41st International Film Festival Rotterdam #2 FRIDAY 27 january 2012
“I did a very Chinese thing; I pirated a café from Beijing”, IFFR programmer Gertjan Zuilhof said at the opening of the IFFR’s Ai Weiwei café last night. In tribute to prolific Chinese artist Ai Weiwei – prevented by a travel ban from the Chinese authorities from attending Rotterdam in person – the festival has created a café in his honour. Open daily from 12:00 to 20:00, in
ddition to providing café fare and free wi-fi, the café (at Karel Doormanstraat 278) is showa ing installations by Ai Weiwei in the type of intimate gallery setting in which such work could perhaps be seen in China, where it is difficult to screen in higher-profile venues. photo: Lucia Guglielmetti
Medicine man This year, the IFFR focuses in on Finland with a programme dedicated to movie polymath Peter von Bagh. By Geoffrey Macnab
Writer-director-curator-historian and all round movie polymath Peter von Bagh, whose career is celebrated in a special Signals sidebar, was 13 years old when he first became infected by acute cinephilia. Von Bagh used to ride his bicycle three kilometres to the centre of Oulu, his home town in the north of Finland, where there were several excellent cinemas. “It must have been films like Elia Kazan’s East of Eden. In a flash, I understood, this was more than the usual trash!” The young cinemagoer (born in 1943) didn’t know who Kazan was, but admits to being captivated by James Dean. “The mythology (of Dean) came to this distant corner of Europe. It came slower than nowadays, but with even greater force.” His mother had died when he was very young, so he was a solitary kid. “Cinema was a medicine for loneliness,” he says. “You look for some company that can fill your life with meaning.” The family home didn’t have a television. “It was a privilege to live in a time when the only living pictures you saw were on film. Film took a very special hold on you. Film was an overwhelming experience, always.” Von Bagh’s father was a psychiatrist. Yes, he muses, his father’s profession may have helped him develop those probing interviewing skills he has brought to bear on big-name film directors who’ve visited the Midnight
Sun Festival in Sodanklyä over the years. (Many of these interviews feature in Sodanklyä Forever, the documentary he brought to Rotterdam last year and which screens again this year.) At the age of 16, von Bagh was already writing for newspapers. His first article was on Frank Capra’s 1959 film, A Hole in the Head. “I saw it again some years ago. I found a DVD of it. It’s a very bad film actually,” he confides. Autodidact
The young film enthusiast was largely self-educated. Unable to rely on secondary sources, he plunged headfirst into his own research. By the time he was 30, he was an absolute expert in cinema history. By the time he was in his mid 20s, von Bagh was making his own films, among them Pockpicket (1968), a twisted homage to Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket in which the hero puts money into people’s pockets, rather than taking it out. During his stint as head of the Finnish Film Archive, von Bagh met an opinionated and acerbic younger fellow film enthusiast who used to turn up at all the screenings. This was Aki Kaurismäki (the celebrated director whose latest feature Le Havre screens in Spectrum). “Aki was very young then. He didn’t even live in Helsinki, but came in every day by train. He didn’t get into the Film School. He has always said that his university and film school was coming to my shows.” In the same way legendary French curator Henri Langlois supported the careers of the Nouvelle Vague directors,
von Bagh helped Kaurismäki establish himself as an auteur. He wrote a huge book, The History of World Cinema (1975), which both Aki and his brother Mika Kaurismäki cited as a key formative influence. “It gave them the idea to become filmmakers,” von Bagh says. Early on in his film career, von Bagh didn’t pay much attention to Finnish cinema. His focus was turned toward international cinema. He admired Finnish directors like Risto Jarva and Mikko Niskanen (who both have films screening at the IFFR), but he only slowly learned to appreciate older Finnish films. Not that this prejudice against his own country’s cinema was unusual. As he notes, the critics behind 1960s English film magazine Movie were equally dismissive of British movies of the time. “They really didn’t understand a thing about their own cinema. That seems to be the same in many countries.” Time bandit
Von Bagh has written more than 30 books – not all of them about films. (For example, he has published a study of Balzac.) He cites nineteenth-century literature, William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway as particular enthusiasms. As if this wasn’t enough, he also runs two film festivals, Midnight Sun in Finland and Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna. Ask von Bagh how he organises his time and he replies: “It’s not organised at all. I never think for a second of organising or planning anything.” If he has five different tasks to perform, his solution is always to find a sixth. The
more work he has, the better he performs. He adds that at both Bologna and Midnight Sun, he has “tremendously good teams” to help him. Flaming passion
In recent years, as big-name auteurs from Bergman to Rohmer, from Chabrol to (most recently) Angelopoulos have died, some have asked if old-style cinephilia is dying. But von Bagh gives short shrift to the idea that he is growing jaded. “I absolutely have the same enthusiasm! Every day, I try to see a film or two.” Just before setting off for Rotterdam, he tracked down a copy of Howard Hawks’ Red Line 7000, a movie he wrote a “flaming article” about “47 years ago”. To his relief, he found that the film had stood the test of time. “I had secret doubts that maybe the film had faded but no, it was one of the great Hawks films.” Von Bagh’s passion is for celluloid. At the Midnight Sun Festival and in Bologna, he insists on showing films on 35mm prints, rather than relying on digital projection. Nonetheless, he acknowledges that sometimes at home, he’ll watch films on Blu-ray, projected on a big screen. “In a way, you can get at least some compensation for the loss of real cinema that is scandalous in cinemas. It makes me tremendously sad to see this most beautiful of things becoming lost.” Peter von Bagh’s ode to the Finnish capital, Helsinki, Forever, screens today at 14:45 in LantarenVenster
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