What is Out There Waiting

originally published in Border Crossings issue 116

What is Out There Waiting: 6th Berlin Biennale
Curated by Kathrin Rhomberg

Not quite a statement, nor explicitly a question, the theme chosen to frame the 6th Berlin Biennale is at once ominous and open-ended, conjuring visions of the underrepresented, the oppressed, or the ignored lurking in the distance, waiting to be uncovered. Despite the temporal and spatial dislocations the exhibition’s title implies, curator Kathrin Rhomberg claims that young artists are thinking less and less about the future, choosing instead to reinvestigate 20th century concerns. Her biennale seeks to addresses this “new historicism” by presenting works that direct their gaze away from the formal and self-referential concerns of contemporary art and “outward, at reality.” As Rhomberg told Artforum’s Anthony Byt, “it became urgent again for me to ask: Is there a relationship between art and the present moment, and if so, what does it look like?”

A challenging question, to say the least, and one that cannot easily be answered, even within the parameters of a mega-show like a biennale, the very structure of which is poised to respond to contemporary issues. According to Rhomberg, what defines our current moment, or at least the things she would like to direct our attention toward, are art practices that engage with social, economic, and political “realities.” Wisely framing reality in the plural, Rhomberg is also concerned with the attendant gaps or cracks in reality, the distance between how things seem and how they are. Implicit in this question is how the invisible becomes visible, and how anything, whether an individual, collectivity, idea, or act constitutes its own visibility. Indeed, the production of reality is one of the strongest themes to come out of Rhomberg’s thoughtful, though at times maddening biennale.

In her attempt to take on such a slippery idea, Rhomberg strikes a modest tone, limiting the exhibition to forty-five artists and moving the bulk of the biennale’s six exhibition venues away from the bustle and noveau-glitz of Berlin’s Mitte to Kreuzberg. An air of seriousness pervades What is Out There Waiting, which eschews the spectacular site-specific works often commissioned for biennales in favor of more subdued, if not ramshackle installations and a curatorial tempo that tries to be deliberate, but instead often comes off as stilted and heavy handed. The work itself is predictably austere. After dutifully marching through the exhibitions six venues, some hidden on side streets and in unlikely locations, viewers may find themselves wondering, “is this what reality looks like?” The exhibition halls at Kunst-Werke, the biennale’s flagship institution feel practically empty, while visitors to the exhibition’s largest venue, a crumbling former department store on Kreuzberg’s Oranienplatz, are subjected to documentary video after documentary with little space to absorb the information contained therein.

An unfortunate by-product of this approach is that the works seem to seldom speak to each other. Indeed, the strongest relationships that emerge between works are often the most literal, like Renzo Marten’s Episode Three and Mark Boulos’ All That is Solid Melts into Air, though thankfully this does not diminish the seriousness or impact of either. Boulos’ two channel video juxtaposes the frenetic trading floor of the Chicago futures market with the artist’s interviews with resistance fighters in the Nigerian River Delta, where the local ecosystem has been decimated in the interest of foreign oil companies. Between outlining how “no bullet, no knife, no dagger can cut him” and telling the artist never to come to see him again, an elderly Nigerian man sternly commands Boulos, “make them remember us,” a not so subtle reminder of both the complexity and responsibility inherent in image making. This thread continues in Episode Three, Renzo Marten’s controversial 90 minute video which suggests that poverty, like any other resource, it is something that is bought, sold, traded, and exploited. Under the guise of a self-obsessed gonzo artist cum journalist, Marten’s stages a number of community meetings and trains local wedding photographers to document their own misery for profit. The Congolese may be poor, Martens reminds them, but they at least have their poverty itself, which they are giving away for free. To this end, Marten’s introduces a blinking neon sign reading "ENJOY POVERTY" half way through the film as both a directive to the Congolese, as well as a not-so-subtle indictment of Western consumption of "third world" poverty.

While political engagement is one of the leitmotifs of the exhibition, also expressed in the protest videos of Minerva Cuevas (Mexico) and Bernard Bazile (France), politics and history are at their richest and most expressive in works that are less explicit. After navigating the prescribed entrance to the exhibition through Kunst-Werke’s basement, visitors are greeted by a few live hens and a large wooden structure created by the biennale’s youngest artist, the twenty-four year old Kosovo born Petrit Halilaj. Entitled The places I’m looking for, my dear, are utopian places, they are boring and I don’t know how to make them real, the work is created from reconstructed beams from his parents’ home. A minimal and poetic construction, the work is an evocative blend of the personal and political, and one of the exhibition’s few doses of charm and humor.

Based in Berlin

Based in Berlin
originally published in SOMA's travel issue

With hundreds of exhibition spaces and over 6,000 professional artists, Berlin has grown into one of the most attractive destinations for artists and art lovers in the world. It is no surprise, then, that the city is funding a large-scale temporary exhibition to demonstrate the “treasures the city has to offer.” What’s debatable is whether this show is actually a move towards the kunsthalle locals have been demanding or merely an attempt to sweeten Berlin’s public image at the expense of its cultural producers. At this point, it remains to be seen. But the debate is fierce.

Opening on June 8th, based in Berlin will feature works by 80 artists living and working in the German capital, and is organized by a team of five up-and-coming curators overseen by curatorial hotshots Klaus Biesenbach (MoMA), Christine Macel (Centre Pompidou) and Hans Ulrich Obrist (Serpentine Gallery). Six weeks of talks, performances and workshops will accompany the controversial exhibition, which is set to take place in an empty studio building on the brink of demolition. Site specific architecture will be created for based in Berlin by the renowned local firm Raumlabor, including a modular structure consisting of containers, trucks, prefab houses and other elements.

EYEOUT Rhineland

Accurate, Insider, Up-to-date. Founded by curator Jan Winkelmann and art collector/software developer Ivo Wessel, EYEOUT offers an unparalleled view into some of Europe’s most dynamic art scenes. From museums to blue chips to out-of-the-way project spaces, EYEOUT will help you find what you’re looking for and even what you don’t know you’re looking for.I was pleased to join the EYEOUT team once again for their guide to the Rhineland.

You can find more information here.

Kunsttips von EYEOUT - EYEOUT Art Events

Originally published in the May issue of Mitteschön
Art Tips from Eyeout
Jesi Khadivi

Sterling Ruby
8 April – 28 May, 2011
Sprüth Magers


Beautiful, brutal forms dominate Spencer Ruby’s installations. I Am Not Free Because I Can Be Exploded Anytime is no exception. Taking its title from a collaborative work by Jenny Holzer and the graffiti artist Lady Pink, Ruby’s current exhibition at Sprüth Magers includes painting, collages and sculptures that evoke the claustrophobia and paranoia of America’s cultural obsession with freedom. The main exhibition space is dominated by a palette of reds, whites and blues that alternate between vivid and restrained hues. The formal qualities of the works on view mirror this tension, ranging from brightly colored, organic fabric and fiber-fill hanging sculptures to more somber plinths and spray painted works on canvas. Peacehead, a spray-painted bronze sculpture of a collapsed peace symbol, perfectly encapsulates the exhibition’s mood of a nation’s optimism deflated.

Mie Olise Kjaergaard
Afflicted Fallout
29 April – 10 June , 2011
Duve Berlin

In 1941 the physicians Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg met in Copenhagen to discuss the question of the nuclear bomb. The meeting ended poorly, with Bohr storming out in fury. Mie Olise Kjaergaard’s fascinating exhibition takes the historic meeting as its subject and includes eleven gestural oil paintings that interpret the architecture of the building where the two acclaimed physicists met. Keeping with her intriguing research based and multi-disciplinary practice, the new body of paintings is accompanied by English translations of letters Bohr never sent to his estranged friend and colleague, along with a sculptural work that is also the key to find the location in Berlin where the artist planted Henbane and Belladonna, the two plants most likely to survive after an atomic bomb.

Alon Levin
End to the Grand Gesture
29 April - 18 June , 2011
Klemm’s

Alon Levin’s large-scale wooden sculptures reference modernist utopias and social theories about space, progress and growth. Order and its disruption are guiding interests in the artist’s practice and the conflict between the two generate a palpable excitement in the his work. As Levin says himself, “somewhere among the ruins there is the potential for the authentically new.” In his anticipated second solo exhibition with Klemm’s, Levin will create an wooden installation filling the entire gallery space, whose exact details are kept under wraps until its debut at Gallery Weekend.

The Spectacular of the Vernacular

The Spectacular of the Vernacular
originally published in Kaleidoscope issue 10, Spring 2011
view in original context here

Distinctions between high and low have become increasingly difficult to pinpoint in recent decades, the channels between the two poles now more porous and nuanced than ever before. Building upon a history of large-scale exhibitions examining the relationship between the spheres of fine art and mass culture, Walker head curator Darsie Alexander’s exhibition “The Spectacular of the Vernacular” takes Mike Kelley’s observation—“the mass art of today is the folk art of tomorrow”— as its inspiration. Unlike exhibitions that have explored similar themes, “The Spectacular of the Vernacular” is not burdened by the weight of proving the relationships between the two spheres. Focusing on works made after 1970, the “The Spectacular of the Vernacular” explores a period of art in which the influence of mass culture is often taken for granted. The exhibition addresses how mass culture is experienced and addressed in daily life, as well as the appeal its forms have held for artists over the past four decades. In order to examine the scope and breadth of the influence of vernacular and consumer culture on contemporary art practice, Alexander brings together works that range in aesthetic and medium, engaging with humble, handmade, and folkloric iconography, as well as the sleeker sides of spectacle and commerce. With nearly forty works by more than twenty artists—Lari Pittman, Marc Swanson, Rachel Harrison, and Shannon Ebner among them—“The Spectacular of the Vernacular” presents both sides of the vernacular encounter: the nostalgia of roadside attractions and the cheerfulness of the carnivalesque.

Jessica Warboys

Originally published in Kaleidoscope issue 10, Spring 2011
view in original context here

Jessica Warboys

In the words of critic David Lewis, the work of Jessica Warboys “walks a tightrope between presence and disappearance.” Working across a range of media that includes sculpture, performance, and film, Warboys explores the psychological space created by objects and mis-enscène. With an emphasis on narrative and the evocative role that objects and processes play in the construction thereof, Warboys’s work toys with the totemic quality of her materials, placing their physicality at the center of a web of associations and metaphors. This is seen most clearly in her partnering of materials and elements. Warboys often uses found objects and harnesses natural forces as part of her process. For a technique she calls “sea painting,” the artist immerses canvases into the sea, allowing the waves and wind to trace their impression upon the canvases’ surfaces. Warboys connects her sea paintings and cyanotype photograms to her broader practice through their spatial and temporal relationship to performance or, in the artist’s words, “improvised gesture.” The career of the thirty-four-year-old London- and Parisbased artist is rapidly picking up speed: in 2011, she can be spotted in “Satellite 4,” an exhibition at Jeu de Paume curated by Raimundas Malasauskas; “Madame Realism,” a group exhibition in Maastricht’s Marres Centre for Contemporary Culture, curated by Lisette Smits; Dublin Contemporary 2011; and at the Crédac in Ivry-sur-Seine this spring

Dazed and Confused

New piece in the film section of this month's Dazed and Confused

Art Schools

My review of Art Schools: Propositions for the 21st Centurywas recently published in the Fanzine. Click here to read.

Candy Says

My preview of James Raisin's new film Beautiful Darling was published on Interview's film blog yesterday.

My Barbarian

My interview interview with My Barbarian was published in The Fanzine. A must read for any lovers of performance art or experimental theater.

White Lightnin'

White Lightnin' in the October 2009 issue of Dazed.

Kiersten Puusemp

This piece was published in Artweek



Kiersten Puusemp: Whole Wide World
The Box
October 25th through November 15th, 2008
By Jesi Khadivi

In fits of pique or depression, everyone has dreamt of going as far away as humanly possible. On October 25th, the opening day of her solo exhibition at The Box, Kiersten Puusemp left Los Angeles. By the time people gathered for her artist’s reception on November 8th, Puusemp was in a helicopter hovering over the Indian Ocean, as far from Los Angeles’ Chinatown as geographically possible. Skipping town for a French territory in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Madagascar was not an escapist stunt, but a way of understanding the earth poetically and spatially. A project three years in the making, Whole Wide World is, in the words of the artist, “an attempt to touch something intangible, to physically experience something that cannot be sufficiently understood intellectually and to perceive the physical reality of a human existence that is limited to a concrete space within an infinite universe.”

This is not the first time the artist has been conspicuously absent from her own opening. She missed the reception for her thesis show at USC because her piece, Long Run, consisted of running a marathon. Everything the artist didn’t take on her expedition to the other side of the earth was left in the gallery. A nomad by nature, Puusemp’s few belongings took up only a fraction of the gallery space; one is confronted with a few pieces of well packed luggage and sundry domestic and recreational items, but mostly white space prevails. Puusemp eschewed presenting her things as art objects, instead opting to leave the remainder of her belongings exactly as they were when she finished packing her bags on the gallery floor. It took a lot of planning, and presumably great expense, to reach the pinnacle of the dialectically physical and intangible experience that Puusemp describes, but the deeply personal nature of the project is both the exhibition’s strength and its weakness. The poster for the exhibition which shows coordinates, maps, immunization records, and frequent flier mile calculations is one of the viewer’s only windows into the process of the piece. However, the culmination of the work (if we are to assume that the spatial relationship that the artist initiates or “makes known” is the function of the piece) is largely private. One must laud Puusemp’s curiosity and desire to explore the basic conditions of human experience. Regardless of her intentions, Puusemp opens many cans of worms simultaneously with Whole Wide World. Post studio art practice is old hat, so we’re used to accepting a jumble, or in Puusemp’s case orderly stacks, of non-art objects as art. But the artistic experience is difficult to pin down in Whole Wide World because the piece is both emphatically spatial, yet completely immaterial. How is the artistic encounter experienced? In a plane over the Indian Ocean? In Los Angeles thinking about a plane over the Indian Ocean? Is it all around us?

The exhibition elicits the contemplation of spatial relationships, the potential immateriality of art objects, the metaphorical artist’s journey, and the artist’s physical relationship to their art work in a globalized post-studio framework. However, Puusemp’s refusal to channel her experience of this journey is the most frustrating aspect of the exhibition. With the exception of the exhibition poster, documentation doesn’t play a role in the realization of this piece. Puusemp gives her audience little guidance. She ditches them in the dust while she takes her journey, leaving them with a room full of things she couldn’t take with her and their own ideas.

Anna Torma, Istvan Zsako, and Balint Zsako in Border Crossings

My review of the Torma-Zsako family's exhibition at the Wilde Gallerywas just published in the Canadian arts quarterly Border Crossings.

first as tragedy, then as farce

My review of Slavoj Zizek's latest book has been published in The Fanzine.

Dazed and Confused, October

My review of White Lightnin' was published in the October issue of Dazed and Confused. Check it out at a newsstand near you!

Review//Modern Painters

My review of this Summer's Richard Artschwager exhibtion at Sprüth Magers has been published in the September issue of Modern Painters/
Check it out here.

Artslant

I've recently started working as a Berlin correspondent for the art website Artslant. My picks this month were Romantische Maschinen at the Georg Kolbe Museum and Allora + Calzadillaat the Temporäre Kunsthalle.

Berlin on the Brink

Berlin on the Brink is an editorial about California artists in Berlin commissioned this Spring by the now defunct California art magazine, Art Week.

Berlin on the Brink
By Jesi Khadivi

My dreams of living in Berlin began in 2002. I was pursuing a degree in Art History and Theory, my apartment was both too expensive and too small, and Berlin’s burgeoning east side seemed like everything post-9/11 New York City was not: spacious, cheap and adventurous. I understand now that my feelings about the city were inspired by collegiate romanticism and disillusionment. New Yorkers at the time were obsessed by Berlin; the idea that German capital had the gritty charm of Manhattan in the 80s inspired a few of the 10,000 Americans that now live in the haupstadt to cross the Atlantic. But relating to Berlin solely through the guise of Nan Goldin era NYC is the equivalent of calling San Francisco “San Fran.” It establishes a false intimacy with the city that only illuminates how little the speaker knows about it. The same goes for Berlin mayor, Klaus Wowereit’s, oft-repeated “Poor but Sexy” motto, which the mayor used in an attempt to hype his financially ailing city to investors. When I moved to Berlin in 2007, I was surprised to not find a cheaper, utopian New York. But I did like what I saw: a laid back hybridization of art forms and practices. Everyone I met had a project (or three) and, even as a foreigner, I encountered an overwhelming sense of enthusiasm and genuine warmth for all sorts of creative endeavors.

After a year in Los Angeles, I returned to Germany in February 2009. Though Berlin is indelibly linked to New York in the American cultural imagination, my first night at O Tannenbaum, a free form bar that hosts electronic music, film nights, informal dinners and others arts oriented events in Neuköln, showed a growing migration between Berlin, San Francisco and Los Angeles, Berlin’s sister city. Although the director of O Tannenbaum is Dutch and the venue has an international following, the film night I attended had a distinctly Oaklandish feel, like a little Bay Area in exile. The night had all of the elements of a Bay Area DIY art event: no entrance fee, affordable and delicious vegetarian food and, most importantly, a dedicated and interconnected web of followers. The crowd at O Tannenbaum was mostly an audience of producers. One thing that has become clear to me on my second pass through Berlin, is that regional identity is nothing more than a shared experience. The bay area contingent that patronizes O Tannenbaum and some of its curators side projects are drawn together by friendship and mutual respect, but their reasons for being in Germany vary from marriage and grad school, to simply wanting a massive change.

Erin Weber, a recent CCA alum and the gracious host of the event, cooked a meal and presented the film Fantastic Planet. Weber has been in Berlin for a year and a half. She works in myriad collaborative capacities, running a small publication and audio-visual performance group called Pyramid Press and Dancing Pyramid, respectively, with the German artist Mella Ojeda. Many of the American artists based in Berlin pass through for only a year or two. One artist told me that Berlin was “the number one destination post graduation for CCA student” and “a pit-stop en route to American graduate schools.” Weber, however, plans to stay. When asked where she saw herself eventually settling down, Weber simply says, “here,” and went on to explain that she had worked so hard building a network of creative friends and collaborators, that it would be silly to pick up and move back to the states immediately.


Alicia Reuter, an American art-critic and curator who has settled permanently in Berlin, cites a lack of competition and an emphasis on continuing arts education as factors that compel Berlin’s art professionals to build bridges between different mediums and continents in ways that are not necessarily commercial. Telic Arts Exchange, the ambitious east side LA hybrid arts institution, is one of the newest international organizations to lay roots in Berlin. Conceived as a platform for art, architecture, media, and pedagogy, Telic curates exhibitions, stages live performances, and hosts the Public School, an amorphous committee-run educational experiment, in their Chinatown gallery. They selected their satellite location at Brunnenstraße 11 with the help of Berlin based architects SMAQ. The space, simply called Berlin, is a conceptual art gallery that will host exhibitions for at least one year. Their mission statement shows a nuanced understanding of the myths and realities of the German capital “Recognizing that art is experienced through so-called secondary formats of press releases, rumors, websites, advertisements, anecdote, and freely circulating images, Telic decided in 2007 to create a gallery within this particular place.” Even commercial gallerists are drawn to the promise and opportunities in Berlin, real or perceived. Gallerist Javier Peres, whose Peres Projects has branches in both Los Angeles, cites the city’s openness as a guiding impulse in maintaining galleries on both continents. “I like the freedom of Berlin, it is the most free city in the western world at the moment, one can do and not do as they please, and that works just fine for me.”

The Berlin based painter Ernesto Ortiz, another recent CCA graduate drawn here in part by the opportunities the city offers as the one of the largest art markets in Europe, cautiously agrees with Peres’ point about the freedom of Berlin. “When I first went back to San Francisco after being in Berlin for a year, I really felt the stark contrast of control in the street. It was as simple as noticing that people in Berlin ride their bikes wherever they wish, rules be damned. This includes sidewalks or wrong direction in the bike lane. There are no Parisian rules of dress or Italian bans on certain shoes. But then again, this is Germany, albeit a very free city in German with a strong American influence. There is still a very real German character trait of rule-making and passive obedience that is felt here.” While Ortiz enjoys Berlin’s cultural openness, like Telic Arts Exchange, he fully understands the myth of place propagated by the American art world. “This is city is a Mecca of social and historical myth,” he says, “I find ideas about Berlin to not be very developed as far as their complexity of understanding. Or simply put, they are quite superficial. Berlin is what Paris was for a long time. This image of European cultural and aesthetic superiority exist in a collective bourgeois basket of themes. Berlin is chic. And most people who accept this do not bother to question or understand why. For many artists I have met here, just the act of being here seems to be an accomplishment.”

Paul Tyree-Francis, a 26 year-old Berlin based artist via Los Angeles via San Francisco, believes the appeal of expatriating is especially attractive to artists and creative professionals. “The idea of being an outsider is a romantic notion, especially in Berlin. There is literally so much free and open space here. Everyone is hopeful that Berlin will culminate, but it continues not to. There was a piece in the New York Times recently about how the city has historically positioned itself to become a megalopolis and for myriad reasons it just never happens.” Living in a city in transition is undoubtedly appealing to artists and writers and is perhaps the key to the “freedom” that draws people here. But what will happen is Berlin ever reaches the pinnacle it is pushing for? Tyree-Francis laughs, If it ever did culminate it may just be an opportunity for everyone to complain about it and leave.”

Interview//Break On Through to the Other Side//SOMA

Originally published in the April issue of SOMA
Break on Through to the Other Side
Text Jesi Khadivi

Tom DeCillo has never made a documentary film before. The New York based director, who gave Brad Pitt his first leading role in the film Johnny Suede back in 1991, generally leans towards dreamy, darkly comedic filmmaking. Genre jumping is no easy feat and directing a film about The Doors, one of the most beloved rock bands in America, is a baptism by fire. DeCillo has emerged unscathed, however, presenting a fascinating look at the men behind the music, comprised entirely of archival footage and excerpts from Jim Morrison’s little seen feature film, Highway. “I wanted to make the film without talking heads,” DeCillo explained, “sitting in the editing room for months looking at this footage, I felt like I was truly experiencing The Doors and I wanted the audience to share that direct experience.” DeCillo spoke with SOMA via telephone from New York City about his new film and the respective challenges of narrative and documentary filmmaking. When You’re Strange was nominated for a Grand Jury Prize at Sundance this year and played to a packed house at the Berlinale in Germany. Since the film’s premiere on the festival circuit, Johnny Depp has signed on to do narration.

Where did Morrison’s Film Footage Come From?

Morrison went to UCLA film school back in 1965. He loved film, but his sense of it completely experimental and free form. Years after leaving film school and well after he joined the Doors, Morrison got some money together and went out into the desert with some old classmates from UCLA and a 35mm camera to shoot a short feature called Highway, based on a script that he wrote. What I loved about the film is how it portrayed a mythological loner figure wandering through the American landscape. Most people cannot believe that it’s Jim Morrison. We had a bizarre reaction to the film at Sundance. One distributor got up in outrage after and stormed out because he was convinced we used an actor.

Did he receive any recognition for the film within his lifetime?

Morrison was very proud of Highway and had real aspirations to be a film maker.
He went to two film festivals with it, but it was not very well received. Highway is a difficult film. As specific as Morrison with his music and the image he created, he did not quite understand that the same need applies to the visual medium. The film is like an extended tone poem that doesn’t make much sense, but I respect his effort. It’s the film he wanted to make.

Did you encounter any sour grapes or any resistance to telling the story of the Doors? Many former band members of these 60s bands are very bitter about their leaders stealing the spotlight and they resolutely want to avoid perpetuating their myth.

Each of the remaining band members had a different thing that they wanted to make clear and I had to honor that, but Ray Manzarek, John Densmore and Robby Krieger all effortessly praised Jim Morrison as a great friend and had no resentment for him in any way. That being said, I didn’t want the band meddling or editorializing what I was doing. There is a possessiveness about the story that bugged me a little bit. One of the best documentaries I’ve seen in the past ten years is Some Kind Of Monster, about Metallica. They hire a shrink because the band is falling apart. I didn’t want to just make a puff piece about The Doors

It seems rare for an LA band in that era to praise each other as you describe, especially a flamboyant figure like Morrison. It was stereotypically the San Francisco bands who lived together and played together while the LA bands got together only to play gigs and fight.

Morrison was addicted to jumping out into the void and not knowing where he would end up. The group was an amazing safety net for him. They allowed him to go out into outer space and always have a place to land. I think they really cherished each other.

There were times when they got famous that the announcer at a gig would introduce them “Jim Morrison and the Doors” and Jim would get so angry that he would refuse to go on and would make the announcer reintroduce them as The Doors.

Your films Johnny Suede and Delirious feature performances by Nick Cave and Elvis Costello. Did working with musicians in your narrative film making influence your decision to work on a musical documentary?

I have a great love of music. The combination of music and the moving image is an incredibly powerful mixture. Nick Cave was in Kreuzberg living with my friend, who was in a German punk band named Die Haut. He had read my script because it was sitting on my friend’s table and he called me saying that he’d like to be in my movies. He had a larger than life presence that many serious actors never quite attain. The same goes for Elvis Costello.

Do you find that there are any parallels between your narrative film making and documentary film making?

I like the documentary film, but I’ve always been drawn to the documentaries that resist categorization, like Errol Morris. They have a mystery to them, a slightly surreal quality that isn’t just a presentation of fact. I discovered early on that the best thing for me to do that would help me artistically was to think of the film as a narrative feature with an epic angle. It is ultimately a tragic story. I don’t mean that in a depressing way, but every one knows what happened to Jim Morrison. A lot of my films feature characters that are struggling to understand something about themselves.

Can you speak at all to the respective challenges of documentaries versus narrative film making?

There was a sense of relief that I didn’t need to exhaust myself trying to eke out performances that were crucial to the success of the film. I’ve been fortunate enough to work with actors like Catherine Keener and Steve Buscemi, who relieve that pressure a little bit, but it can be quite difficult.

While the footage was a given, there were moments of terror trying to tell a story with a dramatic arc: surprise, revelation, joy, all of the things that go into a real film. I didn’t want to paraphrase everything that I had read about The Doors. I needed to find something truthful in it, my own perspective. Ultimately, I came to the realization that I just wanted to show the band as human beings. The footage of Jim Morrison just laughing at times or being like a young boy is, to me, one of the most beautiful moments in the film.

Report//European Highlights from the Berlinale//SOMA

originally published in the March issue of SOMA
European Highlights from the Berlinale
By Jesi Khadivi

The usually tame Potsdamer Platz came alive when journalists, film executives, international a-listers and movie lovers descended upon Berlin’s postmodern quadrangle of hotels and movie theaters from February 5th through the 15th for the 59th annual Berlinale, one of Europe’s longest running international film festivals. While Berlin’s grey skies and frigid temperatures don’t leave much room for glamour (some stars were actually shivering on the red carpet), the festival is an industry favorite because the breadth of its competition films range from quirkily salable films like Mitchell Lichtenstein’s family drama Happy Teeth, starring Demi Moore and Parker Posey to films like Katalin Varga, a sumptuously shot revenge film set in the Carpathian mountains by British, Budapest-based director, Peter Strickland,. Although Hollywood favorites like Michelle Pfeiffer, Blake Lively, Renée Zellweger, Steve Martin, Gael García Bernal all walked the red carpet, the Berlinale provides a forum for international cinema that is less Hollywood-centric and swag oriented than Sundance and more manageable than Cannes. Keeping with the spirit of the festival, I offer my top four European film picks.

4) Hilde (Kai Wessel)
The disarmingly beautiful Hildegard Knef went to acting school as a teenager during World War II, had a romantic entanglement with a Nazi official and fought against the Russians to remain by his side, married a Jewish American solider after the war, and (with different lovers in between) went on to make fifty feature films and record 23 albums. Kai Wessel’s film delivers a portrait of a talented and complicated individual with a level of artfulness few biopics ever achieve.

3) An Education (Lone Scherfig)
Sixteen year old Jenny sneaks Gauloises and sings along to French records trying to escape from the dullness of her tweedy prep-school-life. A bigger distraction comes from a charming older man who whisks her away from Twickenham and cello lessons to art auctions, horse races, and a Paris vacation that changes her life.

2) Alle Anderen (Maren Ade)
Maren Ade’s sophomore effort chronicles the fall out of a couples’ Saturn Return. While vacationing in Sardinia, the idiosyncratic lovers are grapple with their respective uneasiness about identity, success, aging, gender and social codes. The result is a hilarious, yet deeply felt journey into the heart of the 20s and all its discontents.

1) Katalin Varga (Peter Strickland)
Strickland captivates with a sparely elegant story about a woman who sets out on horseback seeking revenge for a crime that occurred 11 years prior. Mark Gyori’s camera conjures a primordial atmosphere for a timeless story to unfold. An impressive and intelligent debut.