The 39th edition of the Rotterdam Film Festival took place in the Netherlands’ modern port city earlier this year presenting well over 200 features and just as many shorts. I managed to take in all or part of about 20 features – much less than a tenth of the programme – in an event which prides itself on showcasing the more adventurous, experimental and unusual offerings in current cinema, as well as offering glimpses into the medium’s fascinating past. Overall the consensus was that this year’s IFFR perhaps wasn’t the most satisfying in the festival’s long and proud history – when festival-goers gathered to compare notes, the emphasis was on the turkeys and disasters to be avoided rather than gems to be sought out.
But with the 40th edition now under preparation, it’s perhaps best to accentuate the positive. And as far as IFFR 2010 goes, that means Matsumoto Hitoshi’s splendid masterpiece Symbol. Matsumoto is best known in Japan as a television comedian – a bit like a zanier version of Kitano Takeshi, revered as an art-house auteur in the west but still best known for his small-screen antics back home. His first film, Big Man Japan, caused a bit of a splash on the festival-circuit back in 2007, but struck me as overlong and somewhat over-deliberate in its east-Asian craziness.
Symbol, however, is a quantum leap forward in every respect. Running a brisk
93 minutes compared with Big Man Japan’s sprawly 113, the first 70 or so alternate between two seemingly-unconnected plot-strands. In one, we follow a washed-up Mexican wrestler preparing for a bout against a much younger opponent – the dusty atmosphere of a semi-rural backwater is pungently evoked. The other story focuses intently on a nameless, pyjama-bedecked, mop-topped chap in his 40s (played by Matsumoto himself) who wakes up in a featureless white room which turns out to hide several prankish secrets.
How can the two story-strands possibly come together, we wonder – is Matsumoto playing some kind of elaborate game with narrative expectations? It’s only in the last
20 minutes that we get our answer – but that isn’t the end of the matter by any means. In fact, what ensues deserves to be ranked among the most astonishing and brilliant twists in cinema history – forcing us to
re-examine everything that’s gone before. Indeed, when Symbol reaches DVD one can imagine delighted and bemused viewers immediately sticking the disc back into the player to enjoy the whole thing again.
For many, the majesty of Symbol made most of Rotterdam’s other offerings seem like very meagre fare. But that’s not to say there weren’t decidedly worthwhile works hidden away in the bewilderingly vast programme. Some were features, including the Danish prison drama R by Tobias Lindholm and Michael Noer, which covers similar terrain to Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet, but in 90 minutes as opposed to 150. Brevity is, of course, even more important when it comes to shorts, a medium whose Rotterdam highlights included the terrific, justifiably award-winning Condolences from China’s 32-year-old enfant terrible Ying Liang, plus the impossible-to-remember, tricky-to-pronounce Zwölf Boxkämpfer jagen Viktor quer über den großen Sylter Deich 140 9, by Johann Lurf.
That title – which roughly translates as “Twelve boxers chase Viktor diagonally over the great Sylt dike”– is the German equivalent of “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” and is a suitably weird moniker for a three-minute movie which consists entirely of 3,664 frames from other films, reportedly snipped out by Lurf during his time working as a projectionist. A headlong bombardment of images and sounds, the cheekily larcenous Zwölf Boxkämpfer is as much of a brain-scrambler as Symbol and perhaps the most potent distillation of the ‘Rotterdam spirit’ at its best.
At the other end of the sensory scale is the ruminative landscape work of 67-year-old American avant-garde maestro James Benning, recently responsible for 16mm masterpieces such as Ten Skies, 13 Lakes and Casting A Glance. His belated, eagerly-awaited move to digital video for the 120-minute Ruhr yielded a curate’s egg of an experience, the highlight of which was the opening
shot, taken in a road-tunnel with a footpath running alongside.
Over the course of several minutes we hear – and then see – various vehicles approach, including a thunderous truck. Then a bicycle slips almost silently into shot and out again, its minimal environmental impact in stark contrast to the combustion-engine behemoths that have preceded it. Elegant and hypnotic, Matenastrasse tunnel was Benning pretty close to his best – indeed, pound for pound, it was the best new work I saw at Rotterdam, even if Ruhr as a whole (concluding in a single hour-long static-camera shot of a chimney-like coke-works “quenching tower”) proved more of an endurance-test than a pleasure.
In terms of digital documentary, my principal find of IFFR 2010 was tucked away in a sidebar celebrating the work of Pompeu Fabra, a Barcelona university best known for business and economics studies, but with a thriving film-school element. 27-year-old Anna Sanmarti’s The Land Inhabited takes us on a journey through the wilds of Russia and Mongolia, into the land of the reindeer-riding mountain tribe known as the Tsataa.
With minimal dialogue, an impish sense of humour and a superb eye for composition, Sanmarti takes what could have been just another ethnographic travelogue and comes up with something entirely rich and strange, studded with subtle epiphanies from start to finish.
