The Berlin Film Festival has always defined itself as a political festival. What does this mean in times of war?
The Berlinale bear as a pinTobias Schwarz/AFP
Every time the recently deceased Gina Lollobrigida entered the Zoo-Palast cinema during the 1986 Berlinale, she was wafted with a whiff of a bygone era. A diva returned to the film world when it had little to offer for her peers. And so it was only logical that “Gina Lo”, who had enchanted the cinema of the 1950s and 60s with her challenging presence, returned as jury president. What she had once broadcast seemed “bigger than life” in less than glamorous Berlin, but now she was supposed to judge the films of the time.
How she did that has since been considered a remarkable chapter in the history of the Berlinale. Gina Lollobrigida distanced herself from the decision of the jury to which she belonged. In her eyes, Reinhard Hauff’s “Stammheim” about the oppressive trial of the German judiciary against members of the Red Army Faction (RAF) was not a film, not even the material for a documentary. Gina Lollobrigida told the news magazine Spiegel at the time that a festival is there to promote film as art worldwide.
“A film festival is not a battlefield on which awards for political, commercial and personal interests are to be won.” It was a harsh judgment with which she was not willing to make any sense of Reinhard Hauff’s sparse minimalism, which in his work depicts the violence of conspiratorial terror group, but also the coldness of the judiciary. Gina Lollobrigida was by no means wrong with her concept of the battlefield.
The strong dictum of a strong woman
What makes Lollobrigida’s intervention so unique and still worth considering today is her courageous defense of the visual power of cinema. It wasn’t an argument about political attitudes, but rather an advocacy of the aesthetic dimension of the film itself. In “Stammheim”, as Lollobrigida emphasized her position, a tapestry is placed under a court record “that should be read, not filmed.” The strong dictum of a strong woman.
The Berlinale has always claimed to be a political festival. The sentence often seemed born of necessity, because Berlin is just as ineffective against the sophisticated self-reference that is displayed at the sister festival on the Croisette in Cannes as it is against the elegant lightness on the Lido in Venice. In the Berlin winter, the political seems like a label that fits well with the harsh reality of the frontline city of Berlin, which emerged from the Cold War.
The Berlinale always had great moments when political positions were urgently needed. When the Iranian director Jafar Panahi was unable to take his seat on the Berlinale jury in 2011 because he had previously been sentenced to six years in prison and a 20-year professional ban as a result of a dubious court case in Tehran, his chair in Berlin remained demonstratively empty. The symbolic gesture made the case known around the world, and the assumption that the solidarity of the film people could have contributed to Jafar Panahi being released on bail from Tehran’s notorious Evin prison after another recent arrest is quite justified.
The effect of artistic counter-speech
In the face of monstrous manifestations of power, there is little hope that artistic counter-speech or aesthetic intervention will have an effect. What does the Berlinale have to offer about the Russian war against Ukraine other than an outcry against the destruction of cultural life in Kiev, Kharkiv and elsewhere, as well as cinematic reactions to the obscene use of violence? One of the primary goals of the Russian war is the annihilation of Ukrainian culture. In contrast, film images and the voices of protest threaten to fade fatally.
The cinema is not an opinion platform through which one can circulate lists of signatures for a better world with good intentions. Rather, it lives from the inner tension of the creation of light as well as from the disruption that what is seen is able to evoke. Solidarity can be good, empathy is an important impulse. Good films, however, are less involved in a cultural conflict than they are able to describe it and play through all of its facets. Being able to trigger quarrels and riots is a constitutive part of sensual-aesthetic expression. If there is no argument about the cinema, even the reassurance that films are also able to generate appears deceptive, even as a threat.