(And on my first bike commute to work in that same period of time, my bike was stolen. But that’s a topic for another day, maybe when we are discussing Reality Bites. Pause a moment to see if you get that one. By the way, reality does bite when you return to where you left your brand new bike that you just bought in March to ride home for the day and find that it's missing.)
There’s nothing at all wrong with this poster – I don’t always come here to tell you how dumb something is.
But it did make me think about how one goes about deciding on a single image to represent a whole film festival. You are trying to encapsulate something essential about the theme of the festival – in this case, Germany – and you don’t have the usual montage of images of a moving picture. A trailer is particularly well suited to this, as you can incorporate one-second of footage of two dozen films if you want to.
A single image? It’s much harder.
I think they did pretty well with this one. In fact, in a way, it’s kind of a callback to the film that made me fall in love with the cinema of Germany – well, at least this one particular film – 22 years ago. That’s when I saw Run Lola Run, my #1 movie of 1999 (even though it came out in Germany in 1998). It’s still in my top 20 on Flickchart.
This woman, whoever she may be, is kind of like the present-day version of Frank Potente’s Lola. Only instead of her hair being dyed bright red, it’s dyed bright blue. (Which is certainly an improvement if we are talking about the colors that represent the American political parties, but we almost certainly are not talking about that in this context.)
The jewel in her forehead? Seems to be a bit of a nod to multiculturalism, as we would historically expect to see this facial adornment on an Indian woman, not a white woman. Of course, an Indian woman wouldn’t work on a poster like this because it would skew things in too non-German of a direction. It has to be both recognizably German and recognizably Germany aspiring to greater things.
And the multiculturalism is a fair thing to credit Germany with, given how accepting the country has been of refugees. The political party that’s running the country, at least, if not some of the more right-wing elements still present in a country that knuckled under to Nazism nearly a century ago.
Plus this woman looks like she’s out at a nightclub, possibly on drugs, which aligns pretty closely with my idea of what a night out in Berlin might look like.
Alas, I don’t go to any of these country-specific film festivals that make their way through Palace Cinemas, even though I’m sure they are rich with good films. (Besides, this particular one actually ended four days ago, I notice. This morning they finally took the poster down.)
It’s my way to wait and see if a movie gets the stamp of approval of an international distribution deal before I decide whether to use some of my limited available time to engage with it – with a festival like MIFF usually being the only exception to that. That may be a limitation of my perspective, but it’s also a reality given that most of the time that I’m seeing a movie in the theater, I need to review it. With MIFF again being the only exception, I’m not going to review some film that will be here and gone in a ten-day festival, and may have already had its final showing by the time I get a chance to write about it.
Now let’s see the single image they choose for the Italian festival that comes through in September. There better not be any pasta.
No comments:
Post a Comment