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New Look Berlinale
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# : |
19808 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1991 |
1,184 Words |
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Louis Kaplan and Jeannine Fiedler
Louis Kaplan and Jeannine Fiedler write on the arts from
Berlin, Germany. |
The Berlin Film Festival, now in its forty-first year, is the third-ranking international film event of the year for the movie world, following close in renown on the heels of Cannes and Venice. Scheduled far from the beaches and sunshine of the French and Italian festivals in the chill, gray month of February, the Berlinale, as it is called, was originally conceived in 1951 to be a kind of cultural outpost of the free world surrounded by the grim reality of East Germany.
That first Berlin Film Festival showed thirty-five European films in the competition along with ten silent German films in a retrospective program. The number of films shown has expended tenfold, with nearly four hundred films from thirty-seven countries. This year 2,300 journalists were accredited to attend the festival--about the same number covering the Gulf War.
The official competition featured twenty-five major motion pictures striving with one another for the highly coveted Golden Berlin Bear.
The 1991 retrospective scheduled sixty-five films dealing, fittingly enough, with the subject of the Cold War as well as honoring two Hollywood onetime stars with tributes to Jane Russell and Robert Mitchum. On the less commercial and more experimental side of the film world, the international Forum of Young Cinema (Young Forum) provided an opportunity for avant-garde and independent filmmakers to showcase their new work. This proved to be perhaps the most popular event of the two weeks, with some screenings seriously overcrowded. Other sections of the Berlinale are devoted to a Children's Film Festival, New German Cinema, and a European Film Market where distribution deals are made. Despite the war in the Gulf, film business was brisk. Most participants see Berlin as the first event of the year for signing deals or taking the first steps that lad to a final signature in the film markets of Los Angeles, Cannes, or Milan.
European films were well represented in this year's competition with eighteen out of the twenty-five entries. Of the four Italian contestants, the coveted top prize of the Golden Bear went to Marco Ferrari's La Casa del Sorriso (House of smiles) from Italy. The controversial film, turned down for competition by both Cannes and Venice last year, won its director a twenty-minute ovation. An affectionate treatment of love in a nursing home, the film features Sweden's Ingrid Thulin (the star of many Ingmar Bergman films) in the lead. A French entry, Le Petit Gangster (The little gangster) directed by Jacques Dullion, an understated psychological
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