Food and films for thought

Berlin film festival sparks conversations about sustainability and food production over elegant cuisine.

The following article was originally published in the Christian Science Monitor (www.csmonitor.com).

A.J. Goldmann

BERLIN - Mauerfall (“wall fall”) is what the Germans call it – part of their rich vocabulary to discuss the fate of East Berlin.

As the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall approaches this November, the 59th Berlin International Film Festival paid tribute last week with a series of films that presaged the collapse of socialism.

“After Winter, Comes Spring,” a special program of films produced in Eastern bloc countries in the final decade of the cold war, included features, documentaries, animated films, and experimental ones from East Germany, Poland, Russia, Hungary, Romania, the former Czechoslovakia, and Bulgaria. After screening in Berlin, the 15-film series goes on a national tour.

The curator, Claus Löser, is an East German native who dismisses the notion that these films explicitly predicted the fall of Communism. “These films are documents of discontent and resistance,” he says in an interview. “Of course, they are not prophetic films in a way of seeing exact historical changes. It’s more abstract.” The films, he adds, “have a healthy amount of disrespect and struck a new note by documenting in film the advent of change.”

Dieter Kosslick, the festival’s director, makes an even bolder claim: The series shows “how artists can seismographically sense changes ahead of time and incorporate these” into their films, he told German news agency Deutsche Welle.

Above and beyond exhibiting works that are prescient, Mr. Löser intends the series to pay tribute to unsung films and to show that Eastern bloc cinema of the 1980s was producing great art on a level with David Lynch, Jim Jarmusch, and Peter Greenaway. “The central mission of this program,” he says, “is to remind about a forgotten chapter of history.”

The best-known work is the Polish master Krzysztof Kieslowski’s “A Short Film About Killing” (1987), expanded from an episode in his 10-hour-long, “The Decalogue,” about a man who commits a senseless murder and is, in turn, executed by the state. The film equates capital punishment to murder.

“It’s a good example to explain the relationship between artistic and political messages,” says Löser, adding that Kieslowski uses the double killing to represent a laconic and frozen society.

Other filmmakers took a surreal approach to representing social ills and the desire for change. A prime example is director Gábor Bódy’s “The Dog’s Night Song” (1983), a beautiful film that offers no easy answers. A disconcerting portrait of a Hungarian town thrown into disarray by the arrival of a new parish priest, the film is a web of fragmented and often intersecting narratives: The audience follows a wheelchair-bound veteran of the 1956 uprising unable to commit suicide; an astronomer who moonlights in a punk band; the abused wife of an explosives officer who runs away to join the band; and their son, who films his world with a German tourist’s Super 8 camera.

“This film is from the East, but it plays with postmodern terms,” Löser says. “You find it in the storytelling, in the changing of the point of view. And you feel very much that something is wrong in this society. The heroes of the film are looking for something, but they don’t know exactly what it is.”

Many of the films in the series use metaphor to treat themes of occupation and resistance. One such film is “The War of the Worlds – Next Century” (1981), from Polish director Piotr Szulkin, a loose adaptation of H.G. Wells’s classic that can be read as a parable for life under a dictatorship. It is unlikely that the references to existing social conditions were lost on the original audience. What is surprising, however, is the parallel with Don Siegel’s paranoid classic “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (1956), which also used alien invasion as a metaphor for communist occupation.

While there was relative artistic freedom in Hungary and Poland by the 1980s, cinema in East Germany and Romania was still heavily censored. Some films were banned outright, such as Rainer Simon’s “Jadup und Boel” (1980), about the memory of World War II in a fictional East German town. It was the last film shot at East Berlin’s DEFA studios and only released in 1988. Simon did not curry favor with the authorities by pursuing realism and avoiding veiled references to current woes.

“Filmmakers are part of society,” says Löser, “so they reflect existing moods. A lot of these films were forbidden for some years because these films had too much reality and that was dangerous for the [Communist] Party.”

In East Germany, some directors avoided censorship by making documentaries, which came under less scrutiny than fiction films. One such film is “After Winter, Comes Spring” (1987), by Heike Misselwitz, the nonfiction film about women in East Germany that lends its title to the series.

“It’s a masterpiece as a film, not only as a political document,” says Löser, who described seeing it for the first time at the 1988 Leipzig Documentary Film Festival, exactly a year before the city’s uprisings, which quickly spread to Berlin. “One segment of the audience burst out in applause and the other segment was completely mute, because there were a lot of government officials in the audience,” he says. Löser was applauding.

“I was happy, of course, because we always had the hope that maybe a change will come and that it might be possible to work in East Germany as an artist and to stand with an open mind,” he says.

The obscurity of the films in the series stems in part from how few directors made films with the same passion after the Iron Curtain fell. (The notable exception is Kieslowski, who continued working until his death in 1996.) Others, Löser says, ceased to find inspiration in a changed world. “It was a great artistic problem if you worked for years and years under very complicated circumstances, and these circumstances vanish. The idea that you are now free to do what you want is wrong. You need to find new coordinates for your work.”

Götz Friedrich’s popular production of Richard Wagner’s Lohengrin returned to the Deutsche Oper Berlin for three performances in late October and early November. This stylish, historically careful production (seen Nov. 2) is among the DOB’s most beloved and has been presented more than fifty times since its premiere in 1990.

The evening’s main attraction was South African tenor Johan Botha, cast in the title role. Berliners last saw Botha in Staatsoper Unter den Linen’s September revival of Fidelio, where he appeared opposite Waltraud Meier’s Leonore. At the DOB, Botha got to sink his teeth into a meatier role than Florestan: he reenergized this well-worn production in much the same way he did the 2006 revival of John Dexter’s 1979 production of Don Carlo at the Metropolitan Opera.

Botha sang marvelously all evening long. His singing was lofty and lush, if at times a little short on texture, but his smooth, robust heldentenor always delivered the goods generously and with effortless volume. His large physique makes him an unconventional romantic hero, but his charisma and expressive voice rendered the love duet believable and made the revelations of the final scene electrifying.

The tenor was surrounded by an impressive cast. His costar was Bayreuth veteran Petra-Maria Schnitzer, who tackled Elsa in last season’s revival of this production. The Austrian soprano has a durable voice that can at times be stiff. At the beginning of the evening, she strained for high notes, and her stamina faltered at the end of Act II, when she sounded exhausted. But she pulled off a wonderfully powerful Act III duet with Botha, in which she proved capable of switching between love, fear and delirium convincingly.

Ortrud and Telramund were Swedish mezzo Susanne Resmark and German baritone Eike Wilm Schulte (another Bayreuth veteran), both of whom were near-perfect in their menace and fury. Schulte was the only singer to match Botha in sheer vocal force, sounding lushly grim and vengeful. He sang with sinewy agility and full-throated texture. He and Resmark had wonderful chemistry: while Schulte let loose despairing howls, Resmark hissed her venomous words with villainous glee (though occasionally imperfect diction). She landed her high notes with a banshee-like cackle, and her low range was bloodcurdling — in a way reminiscent of Strauss’s Klytämnestra, a role she has tackled to much acclaim. It was a terrifying performance, most convincing during her seductive Act II duet with Else.

In the small but crucial role of the king’s Herald, Marcus Brück offered clarion tone. Unfortunately, King Heinrich himself was the wooden Jan-Hendrik Rootering, whose sonorous and ultra-deep voice couldn’t quite cut through the massive ensembles.
The justly famed chorus of Deutsche Oper Berlin sounded a bit clumsy at first, with the women outperforming the men. But they managed to gel for Acts II and III, doing excellent work in the extensive choral scenes.

In the pit, Danish maestro Michael Schønwandt lent an understated sense of urgency to his reading. In the overture, the strings squeaked a bit, and the brass was curiously muted. Schønwandt offset the triumphalism of the Act III prologue with an exaggerated tempo, which made the darting violins sound more anxious than festive. The extensive trumpet sections (including the onstage elements and the sections scattered throughout the theater for the prologue to the final scene) were exceptionally powerful. Despite a slight scenery malfunction at the end, when a silk curtain refused to flutter to the ground and had to be raised up laboriously, Friedrich’s well-worn production still packed an emotional wallop.

A. J. GOLDMANN

The Komische Oper Berlin’s world premiere of Robin Hood, an “adventure opera” by Frank Schwemmer, attracted an audience of generally well-behaved six- to ten-year-olds to an 11 A.M. performance on November 6. The Komische is to be applauded for commissioning a seriously-modern children’s opera, even if both score and libretto (written by Michael Frowin) leave much to be desired in terms of quality and accessibility. The through-composed, loosely atonal score is light-years away from the schmaltzy Hollywood sound of Rachael Portman’s The Little Prince; it’s closer in technique to Charles Wuorinen’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories, to give two recent stateside examples of the genre.

Schwemmer, a young German composer, has written a dramatically compelling and well paced if somewhat pedestrian score, which has a few (usually diatonic) memorable moments and a fair amount of choral writing for the children’s choir (in this production members of the Ernst Senff Choir). Generally speaking, both score and production were clever without necessarily being sophisticated.

The opera’s whimsical plot concerns Daniel, a boy growing up in Berlin who discovers that a computer game of Robin Hood that he plays obsessively contains a secret portal to medieval England. Before he knows it, he’s palling around with Robin, Friar Tuck and Little John in Sherwood Forest, where it seems that half of Berlin’s junior population is stuck and feeling a little homesick. But before they find the portal back to modern times, they need to contend with the dreaded Sheriff of Nottingham and Price John, pretender to the throne of England.

Andreas Homoki, the Komische’s intendant, headed the fun, fast-paced production, which benefited greatly from the colorful sets of Frank Philipp Schlössmann and the irreverent, quasi-historically-accurate costumes of Gideon Davey. Homoki’s ideas were often more inspired than those of Schwemmer: the inventive stagecraft provided most of the excitement and surprises over the course of the show’s two hours. The apartment of the hero, David, is a conscious parody of Berlin’s often zany interior decorating. The orchestra was seated backstage (a fact revealed midway through Act I). Sherwood Forest emerged from the orchestra pit, sank and receded when appropriate, often to the accompaniment of a woefully overused strobe light.

The cast was drawn mostly from the Komische’s ensemble. Across the board, the singers sang and acted with heightened drama, to make the plot readily intelligible to the audience and often just to poke fun at operatic conventions. Thomas Eberstein, perhaps the Komische’s most endearing tenor, played Daniel with adolescent stubbornness and restless energy. Baritone Christoph Späth sang Robin in suitably overblown mock-heroic style, his numerous entrances announced by an ascending/descending three-note figure and usually an archer’s pose. As the boy’s father, Jens Larsen, a powerhouse baritone and frequent performer here, gave one of the afternoon’s most accomplished and genuinely operatic performances. Another shout-out goes to tenor Peter Renz, who, as Prince John, sounded like a cross between Mime and Herodes in his anxious villainy. Hagen Matzeit screeched and whined his way through as the prince’s henchman “Berater” Harry. His character was made up as a rabbit with stereotypically Asian features and brought to mind the Orientalist tendencies of Puccini and Gilbert and Sullivan. Drink-loving Friar Tuck, sung by bass Hans-Martin Nau, was given some of the score’s tonal passages, which he belted out in a deep, raspy growl.

Patrick Lange led a scaled-down orchestra with prominent and inventive percussion and chivalric trumpets, which tore through the score spiritedly. It was heartening to see the Komische be bold enough to commission a serious-minded children’s opera, though the decision to make this the first new opera production of the season was somewhat puzzling.

During the curtain call, the girls shrieked loudly for Maid Marian, the boys for Robin. And naturally, the entire audience let out a collective “yuck!” when the two kissed.