In an age where nuances are more crucial than ever as an antidote to the prevailing hegemony of political and cultural discourse, the 12th edition of Dokuarts in Berlin presented 25 films from 17 countries across the world to project the use and understanding of nuances within contemporary art documentaries. As a 21st-century art form the documentary film finds itself, in equal measure, historically charged and forward-looking.
The presented films consisted of contrasting biographies and ethnographies that embraced various art forms with sociological issues that underlined complexities, conflicts and ambiguities. More than half of the films presented were directed by women or featured female artists. All films were shown in Berlin for the first time, most of them as German premieres, and many of the filmmakers were present to introduce their films and conduct a moderated audience Q&A afterwards.
The first night feature was Arcadia, a film which resulted from research into 100 years of archive footage from the British Film Institute and the BBC, with prizewinning director Paul Wright crafting an exhilarating study of Britain’s shifting –and contradictory – relationship to its natural land, oscillating between familiar and comforting, strange and eerie, to create mood and emotion from disparate places in order to provoke response. Although Wright is nominally a fiction filmmaker he has relied a lot on the nuances of images and sounds in his fiction work and Arcadia also benefits greatly from the accompanying music by Portishead’s Adrian Utley and Goldfrapp’s Will Gregory, which combines techno, folk and classical music.
Shot over an extended period, the lyrical documentary Up the Mountain (Huo shan) by Zhang Yang is a meditation on beauty and simplicity achieved by outstanding camera work and careful observation. Its central focus is the enigmatic artist and teacher Shen Jianhua and the extraordinary art school in the village of Shuanglang in Yunnan, where Shen relocated from Shanghai years before. All the students here are older women of the village and we witness the easy rhythms of life in the remote mountain settlement with its ancient traditions and rituals, and the kinship found through creation in in a place where time has stood still in the most magical way.
Paula Rego, Secrets & Stories is a unique insight into the life and work of Anglo-Portuguese painter Paula Rego, who has critically emerged as one of the most interesting figurative artists of the late 20th century. In Portugal she encountered misogyny and fascism but used her powerful pictures as a weapon against the dictatorship before moving to London. Her son, the film-maker Nick Willing, directs the notoriously private artist who surprisingly opens up to reveal secrets and stories of her unique life while preserving the enigma of her paintings, which hint at personal tragedy, manic depression and perverse fantasies.
In its German premiere, Yves Montmayeur’s portrait film Variations Kawase juxtaposes filmmaker Naomi Kawase’s extensive film career with her ongoing fascination towards Japan’s traditional art forms of music, song and performance art. Concerned that Japan’s great artistic traditions “threaten to get lost in the noise of modernity” she is trying to sustain a connection to them in Buddhism. In a way typical of contemporary Japanese culture, Kawase is seen talking to nature near her birthplace in the Kasuga forest, and at other times directing her film crew on the streets of Tokyo. The supporting short film was the award-winning Miasma, Plants and Export Paintings by Chinese artists Bo Wang and Pan Lu that focuses on the establishment of the British Botanic Empire in China and scientific research and illustration in 19th Century Guangzhou, conveying colonial expansion, science and race.
Perhaps not known to many people, Orson Welles trained as an artist before he pursued a career in the theatre and, more famously, cinema. British broadcaster turned award-winning director Mark Cousins, characteristic of his unapologetic enthusiasm for his subjects, brings a new take on the legendary film director and actor. The Eyes of Orson Welles is the result of his tireless and devoted research, with the voice-over narration serving as a letter to Welles in the afterworld, beginning with the opening shot of present-day Times Square, observing that “the despots you were fascinated by are gaining ground”. With input from his daughter Beatrice Welles and some rarely seen footage, observations and speculations on Welles’s life are interspersed with meditative studies of his graphic pieces which are extremely compelling and underline a vision that would come to fruition so early in his adult life.
Buster Keaton’s beginnings on the vaudeville circuit and the development of his trademark physical comedy and deadpan expression, particularly his extraordinary output from 1923 to 1929, immortalized him as one of the greatest actor-filmmakers in the history of cinema. Renowned American film director Peter Bogdanovich has assembled a rich collection of material from all stages of the great silent clown’s life for his documentary The Great Buster: A Celebration. With fresh, witty voiceover commentary, Bogdanovich intersperses extracts from the movies and also covers the loss of artistic independence and career decline that marked Keaton’s later years before his artistic revival in the 1950s and 1960s, up to his death in 1966. The nearly two-dozen interviews include collaborators, filmmakers, performers and friends such as Mel Brooks, Quentin Tarantino, Werner Herzog, Dick van Dyke and Johnny Knoxville.
Of all the Czech New Wave directors who left following the crushing of the Prague Spring by the Soviets in 1968, Miloš Forman was undoubtedly the most successful. His oeuvre was noted for the conflict between individualism and conformism; from his early Czech films Black Peter (1963), Loves of a Blonde (1965) and The Fireman’s Ball (1967) to his celebrated career in Hollywood with, amongst others, Taking Off (1971), One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), Amadeus (1984) and Man on the Moon (1999). After Forman’s death in 2018, film historian Robert Fischer began editing a feature-length film from an unpublished interview he conducted with Forman in 2000. The resulting Life As It Is: Miloš Forman on Miloš Forman is not only an invaluable insight into the art of filmmaking but also shows Forman’s gift for storytelling and clinical humor as Fischer guides us through a life and career that is a feast for all cinephiles.
Ziva Postec’s career as a film editor had already included working with some of the great directors of the time, like Alain Resnais and Orson Welles, before she was assigned the task of editor for French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann’s legendary epic nine-and-a-half-hour documentary Shoah (1985), a film credited with helping to awaken the public to the horrors of the Holocaust. Catherine Hébert’s portrait of Ziva Postec. The Editor Behind the Film Shoah recognizes the Israeli editor’s crucial role between 1979 and 1985, painstakingly assembling over 350 hours of interviews with witnesses, survivors, and perpetrators, alongside contemporary footage of key locations. The film is a long overdue appreciation of a remarkable woman who relentlessly devoted many years of their life to such a grueling project, especially given her role in Shoah was subsequently downplayed by Lanzmann and other supporting material.
In Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool, director Stanley Nelson takes a fresh look at the Jazz legend, its title a nod to sessions recorded during 1949 and 1950 that would form a 1957 compilation album. It is this period which forms the basis for this documentary and what was to shape both the musician and the personality. Born in 1926 to a music teaching mother and dentist father in Illinois, Davis moved to New York to study music before dropping out and becoming a member of Charlie Parker’s bebop band in 1944; Nelson details his subsequent career and life up to his death in 1991. Though a little sparse in its use of Davis’s music, this biopic uses unpublished archive material alongside intimate recollections of some well-known colleagues, scholars, his family and various partners in an almost encyclopedic but nonetheless compelling new take on the legend who was total genius, albeit part self-destructive.
With The Haendel Variations, filmmaker Christine Jezior focuses on the inner life of Polish-British violinist Ida Haendel, considered a legend among professional musicians and listeners of classical music alike. Over eight years, she followed the musician with her camera and, utilising footage that was shot between 2009 and 2017, constructs an encapsulating portrayal of an extraordinary woman, learning that her love for music and for her fellow human beings are virtuous qualities in old age that gives meaning and life to the now 91-year-old. After retiring from performance, the everyday life of Haendel oscillates between loneliness and hopefulness, nostalgia and the joy of living.
A look at a fast disappearing part of Pakistani culture, Indus Blues tells the story of traditional musicians in Pakistan, where being a musical performer is a social taboo and is being forcibly eroded from its culture. Director Jawad Sharif takes us on a journey through the spectacular landscapes of Pakistan from the northern Karakoram mountain range to the southern coastline to find perhaps the last remaining masters of Pakistani traditional folk music. The unique performances and rarely seen musical instruments, from musicians and craftsmen respectively, underlines an ancient and rich culture being marginalised in a country riddled with political turmoil, economic challenges, and social identity problems.
In 2016 Japanese architect Toyo Ito was commissioned to design the International Baroque Museum in Puebla, Mexico in which he attempted to push the boundaries of design. However, its complexity meant Mexican builders did not know how to solve the construction process, with time and budget running just nine months before the scheduled grand opening. Sin Manual/No Further Instructions by Francisco Gonzalez Pina is a film that deals with the building process of architecture and philosophy within the Feng Shui approach, involving creativity and suspense in order to go beyond the limits of human endeavor.
Ma Ke Liang is the former artistic director of the Shanghai Chinese Opera Theater and his son, Ma Liang, is one of China’s most influential contemporary conceptual artists. Our Time Machine follows their complex relationship, now overshadowed by the father’s Alzheimer’s disease, as the two renowned cultural innovators collaborate in the son’s mechanical puppet theater play about time travel and immortality titled Papa’s Time Machine. The production’s ambitious artistic vision hauntingly echoes the Liangs’ own lives as they grapple with fading memories and a sense of time running out.
A Moon for My Father is a deeply intimate, personal and moving essay film that is collaboration between Iranian filmmaker Mania Akbari and her partner, English sculptor Douglas White. It is loosely structured around the idea of poetic letters, in alternating voiceovers, between Akbari and White as they reflect on how their lives now relates to their family and childhood. Through these meditations on beauty and body image following Akbari’s recovery from a double mastectomy, the result profoundly connects notions of life and images of art in a dream association that also avoids the conventions of tension or trauma.