“I don’t like travelling much”, said Jean-Luc Godard in 2001. “It’s heavy going to arrive at the hotel and be obliged to sign the famous visitors’ guest book, to be given official receptions. There would have to be a clear objective.”
Nine years later, the Swiss-French auteur hasn’t grown any fonder of leaving his home on Lake Geneva. Now nearly 80, he was a no-show at Cannes in May, where his latest, Film: Socialisme, was unveiled to the predictable full spectrum of critical reactions.
In a characteristically gnomic communiqué, Godard announced: “Following Greek-type problems, I unfortunately cannot be at your disposal at Cannes.” And it was a similar story a few months later when he pulled out of the 10th ERA New Horizons International Film Festival (ENH) in Poland’s fourth-biggest city, Wroclaw.
Founded by influential producer/distributor Roman Gutek, ENH moved to Wroclaw from another city in the country’s south-west, Cieszyn, in 2006. It was warmly welcomed by the city’s culture-friendly mayor Rafa Dutkiewicz, whose 600,000 residents make up Poland’s most dynamic city since Soviet domination came to an end. It will host matches in the 2012 European Football Championships and hopes to become 2016’s European Capital of Culture.
The rise of ENH can only help in the latter regard. Since moving to Wroclaw, it has steadily eclipsed the bigger, glitzier Warsaw event (which Gutek also helped to set up in the 1980s) in terms of international reputation. That’s partly because of its stated intention to showcase films of an edgier stripe – the sort more associated with the envelope-pushing festivals of Rotterdam, Vienna and Lisbon, rather than the paparazzi-magnets of Berlin, Cannes and Venice (although numerous titles from each of the latter trio’s more adventurous fringes are included).
In addition, ENH – which attracts healthy attendances, especially from the 20-somethings of this university city – presents exhaustive retrospectives. This year, there was a tribute to Wojciech Jerzy Has (1925-2000), part of that remarkable wave of post-war Polish talent that also included directors Polanski, Wajda, Skolimowski, Borowczyk and Borowczyk, plus a slew of outstanding cinematographers.
But the massive centrepiece of the programme was the 92-film Godard extravaganza – features, shorts and video-works – from favourites such as Breathless (1960) and Alphaville (1965) to more seldom-shown, experimental material from more recent decades.
I split my schedule between old and new titles. Of the half-dozen Godards I tried, the only one I got much out of was 1960’s Little Soldier, a nippy, surprisingly topical thriller about terrorism in sleepy Switzerland starring Michel Subor (who has made a spectacular comeback four decades later in Claire Denis’ The Intruder).
Looking through the selections of newer material, I was heartened to spot several strong pictures which I’d already seen on my festival rounds – unconventional documentaries such as Pietro Marcello’s The Mouth of the Wolf and Anna Sanmartí’s The Land Inhabited.
In terms of new discoveries among the features, I could find only two worthy of such company. The latest from Hungary’s Kornél Mundruczó (a 35-year-old writer/director/ actor who moves freely between cinema, television and theatre) is Tender Son: The Frankenstein Project, a loose updating of Mary Shelley’s 1818 classic to modern-day, snow-blanketed Budapest.
Instead of a science-fictional monster, the agent of terror is a hoodie-wearing teenager raised in an orphanage, seeking his birth-mother in a crumbling, condemned apartment building where a director (Mundruczó himself) is holding auditions for his next movie. Although largely dismissed by critics when competing at Cannes, Tender Son turns out to be a bold, engrossingly sombre and visually striking re-engagement with Shelley, sensitively dramatising its tormented protagonist’s existential plight. Although he has yet to have a feature released in Britain – the Frankenstein connection can only help in that regard – Mundruczó is well-established on the international film scene, very much a darling of the Cannes programmers.
My clear objective in Wroclaw was to unearth unknown talents, preferably of the home-grown variety. However, negative word-of-mouth among international visitors regarding new Polish features and my own experience of the deeply flawed Ewa by Adam Sikora (winner of the Best New Polish Film prize at ENH’s closing ceremony) led me to concentrate on the shorts. Here I came across a trio of miniature gems, each a documentary on olde worlde rural life in far-flung locales.
Via Piotr Zotorowicz’ Charcoal Burners (which does exactly what it says on the tin), Marta Minorowicz’ Piece of July, also known as Piece of Summer (a bucolic grandfather and grandson two-hander) and, in particular, Mateusz Skalski’s The End of the World (a briskly economic snapshot of a hamlet in the grip of winter) show that the venerable tradition of Polish non-fiction remains encouragingly vibrant. All three film-makers were born between 1979 and 1982, the period when the trade union Solidarity under Lech Walesa was putting Poland in the international spotlight.
Norman Leto is the multi-media artist born Lukasz Banach in 1980. His debut feature Sailor – world-premiering with minimal fanfare at ENH – turned out to be the festival’s most unexpected highlight.
According to autodidact Leto: “The budget of this movie was below $5,000, spent straight from my pocket. It’s unbelievable what you can do just with your desktop computer in our times.” Indeed. The kind of defiantly uncommercial, conceptual bizarre mixture that staid funding-bodies would surely run a mile from, Sailor is a 100-minute experimental feature (there is a “plot” of sorts, although somewhat hidden) about an egotistical physics tutor, chiefly comprising three extended, illustrated lectures on various sociological, philosophical and anthropological issues. We are guided rather gracefully through all this by an unreliable narrator and protagonist, whose preoccupations are somewhat spiky.
By turns challenging, infuriating, stimulating and exasperating, Sailor – reportedly part of a wider project that will include an upcoming novel – is narrowly saved from pretentious self-indulgence by a streak of wicked humour (you’ll never look at Geraldine Chaplin in the same light again) and, if nothing else, deserves full marks for originality and chutzpah.
For reasons best known to themselves, the ENH organisers tucked it away in a relatively obscure sidebar of avant garde material when it really should really have been in the national (or perhaps even the international) competition. That incorrigible intellectual prankster and envelope-pusher Jean-Luc Godard surely would have loved it – if he’d turned up, that is.
