The Locarno Film Festival (Web Exclusive)
by Richard Porton

Lili Hinstin’s first year as the artistic director of the Locarno Film Festival demonstrated that consistency remained the watchword of an event that prides itself on foregrounding rarefied art cinema while also catering to the more populist tastes of the crowds that flock to the Piazza Grande, a venue that can seat up to eight thousand spectators. Any changes made to the aesthetic agenda established by Carlo Chatrian and Olivier Père, the most influential Locarno directors of the twenty-first century, were almost indiscernible and largely cosmetic. Hinstin and her team programmed a few more French features than had been customary previously and renamed “Signs of Life,” the sidebar devoted to experimental documentaries, “Moving Ahead.” Otherwise, the same mixture of auteur-driven European features and avant-garde nonfiction that has distinguished Locarno in recent years ruled supreme.

Given Locarno’s aesthetic propensities, the awarding of the top prize, the Golden Leopard, to Pedro Costa’s Vitalina Varela seemed almost preordained. Costa is a Locarno favorite (he won the Best Director prize for Horse Money in 2014) and his idiosyncratic meld of documentary elements and highly stylized fictional re-enactments easily wooed the journalists who regard Locarno as an oasis that abjures the Hollywood blockbusters that predominate at festivals such as Toronto and—increasingly—Cannes. 

Even though the festival built toward Costa’s inevitable coronation, several other competition entries were notable for transforming deceptively conventional narrative notions into works that were, in their own fashion, as aesthetically daring as Costa’s languorous tribute to a stoic Cape Verdean woman adrift in Lisbon. (A comprehensive interview with Costa, scheduled for publication in the Spring 2020 issue of Cineaste, will illuminate many of the nuances of this strikingly beautiful, if characteristically difficult, film.)

Ulrich Köhler and Henner Winckler’s A Voluntary Year was a case in point. Köhler and Winckler take the filmsiest premise imaginable and end up crafting a low-key character study that subtly examines the precariousness of father–daughter dynamics, patriarchal attitudes, and the comic nature of rural inertia. Although Köhler’s (he is, by far, the better-known filmmaker of this duo) films are known for their preoccupation with alienated, and frequently isolated, individuals (In My Room, for example, deals with a self-styled “Robinsonade”), they are less associated with the astringent humor that permeates A Voluntary Year. 

The film deals with Jette (Maj-Britt Klenke), a young woman who ultimately resists pressure exerted on her by her father to flee the German hinterlands and spend her “gap year” from university volunteering for an NGO in Costa Rica. The father, Urs (Sebastian Rudolph), a rigidly moralistic doctor susceptible to bouts of anger, is superficially altruistic. Nevertheless, Jette yearns to break free of his control and deliberately misses her plane to Central America in order to camp out near home with her rather dense boyfriend. The result is a small-scale chamber drama with intermittent eruptions of humor. Jette’s abandonment of responsibility, while fundamentally apolitical, effectively undercuts her father’s authoritarian tendencies. A sparse narrative in which little happens, the film is quite effective in conveying how even the most banal decisions in life can become laden with unexpected significance. 

In a far more whimsical vein, the experimental documentarian Marie Losier’s Felix in Wonderland, screened out of competition, delighted audiences with its portrait of the German avant-garde musician Felix Kubin. Something of a punk John Cage, Kubin dabbles in various genres but still derives much of his inspiration from tinkering with the Korg MS-20 synthesizer, a versatile instrument, and inexhaustible conduit for creativity, he discovered in 1980. The film opens with the resourceful musician placing a microphone in the mouth of a dog in Slovakia. After the lackadaisical dog’s jabs at the mic prove insufficiently cacophonous, better results are produced when the pooch lunges for a bread roll that camouflages the device. Rehearsals for Kubin’s orchestral piece, “Falling Still,” confirm that he’s as ambitious as he is eccentric; the theme of falling is explored with the assistance of a string ensemble, a boy’s choir, video contributions by Losier herself and, of course, a synthesizer. 

Despite the appeal of freshly minted movies, Locarno’s annual retrospectives often prove more alluring than many of the ballyhooed premieres. Quite fortuitously, a bureaucratic snafu that delayed 2019’s planned Blake Edwards retrospective resulted in the scheduling of “Black Light,” an ambitious survey curated by Greg de Cuir. A thematic series that challenged knee-jerk generic and historical assumptions, de Cuir assembled an eclectic group of films that illuminate the black experience. According to de Cuir, an “important aim was to crack up the prevailing definition of Black cinema and to try to offer something more wide-ranging and communal.” 

In practical terms, this “communal” aesthetic entails an expansive definition of black cinema that goes beyond films helmed by Black directors or movies featuring exclusively black casts. Within the retrospective, established African American, African, or Afro-Caribbean classics such as Do the Right Thing, Daughters of the Dust, Black Girl, and The Harder They Come rubbed shoulders with films by Quentin Tarantino (Jackie Brown), Jean Grémillon (Dainah la métisse), and Robert Wise (Odds Against Tomorrow) that, either blatantly or overtly, deal with racial tensions. 

To cite one prominent example, the critique of American racism embedded in Wise’s Odds Against Tomorrow can certainly be ascribed as much to its blacklisted radical screenwriter, Abraham Polonsky (screen credit originally went to his “front,” the novelist John Oliver Killens), as to Wise—known for gritty film noirs before he cemented his reputation as the director of the saccharine, but hugely successful, The Sound of Music. But it’s also reasonable to argue that Harry Belafonte, who co-stars with Robert Ryan in this tale of a doomed heist, is the movie’s true auteur. The film was made under the aegis of Belafonte’s HarBel Productions and his close collaboration with Polonsky ensured that his character—a down on his luck musician who reluctantly participates in an inadvisable robbery—was neither a demonized black villain nor an idealized hero of color on the order of many of his friend Sidney Poitier’s early roles. 

Its avant-gardist aura notwithstanding, Locarno is not averse to welcoming celebrities, who invariably appear to enjoy the city’s lakeside charm, to the festival. While I missed Hilary Swank’s visit, I was present when Locarno awarded its annual Pardo d’onore Manor (Leopard of Honour) to John Waters, the onetime enfant terrible of trash cinema (William Burroughs christened him the “pope of trash”), who now seems positively avuncular. Hintsin hailed him for his tendency to spurn “political correctness” and the Spanish director and all-around provocateur Albert Serra, who interviewed Waters in an open-air event on a scorching August day, celebrated this elder statesman of calculated bad taste as “a moral conscience of America, always original and carefree, but courageous and trenchant in his assault on the powers that be and the enemies of liberty.”

Waters is something of a paradox: even though his reputation rests on the transgressive humor of Seventies films like Pink Flamingos and Female Trouble that introduced the campier side of American “underground” cinema to mainstream audiences (he owes a great debt, as he readily admits, to Warhol and the Kuchar brothers), his public persona is closer to a randy incarnation of Will Rogers than Jean Genet. Even while admiring Serra’s recent Liberté for scenes depicting “pissing and heterosexual rimming” during their colloquy, he came off as a peculiarly homespun nonconformist.

In recent years, Waters has distinguished himself more as a touring raconteur (his one-man show resembles a stand-up act leavened with old-fashioned storytelling) and essayist (his latest collection, Mr. Know-It-All: The Tarnished Wisdom of a Filth Elder is something of a tongue-in cheek advice manual) than as a filmmaker. In the age of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, it’s apparently becoming increasingly difficult to raise money for even low-budget projects that flaunt the Waters brand of sly subversion. For this reason, it was instructive to attend a screening of what might remain Waters’s last feature—2004’s A Dirty Shame. Unabashedly silly at times, Waters’s cinematic swan song exemplifies his career’s contradictions. While the central character played by Tracey Ullman becomes an obsessional sex maniac after suffering a head injury, there’s something strangely innocent, even benign about her priapic glee. Waters’s bemused tolerance toward his characters’ unbridled sexuality brings to mind a quote attributed to both Oscar Wilde and Mrs. Patrick Campbell: “ I really don’t mind what people do, as long as they don’t do it in the street and frighten the horses.” 

Richard Porton is author of Film and the Anarchist Imagination, due to appear in a second edition from the University of Illinois Press in 2020.

Copyright © 2019 by Cineaste Magazine

Cineaste, Vol. XLV, No. 1