To paraphrase Mark Twain, reports of the death of cinema have been vastly over-exaggerated.
I spent about three hours queueing to see one of its true legends, Martin Scorsese, at his honorary Golden Bear press conference. Thankfully I met a friendly Canadian guy with whom to pass the time; we talked sports, Taylor Swift, festivals. And besides a young Bulgarian guy doing a bizarre Jack Nicholson impression, I was totally spellbound throughout Scorsese’s rapturous and passionate sermon on cinema.
Always humble about his own films, and his passion for the greats, Kurosawa, Powell and Pressburger, Bergman, and so on, was just amazing to see in person. Someone even asked about TikTok — probably inspired by his daughter Francesca’s videos. And he made a great point that cinema doesn’t die, it only transforms. What remains, and what must be cherished, is the personal voice.
This is the driving voice of Journey Into Cinema and the driving force of covering the Berlinale, finding those auteur works that speak through one person’s passion to another. Throughout the festival, I have been privy to many interesting and weird and idiosyncratic visions. Below are a few of my favourite films from this year’s edition:
Pepe is Dead. Long Live Pepe.
Hippos seem to have endless cinematic potential. They feel prehistoric, mythical, like something out of a Japanese animation. With their short legs, big beer bellies and massive heads, with a huge snout and a distinctive nose shape, they are at once rather cute and lovable, and incredibly scary. They are also smart and agile: able to hide and blend into the surroundings, looking like floating logs or a still rock. And as everyone knows, they’re deadly, three times faster than a human being, and easily over ten times the weight. You wanna hug them, but they will kill you.
Read the rest over at Journey Into Cinema
Polyphonic Russian Voices, Deftly Intercepted
A grim watch, but a necessary one. Intercepted (Oksana Karpovych, 2024) is simple in its form — contrasting images of an eerily quiet war-torn Ukraine with phone calls back home between Russian soldiers and their loved ones. But it reaches towards a complex web of contrasting emotions: rage, fear, nihilism and despair.
Read the rest over at Journey Into Cinema
Sterben Hits the Thin Line with Ease
Around halfway through the epic familial drama Sterben (Matthias Glasner, 2024), conductor Tom Lunies (Lars Eidinger) explains The Thin Line to his composer friend Bernard’s (Robert Gwisdek) girlfriend Mi-Do (Saerom Park). To paraphrase, it’s a work of art that is both solely authentic and one that can appeal to a wide audience. I.e., it contains moments of beauty and mystery and truth without disappearing up the arsch of the individual artist.
Read the rest over at Journey Into Cinema!
Isabelle Huppert is an Agent of Chaos in A Traveler’s Needs
“To be without a speck of shame until death” — “Foreword” by Yun Dong-Ju (1941)
Iris (Isabelle Huppert) has a very unorthodox method of teaching French. She speaks almost exclusively to her clients in English. After a long-winded conversation, they play a bit of music. A self-made composition or even Liszt’s “Liebestraum.” Afterwards, she asks them, “How did it make you feel?” After several awkward back-and-forths, they open up — about a loved one, a feeling of shame, or a wish to be better. She then translates these complex contradictory emotions into French, writes them on a card and hands them back to their students.
Read the rest over at Journey Into Cinema.
Through the Graves The Wind is Blowing by Travis Wilkerson (2024)
Dense, playful and enraging in equal measure, Travis Wilkerson’s hybrid look at a police detective’s travails in modern-day Split uses its absurdist conceit to lay into Croatia’s ongoing nationalism problems.
Read the rest over at Journey Into Cinema.
Matt and Mara, Between Poetry and Prose
“Prose is governed differently than poetry”
Pause
“By the rules of grammar”
After delivering this joke, creative writing lecturer Mara (Deragh Campbell) smiles, proud of finding a pedantic yet humorous way to continue her unit on Poetic Grammar.
“But I find, whether or not you intend to be a professional poet, the reading of poetry can sensitise you to the reading of prose.”
Read the rest over at Journey Into Cinema!
A Different Man, Sort Of
A black body transformation comedy about the importance mankind places on its looks, while also refracting that self-obsession into a satire of the vanity of actors, A Different Man (Aaron Schimberg, 2024) may carry all the snark and shock of a classic A24 project but is salvaged by the tightness of its construction, backing up its savage tone with the aesthetic chops to match.
Read the rest over at Journey Into Cinema!
Scorched Earth by Thomas Arslan (2024)
As all freelancers know, the work is the easy part. The hard part is getting paid. You think magazines are bad? This difficulty is exponentially increased when you’re a professional criminal.
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Subject: Filmmaking Shows Why Everyone Needs to Study Cinema
I remember that brief time I was taught film theory at boarding school. I think, for some reason, it was part of my English GCSE. I learned about close-ups, crane shots and panning from Roland Emmerich’s The Day After Tomorrow (2004).
For a snob, it might be a strange choice of film, yet Emmerich is unafraid to mix and match different shots and techniques to tell a cohesive story, making it a rather instructive illustration of form.
Read the rest at Journey Into Cinema!
Encounters
Arcadia by Yorgos Zois (2024)
Imagine if Ghost (Jerry Zucker, 1990) was not only good, but was shot in a gorgeous Greek vacation resort and used its premise to explore something genuinely interesting. This is Arcadia, a formally bracing fable about that liminal place between life and death that trusts the audience’s intelligence throughout.
Read the rest over at Journey Into Cinema!
Sleep With Your Eyes Open. Postcards from the Past
Cultures meld, bend and dissipate under the dry Brazilian sun in Sleep With Your Eyes Open (Nele Wohlatz, 2024), a discursive and digressive project that’s precise in tone, yet imprecise in its gestures. Weaving a delicate narrative of dislocation across a series of fragmented postcard entries, its playfulness is both inviting and disorientating. Like drinking too many caipirinhas by the beach.
Read the rest over at Journey Into Cinema!
hold on to her by Robin Vanbesien (2024)
On May 17th, 2018, a Belgian police officer fired his gun at a moving van, tragically killing the two-year-old Mawda Shawri. Lying, obfuscating and barely receiving justice for this blatant violation of manslaughter, the event laid bare the racist structural issues at the heart of modern Belgium society.
Read the rest over at Journey Into Cinema!