20Oct09
Above: Rigoberto Pérezcano’s border town film Northless.
With the programmers of the Middle Eastern Film Festival tasked with bringing cinema to Abu Dhabi—which has no alternative theaters beyond multiplexes—the lineup has taken several ways to introduce and encourage a cinema culture.
Masters are an obvious route; new films by Claire Denis, Alain Resnais, Steven Soderbergh, Tian Zhuangzhaung, and an omnibus of Romanian shorts as representative A-list world cinema is, I’m sure, welcome in the area, at least in theory.
Far more adventurous is MEIFF’s attempt to bring silent cinema to the Arabian Peninsula. Backed by the bold statement that silent films with live musical accompaniment have never played there, MEIFF has generously brought in renowned silent film pianist Neil Brand to give a master class on his background in accompanying silent film and brief but delightful examples of the pleasures and challenges of the work. Another master class, which I was unable to attend, was presented by Paolo Cherchi Usai of the Pordenone Silent Film Festival, and was on the preservation of Arab film history. These two strands of presentation and preservation united for what was undoubtedly the most pleasurable and gleeful of MEIFF’s screenings: the “landmark” silent screenings of four comedy shorts—a Chaplin and a Keaton courageously paired with lesser known Charley Chase and Charles Bowers shorts—at a show that brought in a terrific amount of laughing young children, guided along by Brand’s virtuoso improvisations. Despite being an eye opening experience for the audience—a pre-film poll by festival director Peter Scarlett revealed that the majority had never seen a silent film in a theater—the house was notably lacking much of an Arab presence, for whom this screening was presumably fundamentally organized.
Whether the audiences in general—which are a hard demographic to pin down, seemingly made up most predominantly of ex-pats from the nationality of whatever film is playing, and a variable dose of upper-middleclass locals—are looking for or enjoy finding festival favorites and silent movies is a question I have no doubt MEIFF is losing sleep over, but the effort is admirable and clearly the beginning of something being built for the future. At the very least—whether or not the audience is engaged, or if the right audience is engaged—carving out a space at MEIFF to ensure a respectable level of cinephiliac prestige did its job to help offset flashy galas (the abominable and falsely proclaimed “underwater” Bollywood film Blue) and supporting regional cinema of more questionable quality (No One Knows About Persian Cats and Son of Babylon both being particularly simplistic and intolerable).
But a far more interesting question—and opportunity—in Abu Dhabi is about how a restless and inquisitive festival lineup can interact with the city in which it is being presented.
Let's face it, for the past two years Steven Soderbergh has been making highly politicized cinema in a way no American director would dare to—calmly, methodically, and without baiting either press or audiences with self-important "topics." It is the steadiness of the filmmaker's vision that has perhaps kept many from seeing just how far his digital works like Che and The Girlfriend Experience—both light years ahead of the superficiality and pretense of Traffic—investigate the current American political landscape. Those pictures have approached the process of revolutions and capitalist economics with the cerebral cool and exactitude of Michael Haneke filming an Otto Preminger production. Excersies above all else, the two movies deserve aloof respect rather than aggressive engagement, and it has not been until the filmmaker's new movie and one of his very best, The Informant!, that he has been able to rectify conceptual intelligence with cinematic attack, warm-blooded, witty, and as scathingly indicting as it is entertaining.
in Movie Poster of the Week: "Bright Star"
9Feb10
by Kalehua Kim