BERLIN, Feb 8, (AFP): The Berlin Film Festival, now in its 60th year, was a child of the Cold War, a propaganda tool of the Allies, and a frequent political battleground that reached far beyond the cinema doors.
The anniversary has given the Berlinale, as the event is known, a chance to look back at the scandals and controversy that established the event as Europe’s most politically charged cinema showcase.
“The festival was founded as the Cold War was raging,” the current chief of the festival, Dieter Kosslick, said this month.
“Berlin had been reduced to rubble and ashes but was a powerful symbol for the West.”
When the Berlinale was first held in 1951, some two million West Germans were unemployed and tens of thousands of homeless Berliners still lived in makeshift camps, according to the new book “The Berlinale - The Festival” by British film historian Peter Cowie.
US officials saw an international film festival as an opportunity to indoctrinate Germans, with still-fresh memories of the Nazis and their powerful propaganda machine, and create a “showcase for the free world”.
The aim was also to establish a cultural beachhead in then West Berlin while the divided city marked the front line of the conflict with the Soviets.
In the early years, 500 festival posters were hung in West Berlin so they could be seen in the East, Cowie said.
The first film was Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rebecca”, which had already come out in 1940 but Germans had been deprived of it until after the war. With an influx of glamourous Hollywood fare, it only took five years for the Berlinale to acquire “A” status from the International Federation of Film Producers’ Associations, putting it in the same class as Cannes and Venice.
The first several festivals saw US and British films take home the top prizes.
“It was not until 1958 that a jury accorded top honours to a European film - and one destined to become an all-time classic - Ingmar Bergman’s ‘Wild Strawberries’,” Cowie writes. The German hosts eventually dared to assert their independence from their American patrons, often with explosive results.
In 1970, German director Michael Verhoeven unveiled “O.K.” about a Vietnamese girl who is raped and shot by four US soldiers.
Festival director Alfred Bauer told the jury days before the screening that they would see a “fantastic new German film”.
When he finally watched the picture, jury president George Stevens, the Hollywood legend behind “Woman of the Year” and “A Place in the Sun”, threatened to quit unless it was excluded from the competition.
Stevens had served in the US Army Signal Corps and had filmed not only the Normandy landings but also the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp. He found it shameless of the Germans to accuse GIs of war crimes.
The entire jury eventually resigned without bestowing any prizes.
In 1979, the harrowing US drama “The Deer Hunter” sparked an even deeper rift.
The Soviet delegation, including representatives from across Eastern Europe and two members of the jury, walked out of the festival over what they called an insulting depiction of the Vietnamese in the picture.
Cowie said world powers used the Berlinale to score diplomatic points over events happening half a world away.
“China had invaded part of Vietnam and Hanoi was desperate for help, for arms, and for troops from the Socialist countries,” he said.
“(Those countries) had to find a way to show solidarity without getting militarily involved.”
They, like so many before and after, chose the Berlinale to make their point.
“The Deer Hunter” will be screened as part of an anniversary retrospective this year.
Meanwhile, Asian movies will take pride of place this week at the  Berlin Film Festival, one of world cinema’s top showcases, as new pictures by Roman Polanski and Martin Scorsese make their red-carpet premieres.
Hollywood stars will rub shoulders with Asian legends in the snowy German capital for the anniversary edition of the 11-day Berlinale, which will kick off Thursday with “Apart Together” by Wang Quan’an of China.
German director Werner Herzog (“Grizzly Man”) will lead a seven-member jury including Oscar-winning actress Renee Zellweger, which will choose among 20 nominees for the coveted Golden and Silver Bear top prizes on February 20.
“Apart Together” is a period drama about a soldier forced to flee Mao’s forces for Taiwan in 1949 who reunites decades later with the love of his life.
Japanese master Yoji Yamada, the maker of more than 80 films in his four-decade-long career, will bring down the curtain on the event with an out-of-competition screening of his latest picture, “About Her Brother”.
“Nearly half the main showcase films are family films, although most of those families are fairly dysfunctional,” Berlinale chief Dieter Kosslick quipped.
Chinese veteran Zhang Yimou (“Hero”) will present “A Woman, A Gun and A Noodle Shop” while Koji Wakamatsu of Japan will unveil “Caterpillar”. And Bollywood heart-throb Shah Rukh Khan is due in town with “My Name is Khan”.
The 67-year-old Scorsese’s thriller “Shutter Island” starring Leonardo DiCaprio will get its world premiere in Berlin but screen out of competition.
Meanwhile all eyes will be on Polanski’s “The Ghost Writer”, which he completed while under house arrest at his Swiss chalet awaiting possible extradition on US charges dating from the 1970s over his admission of having unlawful sex with a 13-year-old girl.
The movie is based on the bestseller “The Ghost” and sees Ewan McGregor discovering skeletons in the closet of a former British prime minister modelled on Tony Blair (Pierce Brosnan).
While the French-Polish director, 76, will be absent, his stars are expected at the gala premiere in the 1,600-seat Berlinale Palast theatre.
German director Oskar Roehler has generated pre-festival buzz for “Jew Suss” about the making of the notorious Nazi-era anti-Semitic film of the same name.
“In it, you can see the kind of moral conflicts in which artists, in this case actors, can find themselves,” Kosslick said.
Provocative British director Michael Winterbottom, a favourite on the festival circuit, will screen “The Killer Inside Me” with Jessica Alba, Casey Affleck and Kate Hudson in the story of a Texas sheriff’s dark secret.
And reclusive British graffiti artist Banksy, who has kept his identity a mystery, is due to make a low-profile visit for a documentary about his work, “Exit Through the Gift Shop”.
Also keenly awaited is a screening for the masses at the Brandenburg Gate of a restored version of the 1927 groundbreaking German classic “Metropolis” - complete with lost footage unearthed in Argentina two years ago.
The Berlinale, which ranks second only to Cannes among European film festivals, has a history of opening doors for smaller pictures.
Last year’s laureate, “The Milk of Sorrow” by Peru’s Claudia Llosa, is now nominated for the best foreign-language film Oscar and has had a respectable run in international art-house theatres.
“You have to compliment the Berlinale for discovering at an early stage what is cutting-edge in cinema and for having a sense what will move audiences,” Jan Schulz-Ojala, chief critic of Berlin’s daily Der Tagesspiegel, told AFP.
But he was concerned that in an anniversary year, the biggest names were directors in their twilight years such as Scorsese, Polanski and Yamada.
“It worries me to see that because I think it may then be harder to draw the best mid-career directors, who may just go to Cannes in the future,” he said.
Main showcase
The event, which is the first major European film festival of the year and second only to Cannes in prestige, will wrap up February 21.
Here is a list of the 26 films in the festival’s main showcase, their directors and the countries that produced them.
“Tuan Yuan” (Apart Together), Wang Quan’an, China. (opening film)
“Bal” (Honey), Semih Kaplanoglu, Turkey/Germany.
“Caterpillar”, Koji Wakamatsu, Japan.
“En Familie” (A Family), Pernille Fischer Christensen, Denmark.
“En ganske snill mann” (A Somewhat Gentle Man), Hans Petter Moland, Norway.
“Eu cand vreau sa fluier, fluier” (If I Want To Whistle, I Whistle), Florin Serban, Romania/Sweden.
“The Ghost Writer”, Roman Polanski, France/Germany/Britain.
“Greenberg”, Noah Baumbach, United States.
“Howl”, Rob Epstein, United States.
“Jud Suess - Film ohne Gewissen” (Jew Suss - Rise and Fall), Oskar Roehler, Austria/Germany.
“Kak ya provel etim letom” (How I Ended This Summer), Alexei Popogrebsky, Russia.
“The Killer Inside Me”, Michael Winterbottom, Britain.
“Mammuth”, Benoit Delepine/Gustave de Kervern, France.
“Na Putu” (On the Path), Jasmila Zbanic, Bosnia/Austria/Germany/Croatia.
“Der Raeuber” (The Robber), Benjamin Heisenberg, Austria/Germany.
“Rompecabezas” (Puzzle), Natalia Smirnoff, Argentina/France.
“San qiang pai an jing qi” (A Woman, A Gun And A Noodle Shop), Zhang Yimou, China.
“Shahada” (Faith), Burhan Qurbani, Germany.
“Shekarchi” (The Hunter), Rafi Pitts, Germany/Iran.
“Submarino”, Thomas Vinterberg, Denmark.
Out of competition:
“Exit Through The Gift Shop”, Banksy, Britain.
“The Kids Are All Right”, Lisa Cholodenko, United States/France.
“My Name is Khan”, Karan Johar, India.
“Otouto” (About Her Brother), Yoji Yamada, Japan (closing film).
“Please Give”, Nicole Holofcener, United States.
“Shutter Island”, Martin Scorsese, United States.
Also:
LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Joel Edgerton will star in “The Thing,” Universal’s latest take on the shape-shifting alien who terrorizes a group of people in a remote facility.
The best-known version might be the 1982 John Carpenter-Kurt Russell cult movie, which was a contemporary remake of 1951’s “The Thing From Another World,” directed by Howard Hawks. All take inspiration from a 1938 short story, “Who Goes There?” published in pulp mag Astounding.
Matthijs Van Heijningen is directing the latest movie.
Winstead will play a Ph.D. candidate who joins a Norwegian research team in Antarctica after it discovers an alien ship in the ice. When a trapped organism is freed and begins a series of attacks, she is forced to team with a blue-collar mercenary helicopter pilot (Edgerton) to stop the rampage.
A March 15 start date in Toronto is planned.
The role is a coup for Winstead and marks her first starring studio vehicle. The actress had a bit part in Quentin Tarantino’s “Death Proof” and was Bruce Willis’ daughter in “Live Free or Die Hard.” She caught Universal’s eye with her work opposite Michael Cera in the studio’s upcoming “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World,” where she plays love interest Ramona V. Flowers. Universal is releasing that movie Aug. 13.
Edgerton starred on Broadway opposite Cate Blanchett in “A Streetcar Named Desire.” He next co-stars opposite Tom Hardy in Gavin O’Connor’s “Warrior” for Lionsgate. (RTRS)