International Film Festival Rotterdam

By Dan Kidner

Benjamin Crotty, Fort Buchanan, 2014

International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR), now in its 44th year, colonizes its host city in the same way that many art biennials do, forming a kind of temporary heterotopia. For a week at the end of January an international community of, for the most part, like-minded individuals, descend on Rotterdam and constitute a city within a city; one with its own transport network in the form of shuttle buses between venues; its own currency – the café of the de Doelen, the concert hall that serves as the festival’s centre only accepts payment via delegate cards – and even its own daily paper, The Daily Tiger.

At this year’s festival heterotopia would have made an apposite over-arching theme. Many of the more memorable films across the numerous programmes explored the kinds of spaces written about, famously, by Michel Foucault in his 1967 paper Of Other Spaces, Heterotopias. Benjamin Crotty’s Fort Buchanan (all films 2014) is set on a French military base; James Benning’s new film, premiering at the festival, natural history was shot back of house at the Natural History Museum of Vienna; Lav Diaz’s Storm Children: Book One explores what Foucault classified as a ‘crisis heterotopia’ – a world created by adolescents in the aftermath of a catastrophe; and J.P. Sniadecki’s documentary The Iron Ministry, captures Chinese society mirrored inside the carriages of a slow, Communist-era, train ferrying passengers – some with their worldly possessions, some with their live stock – across China.

Thankfully though it was not my job to bring together the disparate range of films shown at IFFR under one catch-all title. That was attempted, valiantly, by festival directors Rutger Wolfson and Janneke Staarink, who proposed, in their foreword to the festival’s catalogue, to focus on ‘the here and now’. Within this there were other, more focused strands with titles such as ‘What the F?!, Really? Really’, and ‘Everyday Propaganda’, which surveyed the influence of contemporary feminism on filmmakers, the legacy of Surrealism, and contemporary and historical forms of political filmmaking. There were also two competition strands (for short films and first or second feature), and various standalone programmes and retrospectives.

Screening in the Bright Future strand Benjamin Crotty’s smart yet bewildering fiction feature Fort Buchanan follows the fortunes of a number of military spouses whose days are spent idly relaxing in the French countryside. The film’s odd tone – driven by performances that veer from woozy ironic detachment to high melodrama and back again – is in part a consequence of the novel conceptual conceit used to generate the script. The director compiled transcripts from US television dramas and sitcoms and assigned discrete scenes a keyword. Drawing from this cache he grabbed dialogue with which to tell his unlikely story of a gay military couple, their adopted daughter, and the military wives that stand in as a kind of idealized extended family. The setting, structure and moral dilemmas are also borrowed from – or at least inspired by – the films of the French new wave, particularly those of Eric Rohmer. Imagine Agnes Varda’s Le Bonheur (1965) directed by Spike Jonze, and you’d be half way there.

In Storm Children: Book One Diaz patiently tracks groups of children as they scour the city streets and docks of Tacloban, in the Eastern region of the Philippines, months after it was decimated by super typhoon Yolanda in 2013. Diaz’s two and half hour documentary begins with shots of the children playing in the flood waters that wash through the city, a sequence made sombre only by the knowledge that over 6,000 people lost their lives in the storm. Play quickly turns to industry as the children begin gleaning anything from the destroyed cityscape that might be exchangeable or useful. For most of the film Diaz’s camera simply watches; it is only in the last third of the film that the director almost absentmindedly begins asking questions about the catastrophe of a couple children he has been filming, soliciting matter-of-fact yet devastating stories of destruction and loss. Play resumes at the end of the film as the children are shown diving from wrecked ships into the water strewn with detritus. Without taking any emotional shortcuts Diaz’s film takes it time, and as with many of his films, whether fiction or documentary, manages to be both fiercely political and heartbreakingly beautiful.

Many of the short film programmes failed to hold together, sometimes because of the dearth of interesting work, but often because of the incongruity of the selected films – some intended to be screened in the cinema, others the gallery. For this reason some films failed to hit home immediately but gnawed at me over the course of the festival, their aesthetic questions only later finding purchase. One such film was Rachel Rose’s A Minute Ago, which visually intermeshed amateur video footage of an unexpected and violent hailstorm on a Russian beach, with the rotoscoped image of architect Philip Johnson leading a virtual tour of his Glasshouse. It is possible that A Minute Ago is best suited to a gallery, but other artists’ films, especially three recently shown at commercial galleries in London, were not only at home in the darkness of the cinema auditorium but revealed extra layers and resonances. Beatrice Gibson’s F for Fibonnaci, James Richards’ Raking Light and winner of a Tiger Award for short film, Ben Rivers’ Things all made the successful transition.

One programme that did cohere well, and made sense of the grouping, was The Dragon is the Frame (named after a 2014 film by Mary Helena Clark, included in the programme) and comprised interesting films by, among others, Tamara Henderson, Luke Fowler and Pablo Pijnappel. Fowler was represented by the quietly insistent and critical Depositions, which attempts to restore some dignity to images of the communities of the Scottish highlands taken from patronizing BBC documentaries and news features from the 1970s and ’80s. Depositions repurposes footage from the archives of the BBC and sound from the School of Scottish Studies, and is film about difference and dichotomies: science and superstition, near and far, community and the individual.

The crisis heterotopia that the late experimental filmmaker Anne Charlotte Robertson built and inhabited was in her own apartment, and later her mother’s house. Confined in these spaces she moved and tested her capacity to understand the world, coming to terms with and ultimately limiting the effect of her debilitating mental illness. Three films from her most famous work, Five Year Diary (1981–97), were shown at Rotterdam, selected and introduced by director of LUX, Ben Cook. Robertson would present her diary films at marathon screenings, sometimes lasting hours, and would provide live commentary to films already layered with in-camera commentary and further narration added in post-production. Obsessing over her meals, taking out the rubbish and composting, Robertson builds a world and a narrative, which enable her to cope with the tragedies in her life, such as the death of her three-year-old niece. In the last film of the three sensitively selected by Cook, Robertson mourns her niece, and ponders the adequacy of the world she has constructed, complete with feline company, to cope with the world as it actually is. Defiantly but sorrowfully she intones, ‘a cat is not quite a child’.