Yahoo Lifestyle The Berlin Film Festival at 75: Building for the Future on Its Rich Past
The history of any important film festival is the history of the films and filmmakers they’ve showcased and championed: what’s their tally of breakthrough filmmakers and esteemed auteurs who have defined the past century of cinema?
This is why Berlin, Cannes and Venice, after nearly a century of annual unspoolings (as Variety likes to call them) retain their reputations and the vitality of their programming and festival operations.
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There is a parallel history as well, one that charts the important fests’ cultural and economic impacts upon the communities and countries where they’re held.
The French film industry is a primary European powerhouse of collaborative private and public financing and film promotion, and it has coordinated beautifully for decades with the Cannes Film Festival. To the good fortunes of both.
Itay’s official cinematic and cultural organizations and departments have partnered effectively with the Venice Festival, even if those partnerships were often fraught with pressures as competing arts fiefdoms set bureaucrat against bureaucrat.
Luckily for Venice, the Alberto Barbera era of the past 15 years has been the time of the festival’s greatest success as a launchpad for major awards season films and filmmakers, achievements aided immeasurably by the more harmonious, less fractious approach to partnerships than had occurred in the past.
The history of the Berlinale’s first 75 years is less stellar today and less consistent over decades past, with a multitude of highs and lows.
In 1951, just a few years after World War II, the former center of the Axis Powers alliance became the home of the film festival, a cultural outreach designed as nothing less than a way to reconnect Germany to the world it had just tried to obliterate and dominate. The country was already divided into the Soviet-dominated communist East Germany, and West Germany, politically and culturally aligned with the West and the U.S.
In 1961, West Berlin was encircled almost overnight by a wall built by the East German government, putting down any hopes for a less contentious world. Yet the festival, suddenly in the global spotlight, hung more than 500 huge posters on surfaces close to the Wall so that the East Berlin citizens could see messages of support for their rights and hopes for freedom.
The festival found itself at the center of East-West political rivalries and intrigues, but still grew in importance and prestige.
Perhaps the triumphs over adversity of the first 60-plus years of the Berlin Film Festival can be at least partially attributed to that much-celebrated Germanic trait: consistency.
From the fest’s founding in 1951 to the pre-COVID 2019 edition, the leadership of the festival was primarily in the hands of only three men.
The founding artistic director of the Berlinale was Dr. Albert Bauer, who ran Berlin until 1976. During his tenure, the Festival began to attract movie stars such as Cary Grant, Gene Kelly, Shirley MacLaine, Errol Flynn and many others, which immeasurably raised the international profile of the fest.
Berlin was very much at the center of the 1950s European flowering of auteur cinema that extended into the 196, with Golden Bears going to such films as Henri-Georges Clouzot’s “The Wages of Fear,” David Lean’s “Hobson’s Choice,” Ingmar Bergman’s “Wild Strawberries” and Claude Chabrol’s “Les Cousins.”
In 1956, FIAPF formally accredited the festival. During the 1960s, filmmakers such Jean-Luc Godard, Michelangelo Antonioni and Roman Polanski scored Golden or Silver Bears.
The history of the achievements of the Bauer era was rewritten decades later, long after his passing, when an investigation revealed that Bauer had clouded over his Nazi past. In 2020, the festival grappled with this revelation, and they ceased the awarding of the Bauer Prize, which had been established after his death. They also issued a detail report of Bauer’s effective and long-term assistance to top Nazi party figures, such as propaganda minister Josef Goebbels.
When Moritz de Hadeln took the helm of the festival in 1980, Cold War tensions were escalating, yet the festival continued to grow in importance. A great leap forward occurred in 1978 when the European Film Market launched under the direction of its longtime steward Beki Probst.
By the 1990s, the Berlin Wall had fallen and Hadeln’s historic tenure included the relocation of the festival to the newly rebuilt Potsdamer Platz, where the festivities continue to this day.
During the De Hadeln era, Asian cinema rose to new prominence, with director Ang Lee taking home the coveted Golden Bear twice in the 1990s, (for “The Wedding Banquet” and “Sense and Sensibility”). Americans such as Terrence Malick and Paul Thomas Anderson also won the fest’s top honors, along with major European auteurs from Bertrand Tavernier to Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
From 2001 to 2019, Dieter Kosslick, a former film critic and CEO of the North Rhine Westphalia film fund, served as a colorful impresario, global ambassador and programming chief.
Middle Eastern filmmakers gained prominence thanks to Berlin under Kosslick, with Asghar Farhadi and Jafar Panahi both winning Golden Bears. The continued growth and success of the market along with Kosslick’s great zeal and work ethic on behalf of the festival may have masked the underlying challenges faced by Berlin.
For example, great attempts were made to raise the festival’s profile with Hollywood, but its place on the calendar (early February) has stymied the best intentions and efforts of Berlin’s leaders to woo Hollywood awards season contenders to add Central Europe to their list of campaign stops.
Add to that the historic downturn in the fortunes of indie film finance, with indie financiers watching their own bubble bursting at the same time as the 2008 global financial crisis, and you have a 21st century Berlin in the shadow of the previous five decades of renewal and vibrancy.
With COVID and new economic disruptions to the global film industry, the film festival scene has faced unprecedented challenges over the past five years.
Travails from sponsor fatigue to cutbacks in entertainment marketing, to the decline in arthouse attendance numbers, all these woes and others are giving festival organizers and art film fans lots of sleepless nights.
While Cannes and Venice have weathered these troubling times with renewed vigor and importance to international cinema, Berlin has arrived at this anniversary somewhat bruised and with its future quite uncertain.
There’s a tough economic downturn in Germany and big film festivals (and film markets) are under duress everywhere, even where the times appear rosy. As reported regularly in Variety, there are major changes underway at key festivals from Toronto to Sundance.
There are reasons for hope.
Incoming Berlinale director Tricia Tuttle is an internationally respected figure, and the city fathers of Berlin still know the importance of the festival as a major cultural showcase that powers tourism and business investment dollars.
With its ability to overcome first the devastation of war, and secondly the bifurcation orchestrated by geopolitical chess players, Berlin didn’t get to 75 by giving in to gloom and doom. Here’s hoping there are great days ahead for one of the planet’s truly great film festivals.
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