Part Seminar, Part Something Else: The 69th Festival del
Film, Locarno
Jerry White
Locarno Film Festival seemed like the
more cosmopolitan little sister of Cannes. Similarly situated
in a European resort town (in Switzerland, just across the
Italian border), the festival promises both isolation and openness, and its late-summer timeslot (August 3–13 in 2016) puts
it at the leading edge of the festival calendar, ahead of the
important North American festivals of fall: Telluride,
Toronto, and New York. But the truth is that Locarno
doesn’t set the year’s agenda for world cinema, or even preview that agenda, as it once did. Back in 2003, when I first
attended, there was a sense that this was a place to see some
of the major Cannes films, some of which would appear on
the massive outdoor screen of the Piazza Grande (the section
of the festival that is one of Italian Switzerland’s most beloved cultural institutions), as well as the place to see material
off the beaten path. While that was still more or less the case
during my last visit in 2006, it now seems long gone; this
summer, the only film with any connection to the discourse
at Cannes 2016 was Ken Loach’s Palme d’Or winner I Am
Daniel Blake (2016), which did indeed play the Piazza (and
which won the Prix du Public, perhaps ironic given that the
prize is sponsored by the Swiss bank UBS).
It is tempting to tie Locarno’s fate to that of the Montreal
World Film Festival, once a serious rival to Toronto that is
today sunk in obscurity, featuring a catalogue full of
world-cinema miscellany and tributes to minor figures, beset
by perennial financial problems and at the operational level
marked by a casual ineptitude. I must confess that as I stood
in yet another Locarno-style crush of people trying to get
into a theatre, and then once inside fanning off in all directions with nary an usher in sight to impose some Swiss-style
(or even Cannes-calibre) order on things, my mind did wander in that direction.
That, however, would be a mistake, born of my momentary combination of low blood sugar and queue anxiety that
is such a common malady at festivals. Actually, Locarno is
For decades the
Film Quarterly, Vol. 70, Number 2, pp. 74–80, ISSN 0015-1386, electronic ISSN 1533-8630.
© 2016 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please
direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through
the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.
ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints. DOI: 10.1525/FQ.2016.70.2.74.
74
WIN T ER 201 6
returning to an earlier version of itself, once again making
good on some of the promises that it issued decades ago.
This was made clear by a short piece in Le Temps, a kind of
national daily for French-speaking Switzerland, where columnist Olivier Perrin recalled how, in 1970, former festival
director Freddy Buache (a legendary figure in Swiss cinema
circles) had chosen the Egyptian Shadi Abdel Salam’s
film The Night of Counting the Years (Al-Mummia, 1969) as
Locarno’s opening night attraction.1 Following the ceremonies Buache got dressed down by the director of the cinema
section of the Swiss Department of the Interior: “Poor man:
when you let yourself choose such a mediocrity to open an
international festival, you can hardly call yourself the director of such an event.”
The contemporary situation could hardly be more different. One of Locarno’s key sections is “Open Doors,” which
takes a lesser-known regional cinema as its focus each year.
It is currently in the first of a multi-year cycle of South Asian
cinema: this year, films came from Bangladesh, Bhutan,
Burma, and Nepal. Next year, Afghanistan, the Maldives,
Pakistan, and Sri Lanka will follow, with the South Asia
focus continuing through 2019. The main sponsor? The
Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation.
What Buache faced in 1970, basically, was a conflict between two competing ideas of what “an international festival” was supposed to be. One vision emphasized the last
word: festival. Such an event is supposed to be a good time
for all, one whose top priority is making sure that the state
of the world’s cinema is indeed something worth celebrating,
and which incidentally reflects well on the host. The Piazza
Grande and its splashy, often Hollywood-tuned screenings
(Jason Bourne [Paul Greengrass, 2016] could be seen there
this year) is the embodiment of that definition. The other vision emphasizes the word before it: international. Buache’s
goal (as it was with his work as director of the Cinémathèque Suisse or with his historical and critical writing) was
to ensure that Locarno not bog down in quaint, touristy notions of global culture, that there be at least an effort to evoke
the genuine complexity of world cinema and to maintain an
openness that would prevent the festival from sliding into a
version of the European Art Cinema/Hollywood entertainment cinema binary.
It would be too romantic, too indulgent of the gauchiste
sympathies that I share with Buache, to say simply that the
second one has won out. Nevertheless, it is possible to see an
enormous amount of material at Locarno without feeling
the presence of Mr. Bourne or his colleagues, without feeling
that all the resources are being poured into splashy commercial films, be they Hollywood or European. Locarno has become uniquely valuable because it remains invested in
several distinctly non-Hollywood endeavors: history, documentary, internationalism, and localism. There are precedents for this kind of thing, of course: Edinburgh in the
1970s (with its commitments to various counter-cinemas
and their sometimes Sirkian heritages), Telluride in the
1980s (which showcased dissidents like the Philippines’ Lino
Brocka or Georgia’s Sergei Parajanov and Tengiz
Abuladze), Rotterdam in the 1990s (which saw the birth of
their Hubert Bals Fund, committed to supporting engagé
filmmakers of the Global South), or Toronto in the 2000s
(when there was a vigorous commitment to Canadian filmmaking, including retrospectives and accompanying book
publications).2 Locarno’s radical flames may not burn quite
as hot as all that, but they do seem to be burning longer; of
those in this mini–roll call only the Bals fund really continues
to light the way toward a future cinematic radicalism that is
also informed by serious historical work.
Locarno’s enduring relationship with international archives has ensured the robust presence of retrospective programming. This year the leading sidebar was “Beloved
and Rejected: Cinema in the Young Federal Republic of
Germany from 1949 to 1963,” curated by Olaf Möller, who
also edited its massive companion book of the same title in
both English and German editions. The title was a bit of a
misnomer: there was a considerable East German presence
as well, and for people who know as little about filmmaking
in the GDR as I do, this was a revelation. I saw ten films in
this program (not even a sixth of what was on offer), and the
most amazing work I saw, possibly in the entirety of the
Locarno program, was Spotkania w mroku (Encounters in the
Dark, 1960), a co-production between Poland and East
Germany, directed by Wanda Jakubowska, who twelve
years earlier had made the legendary Ostatni etap (The Last
Station, 1948), shot at Auschwitz.
Spotkania w mroku also dealt with the Holocaust, this
time in the form of a story about Polish deportees forced to
work in the factory of a wealthy but vaguely sympathetic
German. A strange community forms among this group,
one defined by shared struggle and solidarity but also by
intense bonds of affection. The birth of a child is something
of a flashpoint for the narrative, but overall the film is organized in a very unusual way: mostly but not fully in flashback, featuring multiple climaxes, and defined throughout
by a curious languor that often wanders into the lyrical.
Shown, like most of the retrospective’s films, in a very good
35mm print, the film is visually stunning; one particularly
indelible image consists of an extreme long shot of wounded
soldiers lying against a hill as a Red Cross train slowly lumbers away without them. Throughout, the center of gravity
is Polish actress Zofia Slaboszowska, who portrays a classical
pianist defined by an intense formality, an artist who finds
new forms of commitment, new forms of rigor, by being
part of this community of slave laborers. It is not hard to see
how the film is consistent with the ideology of the early
GDR, but there is no way in which it can be read as didactic.
The sympathetic West German factory owner turns out to
be not so nice after all, but rather than some signifier of class
struggle, there is a genuine poignancy to the impossibility of
an eventual reconciliation.
One of Locarno’s most exciting annual traditions is its
Semaine de la critique or Critic’s Week, sponsored by the
Swiss Association of Film Journalists. Devoted entirely to
new work in documentary, this always offers seven films in
total, all of which screen in big venues to near-capacity
crowds. The Semaine’s selection committees have tended to
avoid conventional, issue-oriented work, although often (this
year as in past years) this is accompanied by a parallel weakness for works that stray either into the minutiae of the everyday or into the realm of the first person, therapeutically
self-indulgent. Two Polish films navigated this terrain brilliantly: Pavel Cuzuioc’s Secondo Me ([According to me],
2016) and Anna Zamecka’s Komunia ([Communion], 2016).
Secondo Me moves between Vienna, Milan, and Odessa,
ostensibly offering a portrait of three workers at the coatcheck desks of great European opera houses. What it
actually offers, though, is a tightly constructed and visually
striking evocation of European upper-working-class life. Its
Italian title, which means “according to me,” is important,
because of the keenness with which Cuzuioc tries to capture
the subjectivity of each protagonist. All three attendants
express a sentimental fondness for their jobs, not so much for
the proximity to great opera or architecture but because of
the rhythms of work that entails having one’s daytime free,
the constant movement of people, and the camaraderie of
colleagues. Details about everyday life are not overly present,
but there are some key details: the Italian protagonist is passionate about politics and blood donation; the Ukrainian
protagonist has raised her grandson and is now anxious as he
F ILM QU A RTE RL Y
75
Spotkania w mroku (Encounters in the Dark, Wanda Jakubowska, 1960).
Pavel Cuzuioc’s Secondo Me (2016).
goes off to university to study material she doesn’t quite
understand; the Austrian protagonist is keen to maintain a
connection with students as a hedge against stagnation.
The film is composed mostly of a series of fixed-position
sequence shots, necessitated, no doubt, by the logistics of
76
WIN T ER 201 6
filming in an active opera house. This has the effect of making the material shot outside of these environs feel especially
kinetic. To a certain extent this is a matter of handheld work,
but one of the film’s last shots really is exceptional. The camera follows the protagonist down into the stacks of the
Vienna library where he spends his working days, a space
that grows narrower as the camera descends ladders. The
smoothness of the movement, though, turns genuinely vertiginous as that camera shoots through a tunnel of everchanging bookshelves. This is a work of portraiture, to be
sure, but one that is rendered with equal attention to movement and social context.
Komunia follows a Polish family whose youngest son is
preparing for his first Communion. He is ten years old, a little late for first Communion; he is also autistic, and so hasn’t
been able to memorize the points of the catechism still in use
in Polish churches (and which today would be unheard of
in most English and French language dioceses worldwide).
Zamecka’s film goes well beyond the usual narrative about
a secularizing Europe, although that is certainly part of the
mix here, to focus most intently on the family’s older daughter, a relatively indifferent believer whose main concern is
negotiating her difficult little brother, their alcoholic father,
and their absent mother. If the daughter’s domestic sphere is
pulled in three directions, Zamecka shows the social life of
Poland as correspondingly split in two between an ineptly
modernizing Catholicism, still based in the Polish school system and trying to get young people to go along, and an
equally inept social welfare system, omnipresent in the family’s life but tragically unable to provide anything even
vaguely resembling help.
These are two sides of the same coin: the education system and welfare state and the Church, each clueless about
the challenges that Polish modernity is laying at their feet,
and clueless precisely because of the way that “Poland” on
the one hand (with the Church) and “modernity” on the
other (education and social services) have made them inescapably central to people’s lives. As with Secondo Me, this is
also a visually astute work, defined especially by interiors
that are shot with available light and which achieve a soft
symphony in brown and red that is never fully depressing.
Such images are the brighter ones, captured in the school, in
the church, at the post-Communion restaurant meal where
the family comes together in a way that is, obviously and
painfully, fleeting.
Vor der Morgenröte (Stefan Zweig: Farewell to Europe,
2016), written and directed by Maria Schrader, played the Piazza Grande midway through the festival, and was defined
by a comparable sense of the fleeting quality of connection:
to loved ones, to places, to commitments. This is a biopic of
the famous Austrian writer (played by Josef Harder) whose
work formed the basis of Wes Anderson’s Grand Budapest
Hotel (2014), among so many other contributions, and for
this audience it provided a splashy, glamorous, but still serious experience. Like Secondo Me, it is defined by a series of
key fixed-position sequence shots in grand spaces; Schrader
heightens the sense of the film being broken into tableaux
even more by dividing it into three distinct parts and an
epilogue.
The story emphasizes Zweig’s identity as a lonely cosmopolitan: worldly, multilingual, but fully at home only speaking German with a few intimate friends. It also emphasizes
his unwillingness to get involved in politics; Zweig was an
exile from Nazi-era Europe, but throughout the film he refuses to denounce Germany, partially because he thinks this
is the easy path (as an exile, he faces no consequences for
making such statements) and, it becomes clear, partially because he feels such sadness at being expelled from his place
in the German language and the world it created. Where he
feels happiest is Brazil, a country that Schrader renders as
poor but pleasant, a welcoming shelter full of fans of his
work and a place where you can still get German newspapers every once in a while. Though Brazil was indeed on
the side of the Allies during World War II, it was ruled
throughout that time by the dictator Getúlio Vargas. But
Schrader presents Brazil as Zweig saw it: a beautiful country
on the right side of the war that was very welcoming to
famous Europeans. The film mentions the historical weirdness of this only in passing; blink and you could miss it.
More poignant is the chapter set in a wintry New York,
not only for the intensity of its interiors (that “chapter” is
shot entirely in a small apartment) but also because of the
power of Barbara Sukowa’s performance as Zweig’s first
wife, Friderike Maria von Winternitz. She provides the
film’s moral center, with Sukowa radiating a calm, intense
endurance that contrasts sharply with the brooding nervousness of Harder’s Zweig. She is just as cosmopolitan a figure
as Zweig, but her description of fleeing Marseille in near-riot
conditions, unable to say a proper goodbye to a family or a
continent, provides a powerful corrective to some of the
film’s historical shortcomings.
Such chaos looks very different through the contemporary lens of Wang Bing. Best known for his nine-hour portrayal of Chinese industrial landscapes, Ti Xi Qu (West of the
Tracks, 2004), Wang brought a very different film to
Locarno. Ta’ang (2016) follows a group of refugees on the
border between Burma and China (the title is also the name
of the ethnic group), moving with them as they try to find
shelter from fighting that is always faintly audible in the
background but never visible onscreen. In his introduction
Wang warned audiences that much of the film “is hard to
see,” alluding to the degree to which he shot only with available light, which oftentimes meant improvised campfires. In
fact, this strategy is highly effective. The film is entirely
about the unseen (there is no combat footage). The preponderance of darkness is not only a summary of the ways in
which the visible is a limited guide to reality, but it also creates a kind of stillness and calm echoed in the remarkable
calmness of the film’s subjects. The final sequence, where a
group of women and children (along with one man) walk
down a dirt road and finally decide to stop and make camp
is stunning for just this reason. Cannon fire is audible, but
nobody seems to pay it much mind. They’ve found a lean-to,
and all figure that this is as good a place as any to stop; the
film ends with them cutting down sugar cane to shore it up
and calling home to check up on a older family member who
had to stay behind. The calmness of the scene is remarkable,
and the celebrated patience of a filmmaker like Wang
F ILM QU A RTE RL Y
77
Barbara Sukowa in Maria Schraeder’s Stefan Zweig: Farewell to Europe (2016).
suddenly comes to feel like the only reasonable way to
render such a moment in history.
Locarno’s commitments to internationalism notwithstanding, it is also well known as the most important international venue for Swiss cinema.3 One of the festival’s
annual sections is the “Panorama Suisse,” which showcases
some key Swiss films that have already found acclaim both
locally and internationally. But there is also a vigorous program of retrospectives and restorations of Swiss cinema, as
well as a lot of Swiss films scattered in other parts of the program. Of all the Swiss material I saw, the strangest work by
far was Jacob Berger’s Un juif pour l’exemple (A Jew Must Die,
2016). This told the story of the murder of a Jewish cattle
merchant by Nazi sympathizers in WWII-era Switzerland
which, we come to see here, was not always as neutral as the
Swiss would like to remember. (Berger, a dual Swiss-British
citizen, is the son of the English writer John Berger.)
The historical stakes of Berger’s game may seem high,
but something much trickier is going on here in terms of the
changing nature of Swiss culture. The film is loosely based
78
WIN T ER 201 6
on the novel of the same name by Jacques Chessex, who
published it right before he died (two more novels were published posthumously). Chessex is also a central character in
the film; Berger presents the narrative as Chessex’s recollections of the period, and it brings us right up to the point that
he had his fatal heart attack during a public debate. I’m willing to leave aside its historical fudges, even though Chessex
died as he was being attacked not for Un juif pour l’exemple,
as in the film, but for his support of Roman Polanski, who
had just been arrested at a Zurich airport on his way to a
tribute at that city’s film festival. Chessex himself can fill the
role of the film’s central character because of his stature in
Swiss literature; he was to the French-speaking parts of that
country (collectively known as la Suisse romande) roughly
what Margaret Atwood is to English-Canadians, or J.M.
Coetzee is to white South Africans. He is still the only Swiss
writer to ever win the prestigious Prix Goncourt, which he
was awarded in 1973 for his novel L’Ogre. When Chessex
died in 2009, the event provoked a major round of soulsearching in la Suisse romande about the state of Francophone
Ta’ang (Wang Bing, 2016).
Swiss culture and the prospects of someone of his international stature ever emerging again.
The film’s weird aspect of self-conscious anachronisms
(people drive modern cars, the police wear modern uniforms)
makes sense only to an audience who accept this as a film
about the culture of la Suisse romande today. One of the most
sophisticated film critics I know privately dismissed Un juif
pour l’exemple as facile and moralizing. If the only legible
aspect of it is the anti-Nazi material, then I can see how that
would be an obvious conclusion. Coming out against the
Nazis is hardly a bold move; in the twenty-first century
pointing out that Switzerland was the home to Nazi sympathizers is not that shocking a revelation. But hiding below the
moralism and signaled by the anachronisms is an argument
(without any particularly clear conclusion, I hasten to add)
about the culture of a small partner in a small country, about
how strongly people want to hang on to their sense of investment in a place and the consequences of that kind of investment, about the ways that the French speakers are or aren’t
different from the rest of the country (especially the German
speakers, Switzerland’s domineering older siblings).
Un juif pour l’exemple is a mess, a fascinating, unpredictably strange mess. What’s particularly noteworthy is that
such an odd film would appear here as the “must see” of the
Swiss list; Le Temps devoted a full page to it on the festival’s
Un juif pour l’exemple (A Jew Must Die, Jacob Berger, 2016).
opening day, when it played at the largest of the non-Piazza
venues. When I saw it three days later at an only slightly
smaller venue at 9 A.M., every seat was taken. Local audiences seemed highly invested in the film, and it’s hard to imagine that Chessex’s role in it didn’t account for most of that
interest. It was a moment of unequaled localism in a decidedly international event.
Locarno, more than any festival I know, is defined top to
bottom by tensions between internationalism and localism,
commercialism and experimentation, applause and debate.
My moment of clarity on the depths of these internal conflicts came when Guy Lodge, a critic for Variety and the
F ILM QU A RTE RL Y
79
Guardian, joked that the essence of the Piazza Grande was
that it needed to allow for both Jason Bourne and Stefan
Zweig. The fact that he made this very pithy comment in
a panel devoted to Swiss cinema—a panel sponsored by the
government-funded agency Swiss Films but conducted, like
the IndieWire-sponsored panel on film criticism in a digital
age, entirely in English without any simultaneous translation
into a Swiss language—hints at the key problem. On the one
hand there was a desire throughout the proceedings to open
things up to the world, and to have international critics offer
insights into the local situation. Good enough. But here, as
throughout the festival (and Locarno is hardly the only large
event where this is true), there was also a pronounced fear of
frightening the visitors, that is to say, the English speakers,
with the reality of being in a foreign country.
At a similar Swiss film panel in 2003, I watched the moderator shift between French and Italian. Roger Ebert was
part of that one, a luminary invited to give some international sense of the situation of local filmmaking. He listened
intently to simultaneous translation over headphones, and
when it was his turn to speak, he did so in a noticeably
straightforward and precise idiom, obviously aware that he
too was being translated.
For all my grouchiness about such issues and my unhappiness about the near-disappearance of the French language
that had been so present on my visits of 2003 and 2006 but
now was almost fully replaced by English in the workings of
the festival itself (with Italian still front and center for big
events), I could not help but marvel at the presence of the local realities and the way that they were being balanced by a
wide-ranging openness to the international. No other film
festival in the world would show a film like Un juif pour l’exemple on its opening day; no other festival would show a biopic about Stefan Zweig in an outdoor screening for eight
thousand; no other festival would produce a retrospective of
sixty films from West Germany, many of which turned out
80
WIN T ER 201 6
to be from East Germany, the most memorable of which
was a co-production between East Germany and Poland.
Locarno has changed radically over the course of the last
two decades, seeming to emerge from the shadow of Cannes
into something very different indeed: part marketplace, part
showcase, part international development project, part seminar. The program is massive, and to invert my earlier
Bourne-inflected hypothetical, it’s certainly possible to spend
all ten days seeing only very conventional films. But sitting
there in plain sight is a festival that challenges its viewers, not
just by presenting surprising or unusual films, but by offering, over the course of the entire program, arguments about
“big problems” in cinema: problems having to do with nation-states, with documentary form, with the relationship
between art and politics, and with cinema’s ability to be both
intimate and epic, sometimes simultaneously. The festival
still clearly believes in the sense of cinema as a singular international force, and that kind of faith is pretty unusual in an
event of this size. Or any other size.
Notes
1. Olivier Perrin, “Le coup de gueule de Freddy Buache à
Locarno, 1970,” Le Temps, August 2, 2016. See goo.gl/RgCKgq
2. Full disclosure: I worked on two of Toronto’s Canadian retrospectives. I contributed some catalogue notes and wrote the
afterword to the book they published for the 2004 retrospective of Pierre Perrault, and in 2006 I curated and wrote the
book for their Peter Mettler retrospective. TIFF’s commitment to Canadian cinema actually dates back to its origins.
For many decades, it was the only juried section and launched
a number of careers.
3. In fact, the most comprehensive such festival is the Solothurn
Film Days (Solothurner Filmtage/Journées de Solure), which
takes place in January and is devoted entirely to Swiss cinema.
It’s a great operation, but its international profile is pretty
slight.