informed several of the more memorable films in this year’s line-up, among them Re: Monday (Adam Burr, USA 2007), The Secret of the Blood (El secreto de la sangre; María Viktoria Andino, Argentina 2006), and Now Everybody Seems to Be Happy (Ahora todos parecen contentos; Gonzalo Tobal, Argentina 2007), which won the €7,500 VFF Young Talent Award for best film.
Re: Monday’s title itself is deceptively simple, as is the setting: the front seat of an eighties-era van. This is a delicate, beautifully paced and shot film that makes optimal use of long lenses and extreme close-ups, informed by a careful symmetry throughout. In it, a young Asian-American woman and a middle-aged white man chat with first-date nervousness about themselves and why they chose to meet the way they did: via an Internet chat room. (The film was inspired, Burr told us later, by his fascination with the Internet, chat rooms, and “what brings people together and pushes them apart.”)
Slowly, we get to know these two gentle, lost souls, and our sympathy for them grows, as we begin to piece together how this seemingly utterly mismatched couple could find themselves drawn to each other. As the film draws to a close, we learn that they are both seeking the same thing from each other, and it’s not what one would first suspect, given the circumstances. In the end, they find it together, as we look on in horror, disbelief — and understanding.
The Secret of the Blood is also one that elicits horror and disbelief, although here, they are felt both within and outside of the film. Indeed, it is a pitiable lack of understanding that brings these emotions to the fore. A frightening parable taken partly from real life, the film brings us to an early mid-20th-century girls’ Catholic boarding school, in a small town or village. As it enigmatically unfolds in a period palette of browns, blacks, whites, and muted golds, we are caught up short when the titular red bursts savagely upon the screen. No, it is not a tale of murder; it is one of a natural occurrence in an environment where such things are not even acknowledged, much less explained or discussed. A telling exploration of the price of ignorance and the failure to communicate — the devastating cost of keeping secrets, where none were needed.
Secrets are not just needed but indispensable, at least in the protagonists’ eyes, in Now Everybody Seems to Be Happy, whose title was taken from a news article written after the 2001 event — the “kidnapping”of a high school teacher by his adoring (female) student — came to a successful conclusion. A film that, in the words of the jury, “in a subtle and sensitive way... captures images that reflect the dangerous territory of human [behavior],” it also uses music, most notably the lyrical and familiar Adagio of Mozart’s Clarinet concerto in A Major, to frame the story. A road movie with a distinctive twist, Now Everybody Seems to Be Happy exhibits a sure narrative hand and, given what must have been a temptation to send a “message,” refreshingly abstains from it. (When asked why he chose the Mozart piece, the director told me that it was on one of the CDs that played in their car during the 10-hour drive to the location, and that it struck him as a perfect expression of the sense of acceptance he wanted to portray.) The film also won the first prize of the Cinéfondation Jury at Cannes this year.
A sense of acceptance is crucial for the two characters in Padam... (José Manuel Carrasco, Spain 2006), which won both the ARTE [a corporate entity that supports European film production] short-film prize of €6,000 and the €5,000 Prix Interculturel for best film fostering intercultural dialog in Munich. (It’s also been nominated for a Goya as Best Short Film, Fiction in its native land.) Pilar, a fortyish single, places a personals ad out of a wan, what-have-I-got-to-lose-anyway sort of desperation, and is alternately bemused and appalled by the man who answers it, whose background and interests seem (despite the fact that he was ostensibly the best of the bunch) light years away from her own. The yin and the yang of their equally strong personalities provide both an engaging story and a cultural paradigm of the immigrant experience that hits home for anyone who has ever been on either side of it — which these days, is all of us. As the jury noted, the film’s sensitive, honest and humorous depiction of this unlikely encounter “giv[es] people hope in these dark and complex times.”
Hope is indeed what sustains a beleaguered family of four determined to live a normal life in war-torn 1999 Yugoslavia in another dual prize winner, Michaela Kezele’s Milan (Germany 2007). A moving portrayal of the utter senselessness of war, Milan (the title is taken from the name of the little brother through whose eyes much of the action is seen), while deeply human and humanist, is equally adept at delineating he existential toll it takes on innocents. The film has been widely acclaimed; in Munich, it took the €4,000 Prosieben Prize for Best Director of a German Film, and the much desired Panther Prize: four weeks’ worth of free use of €10,000 in dolly equipment.
Responding to questions after the screening, Kaezele told us that criticism of her film has come from both sides of the Serb-Croat divide: Serbian audiences complain that it’s one-sided, with some even walking out after seeing the character of a U.S. pilot; hatred of Americans, seen as engineers of the NATO bombing, runs deep. Others accuse her of lobbying for Serbs (one must assume, by showing them acting and feeling like human beings). But Kaezele will have none of it, insisting that her background has made her highly sensitive to issues of fairness: one of her parents is Serb, the other Croatian, forcing her to learn early in life the importance of not taking sides. In an interview with the Munich newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, Kaezele stated simply: “It’s not enough to say: these are the bad guys, these are the good. War is a complicated affair, and there are many tragic stories hidden behind it. There’s politics, and there are people who have to live with it. My film is about people... The most beautiful thing for me, is that Milan has moved people equally in different countries.”
No doubt about it: one of the things movies do best, and most meaningfully, is to move people emotionally. And yet — as some of the finest filmmakers in the history of the medium have gleefully (and often repeatedly) demonstrated — movies also excel at making people laugh, both at themselves and at the things that happen (or could happen) to them and to their hapless friends and neighbors.
The films that filled the Filmmuseum screen during Festival week included not a few that showed a distinct, and sometimes distinctive comic touch, often aided by a sharp eye for the irony of the human condition. Two that deserve special mention are Polska Road Movie (Bartosz Grudziecki, Germany 2007) and Scarlet Sunrise (Eduard Grau and Edward Edwards, United Kingdom 2007, which won the ARRI Award for Best Documentary, with a €4000 voucher for equipment). The similarity between the two ends there.
Polska Road Movie takes us on the road with a middle-aged German couple with... well... issues: wife has persuaded reluctant hubby to take her on quixotic search for long-lost (male) Polish pen pal whose photos she’s unaccountably kept, and whom she remembers having promised, some twenty years before, to buy chocolates for if she ever got to Poland. Hubby gets lost on twisting, unmarked roads in Polish countryside. Enter pretty blonde hitchhiker, who offers to direct them to their destination. Wife gives her the gimlet eye; hubby gives her the once-over. And the games begin.
Asked about influences of Polish directors, director Grudziecki agreed that Polanski’s Knife in the Water had informed the film’s narrative structure, adding that he’d insisted on shooting it himself so that he could move quickly: Remarkably, it was shot in less than a week.
One would hate to imagine Scarlet Sunrise as a solo effort, not least because that would deprive us of the dynamic duo of Eduard (Grau) and Edward (Edwards), who — in addition to fulfilling their post-screening directorial duties by answering, or skillfully or unapologetically deflecting, questions — regaled the audience with a routine straight out of Vegas (or the Catskills). Which was the last thing we expected; after all, their film is a documentary, which the catalog soberly describes thus: “On the Norwegian island of Svalbard, in the Arctic circle, there still exists a Russian coal mining settlement created in the days of communism. Their inhabitants try to survive, isolated from the world.”
Try it they might, but their decades-long isolation is about to end, or at least in part, with our indefatigable explorers determined to open their world to the wonders of ours, and vice-versa. Among the many memorable characters we meet is Vassily, the town’s anesthesiologist: “Whether I’m good or not doesn’t matter,” he tells us matter-of-factly. “I’m the only one.” Let’s just say that the scene shot in a dentist’s chair is not one you’d want to show a prospective patient. (Although Vassily is arguably not completely to blame: from the looks of it, they’re not using any anesthetic.) Perhaps my favorite scene was the concluding one. We hear the song, “Scarlet Sunrise,” that gave the film its title: “You are the love of my life, don’t leave me...” as shots of residents embracing their loved ones — including a farmer cradling a piglet, who gazes up at him adoringly — fill the screen.
The audience was abuzz with questions. How did you manage to break Barentsburg’s wall of silence? Did you have a guide who provided entree? “We had a guide,” said Edward (or was it Eduard?), “but he disappeared in the wilderness and left us.” Why did you film the guy getting a tooth pulled? “Only in two months does a person get a tooth pulled out. And we were THERE.” (The pride could not be concealed.) The hospital is a huge affair with some 300 beds — totally empty. “So the nurse was waiting in the door for a patient, and we walked in. She put her arms around us.” How many inhabitants are there in Barentsburg? “Four hundred.” “No, no, five hundred.” “Four.” “Five.” (We never did get that settled.) “And only forty women.”
Maybe that was the problem of the guy in The Safety in Rubber (Amit Itzcar, Israel 2007), “a lonely man in a room looking for comfort and company” who may have been inspired by the current hit “Lars and the Real Girl.” Only this fellow (played by the director, completely nude, who also served as screenwriter, DP, editor, producer, and production designer) takes it to a whole ‘nother level: his babe is inflatable, and looks about as real as Betty Boop on a bad day. While the films weren’t rated, this is definitely not one you’d want to take your ten-year-old to. Suffice it to say, his exertions on the lady are such that the inevitable happens, and we watch her slowly deflate, squealing and hissing all the way (unlike the audience, which was eerie in its utter stillness throughout the film).
The director/actor/DP... etc. came onstage (yes, dressed) to take questions afterwards. Why did he choose to act in it as well as doing all the technical stuff? “Loneliness was the concept of the movie,” Itzcar replied, which also made it seem natural for him to do everything himself, including play the lead. (It was his diploma film at MFA.) The film opened in São Paolo, but could not be shown in its homeland, where it was labeled obscene and perverse.
On the opposite end of the comfort spectrum, although it too is a film entirely without dialogue, was the delightful Tango ›Camisa‹ (Saida Kurpesheva, Russia 2006), which won the Student Camera Award of €1,000 plus an additional €2,000 contributed by the jury president Michael Ballhaus. In five brief minutes, it takes us into the dreary, sweaty workday of a laundress who wants more — and finds it in her imagination. That is... in the arms of a white shirt, which she takes as her dance partner with a come-hither smile, and which suddenly is transformed into her personal Prince Charming. Together they dance a voluptuous tango, her pinned-up hair falling freely to her shoulders and whirling madly to the beat until, exhausted and exhilarated, she feels him sweep her off her feet. Then, suddenly — as swiftly as he appeared — he’s gone. And she begins to weep. But only for a moment. Defiantly casting off the emotional garb of the maiden who finds her prince turned back into a frog, she picks up the shirt and roguishly throws it over the camera lens. And we realize that she will never look upon shirts the same way again. (Neither will we!)
While a white shirt can inspire a fanciful tango by a young woman, in real life, a yellow dress inspired acts of love, bravery, and desperation to fulfill the dream of a beloved older brother for a young woman. The Yellow Dress (Das gelbe Kleid, Lisa Schiewe, Germany 2007) takes us into one of Rio’s infamous favelas, where despite the rawness and brutality that tear at the life of its young residents, remarkably, not all lose their sense of justice, loyalty, faith, or the ability to dream.
The director was inspired by a true story in Rio, where a young man was murdered by the drug dealer he had been working for so as to earn money to support himself, his younger brother and their mother, after he made the fatal mistake of loudly and publicly dissing the dealer. His last wish, which his little brother is determined to fulfill, was to be able to purchase a beautiful yellow dress his girlfriend had seen in a shop window, and had so longed for. The movie was shot in that very neighborhood, with few professional actors (the children attend the school made famous by City of God); crowd scenes were shot without telling the townspeople in advance, although they were, Schiewe told us, very friendly and welcoming.
As could be said (although to be honest, he would probably be the only one to say it) of the prone protagonist of Milos Tomic’s Spitted by Kiss (2007), a whirling, dialogue-less burst of creative energy from Belgrade by way of the Czech Republic. In this highly imaginative, kaleidoscopic, semi-animated film, stones and other erstwhile inanimate objects pivot, bounce and skitter while conspiratorially murmuring and barking at each other like demented Disney rejects, as a guy lies spread-eagled on the sidewalk, courting the woman of his dreams by uninhibitedly engaging the parts of her that are nearest to him. She responds, appropriately enough, by kicking him in the head.
Michael Ballhaus
For me, though, the REAL kick in the head was the hour and I half I sat in a packed theater hearing the legendary cinematographer Michael Ballhaus, who served as jury president, speak edifyingly and expansively about the people and events that have informed his life and life’s work. Beginning as a teenager taking publicity photos at his parents’ theater, it was only a few years later when, visiting the set of Max Ophüls’ Lola Montez, Ballhaus, who recently received the International Achievement Award of the American Society of Cinematographers in Los Angeles, realized that his future was in the cinema. Interestingly, in his future lay his past: a DP recommended that to realize that dream, Ballhaus first study photography. He did, and graduated summa cum laude.
It was Rainer Werner Fassbinder favorite and fellow filmmaker Ulli Lommel who introduced him to the cinematic wunderkind/enfant terrible, with whom he was to complete 17 films during “a long and very intense working relationship.” Fassbinder didn’t like him at first, Ballhaus told us, and was “very tough and very pushy,” largely out of the need to keep a close eye on the bottom line: time was money, which was in short supply. Ballhaus recalled being asked to scout out locations, only to have Fassbinder come up with better ideas himself. Rather than discouraging him, these experiences helped Ballhaus develop his own approach and hone his own creative sensibilities.
Unlike someone such as Andrei Tarkovsky, Ballhaus continued, Fassbinder never talked about preparation or style ahead of time, but was “very visual” and spontaneous, with most everything improvised on the spot. Even when the two agreed, Fassbinder’s genius was his ability to take already good ideas and improve on them: for example, the celebrated double-360? turn in Martha, which stemmed from his insistence that the moment be memorable and ”very remarkable” for the audience. Ballhaus had suggested that the actors go halfway rather than completely around each other, because a double turn would necessitate two sets of tracks, one a foot higher than the other. Fassbinder solved the problem by simply instructing the actors to turn themselves while circling each other. Problem solved — and film history made.
Fassbinder’s obsessive work habits and boundless creativity enabled him to churn out film after astonishing film, writing the script for his masterpiece Berlin Alexanderplatz — a 13-hour opus shown first on German television — in only three months. “That’s something you can only do, I hate to say it,” noted Ballhaus ruefully, “when you’re heavy on cocaine.”
While fueling his creativity, drugs also made Fassbinder unpredictable: “He played really bad games with me,” Ballhaus told us, at one point refusing to talk to him for several days without explanation. Frustrated, Ballhaus quit. (Years later they again worked together, with no problem.) Fassbinder would ruminate about possibly working in the U.S., he added, so it was ironic that it was Ballhaus who went; Fassbinder never made it. That said, given his personality and work methods, he would never have fit in as seamlessly as Ballhaus, who was happy to find “kindred souls” in the U.S., and has become the go-to DP for such Hollywood luminaries as Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola.
Ballhaus spoke warmly of Scorsese who is, he noted, the complete opposite of Fassbinder, relying on careful preparation to the extent possible rather than leaving things to the inspiration of the moment: “From Day 1, it was a dream to work with him.” He told us regretfully of a “low-budget”($20 million) film that he was to make with Scorsese in Israel, which the studio ultimately pulled the plug on. Ballhaus told him that to accomplish all they needed to do, and stay within budget, they’d have to complete sixteen shots a day. Scorsese didn’t blink — nor did he waste a minute, spending 10 days and nights on the set, and barely setting foot in his trailer.
Scorsese, as we know, “is a movie freak — watches a movie every day,” even when directing. “He is obsessed with images,” which is great for a DP. Is it restricting, though? Not at all: “He doesn’t dictate the mechanism, how the scene is shot; he leaves that entirely to the DP,” although he likes to move the camera a lot, which he feels helps to tell the story (the “link between motion and emotion”). Scorsese admires Alfred Hitchcock tremendously, and will often recall shots from favorite Hitchcock films to explain what he’s looking for.
Explaining his own methodology, Ballhaus said he makes not only a shot list but, to save time, a list of the order in which he’s like to shoot them based on camera angle. Among current directors, in addition to Scorsese, Ballhaus likes Robert Redford, “a brilliant man, I love him very much” who nonetheless “doesn’t have a lot of visual ideas,” so Ballhaus tapes rehearsals to help him. The DP’s role is much more collaborative in the U.S., he added, where he is the “creator of images” and enjoys considerable freedom — especially with directors like Mike Nichols, who is “great working with actors, the best,” but leaves the camera work to Ballhaus. Essentially, “you have to know your director,” and fit your method to his.
Of course, to know your director is not necessarily to love him, as may be the case with Coppola, who during the filming of Dracula told Ballhaus (who later found out that Coppola had chosen him because of his reputation for being fast and able to come in under budget) that any cost overruns would come out of the cameraman’s salary. Still, Ballhaus loves his job, and is happy to work with directors who also love theirs. “You’ve got to be really flexible.”
Ballhaus next screened a clip from Scorsese’s Oscar-winning The Departed and offered an inside look at how the director resolved one of the key creative decisions confronted by any director with a character who must “age” significantly: how to portray Frank Costellos’s (Jack Nicholson’s) 25-year age span. Using CGI would have been convincing, but costly. So Scorsese and Ballhaus agreed to shoot it in the dark, reasoning that everyone knows Nicholson’s voice, so there wouldn’t be any question who was speaking. An added advantage was the air of mystery and sinister atmosphere it would impart to the scene. Ballhaus admitted that it was hard to keep the light off Nicholson, and that the experience was challenging, but fun.
Now came time for the questions. The first one addressed Scorsese’s apparent predilection for violence in his films. Ballhaus responded with great candor that this was the hard part in his relationship with the great director: while Ballhaus hates violence, Scorsese is “almost obsessed” with it. “In The Departed, we had to kill like 24 people. It’s not fun — it’s really not. It becomes abstract, the killing process. But you do it. You hate it, but you do it.” Why did he think Scorsese has this obsession? Ballhaus speculated that it may go back to Scorsese’s early years growing up in Little Italy with a best friend whose father was a Mafia boss, adding that if Scorsese hadn’t been small with asthma, “he could’ve been one too. But he had to sit home and watch TV” — where, of course, there were lots of movies.
Asked whether Fassbinder’s dream to make movies in the United States would have found fertile soil here, given his own predilection for violence and the success of such films in the U.S., Ballhaus was doubtful. There would almost inevitably have been a clash, both on a personal/philosophical level — between Fassbinder’s dominant personality, and the “teamwork” ethos that informs U.S. filmmaking; and on a practical level — between Fassbinder, the cinematic polymath’s, insistence on either doing or hands-on managing everything himself, and the U.S. method of working with a crew and the concomitant union rules.
A seemingly simple question came from a potential DP: How do you do what you do? I want to be able to do it well. Ballhaus smiled. “You have to recognize that every film is unique,” and go from there. “If you really want to do it, it will happen. I promise.” How was it to work (on The Departed) with legendary editor Thelma Schoonmaker? Marvelous, said Ballhaus. “She is so close to Marty, to watch them working together is fantastic. Watching the film, I was so entranced, I forgot I shot it!” Among his personal favorites, Ballhaus listed Goodfellas and The Fabulous Baker Boys.
Did you ever want to be a director? Lots of DPs have. But no, not Ballhaus: “I love my job.” Besides, “you’re more independent as a DP, and there’s not as much work or responsibility.” Any tips for aspiring DPs? “Know that the director is in charge,” but be ready — and know how, and when — to suggest ideas. How do you lead actors to work in relation to the frame? “Some actors know that the audience is the lens,” said Ballhaus, adding that it’s important to tell actors what size lens you’re using. Leonardo DiCaprio is particularly attuned to it, he noted. On the other hand, some stage actors come to the set not even knowing where the lens is.
And then there are actor-directors like Robert De Niro, who clearly knows where it is, but doesn’t allow himself to be limited by it: “The focus puller never knows where [De Niro] is. We’re happy when he stays in the room all the time.”
What about coming to the U.S.? You made it, and reached the top; is there still a place for young European DPs in Hollywood? There will always be, Ballhaus assured them, and especially for German directors, some of whom — Wolfgang Petersen, Wim Wenders, Werner Herzog — have had great success in the U.S. “And if you make it in America, you know the world will always be open to you.” Of course, there are things to keep in mind once you get there; for example, accents: “I could hardly tell the difference between a New York accent and a Boston accent,” but in The Departed it was crucial. The most important thing, Ballhaus concluded, is to listen. If you do that, it will serve you well, regardless of the director.
Listening certainly served us well in the Munich Filmmuseum that morning, as did watching during the whole of that remarkable week. Those of us visiting from the U.S. may have missed Thanksgiving, but in some ways, we could be said to have gotten the better deal, exchanging caloric overload for cinematic nourishment. And the awards ceremony gave us even more to be thankful for: going against type, it too was calorie-conscious, the emcees warning us that, as most of the small fest budget had been used to bring the student filmmakers to Munich, the ceremony was to be guided by three principles:
1) Directors are good with pictures, but not necessarily with words. So we won’t make them give acceptance speeches.
2) If they nonetheless want to, they have one minute.
3) We’ll try not to talk too much either, but if we do, you’re free to leave.
Needless to say, no one took them up on it. Besides the fact that they were by now old friends, having engagingly introduced most of the films and interviewed the directors during the festival, it would have been somewhat self-defeating to attend an awards ceremony, and leave before the awards were given out!
One that deserves special mention was the first award presented, which, perhaps appropriately for Munich, was the König Ludwig Trophy for the best Kaltenburg beer commercial, presented (and what could be more appropriate, or more Munich?) by His Royal Highness Prince Luitpold of Bavaria. The ad ribbed our favorite experience, going through the airport security line, where a Japanese businessman with three beautiful bottles of beer is told that they violate the “no liquids” rule. What to do? His disappointment lasts but a moment, as the only real solution comes to him. As the laughter subsided, one could only hope the bathrooms were working on his plane...
This is one fest to add to your calendar if you care passionately about the future of cinema, and would like a sneak peek at some of its leading directors, actors and cinematographers. See you there next year!
Visit the Munich International Festival of Film Schools website in English and check out the award winners.
