Resting on the banks of the Spree in the Deutsche Historische Museum lies Berlin's Zeughaus Kino, a beautiful film house and without doubt one of the city's best kept secrets. Comfortable seating, pleasant clientèle and tall handsome windows which overlook the river. The ticket prices are perhaps the city's most reasonable but- for better or worse- It's 165 seats remain sparsely occupied. The cinema boasts some great programming too and last month it played host to Berlin's DokuArts festival, a remarkable documentary festival which focused solely on films about the Arts. Rodney Ascher's juicy Shining conspiracy caper Room 237 was the festival's poster boy (you can read what I said about it here) but DokuArts also offered two of the most profoundly moving studies this writer has seen.
Harry Dean Stanton: Partly
Fiction
Sophie Huber (2012)
Sometimes in film making, as in life, it’s better to take a step back. Breath. See the tapestry as a whole. Harry Dean Stanton has been a cinematic enigma his entire
career and so for her study of the man, its little surprise film maker Sophie
Huber decided to do just that. Shot in the noir-y settings you might hope
for- a night drive though LA, Stanton’s local boozer, in black and white at
home- her enchanting meditation on the legendary character actor never feels the
need to wade in deep. Stanton reflects on an astonishing life: His friendship with
James Dean and later with Brando; living with Jack Nicholson; jogging with
Dylan. On film he sings with his pal Kristofferson. He drinks a coffee with long time collaborator David Lynch and
gives him an interview. He muses on life and the cosmos. It’s a film which accepts that some surfaces are not made to be broken. So when a window is left ajar and we chance a peak inside it hits us even harder. And these moments only come when the actor sings.
Revealed in tender close-up, that wonderful weathered façade flickers
with longing, regret and who knows what else. Film has always been fascinated with the meandering mind. It's ability to capture it is one of the main things which sets it aside from other art forms. In Stanton we've cherished perhaps America’s best
meanderer. Huber seems to know this. Her beautiful documentary does too.
A Story of Children
and Film
Mark Cousins (2013)
A perfect companion to Cousins’ near- definitive 15 hour
love poem to the movies- The Story of Film an Odyssey- A Story of Children and Film explores, in a similar fashion, what makes kids so damn cinematic.
Cousins shoots a home video of his niece and nephew with a marble run and then
picks apart what we see. Kids do certain things when they have that sort of cold
attention on them- first uncertainty, then playfulness. Showing-off. Wrecking the place. Cousins clocks these traits and then taps that archive of a brain to show
them in the movies. With references ranging from more well-known stuff like Kes and ET to leftfield choices from Iranian house arrestee Jafar Pahani
and Hirokazu Kore-eda in Japan, the director delivers- in his melodic Belfast lilt- another articulate and heart wrenching visual essay. Only the
coldest of hearts need not apply.
