Dreileben
I've been considering the posts that I had thought of making before going on holiday. Even though Theresa May is in the news again, I am sure that even those interested have heard more than enough about her cat, and I talk too often as it is about the ways in which editorial stances affect coverage of stories, so instead, let's look back to the London Film Festival.
Half of this event took place while we were away, which made it difficult to come up with films to see. Then the only one (Weekend) that we both wanted to see, and that was in the first week at convenient times, sold out, but as expected it has now received a commercial release. All of this meant that I focused perhaps too much on one significant event in the festival, namely the showing of three films produced by different German writer-directors set in the same fictional two-week period of a convict's escape from custody. I went for the full experience and saw them all on the same day (plus a Q&A at the end), though sadly the cinema required that I leave the screen between films. They were more worried about people not buying tickets for all three than about the purity of the artistic experiment.
The first film was a teenage romance, with the escape going on in the background, the second covered the police investigation, and the third showed the convict's story. The first contained two scenes that were also, one each, in the other two films. The third, perhaps even more interestingly, contained two scenes that could have been, one each, in the other two films, but were not.
I enjoyed the third film most. I think this was because it had the subtlest, most interesting story, but it could have been because by that point I had three hours of context. Certainly part of its power was in contradicting the depiction of the convict that had been hinted at in the first film and confirmed in the second. I don't think I would have enjoyed the second film under any circumstances, but the first was also good, especially the ending, which would have been significantly affected by being the very last sequence, but probably not to its detriment.
No-one mentioned in the Q&A that a very similar project had been organised in France nearly ten years ago. Perhaps the audience were, like me, a combination of too scared and too polite to bring this up. Both projects make very interesting statements about context, and about how any experience of events is partial.
Half of this event took place while we were away, which made it difficult to come up with films to see. Then the only one (Weekend) that we both wanted to see, and that was in the first week at convenient times, sold out, but as expected it has now received a commercial release. All of this meant that I focused perhaps too much on one significant event in the festival, namely the showing of three films produced by different German writer-directors set in the same fictional two-week period of a convict's escape from custody. I went for the full experience and saw them all on the same day (plus a Q&A at the end), though sadly the cinema required that I leave the screen between films. They were more worried about people not buying tickets for all three than about the purity of the artistic experiment.
The first film was a teenage romance, with the escape going on in the background, the second covered the police investigation, and the third showed the convict's story. The first contained two scenes that were also, one each, in the other two films. The third, perhaps even more interestingly, contained two scenes that could have been, one each, in the other two films, but were not.
I enjoyed the third film most. I think this was because it had the subtlest, most interesting story, but it could have been because by that point I had three hours of context. Certainly part of its power was in contradicting the depiction of the convict that had been hinted at in the first film and confirmed in the second. I don't think I would have enjoyed the second film under any circumstances, but the first was also good, especially the ending, which would have been significantly affected by being the very last sequence, but probably not to its detriment.
No-one mentioned in the Q&A that a very similar project had been organised in France nearly ten years ago. Perhaps the audience were, like me, a combination of too scared and too polite to bring this up. Both projects make very interesting statements about context, and about how any experience of events is partial.