Recent viewing

- I went to see 'Vorspannkino', an exhibition of cinema opening titles at KW Berlin

Interesting exhibition design, 4 'kinos' set up in the cinema. In one, you walked through a curtain to what felt like the front 2 rows of the upper level of a cinema, looking across at a screen in the distance. It felt as though the floor below should be full of aisles and seats, but when you looked over the edge you saw only a big empty hall... the effect was somehow surreal. Another room had projections on the wall and you never knew which part of the wall would show the next sequence. So, in the dark, people moved silently around the room as each new sequence started. Another drew viewers along a trail of suspended screens...

I emerged after this into the sun. The building opposite KW has a facade is clad in scaffolding, some kind of work being done. This day, sitting up in the scaffolding, there was a man playing the cello and a girl filming him on the ground. A crowd of passersby had gathered to listen, sitting in the street. Two women got up and started to waltz in the road.

It felt like, after what I had just seen, this was the movie proper starting.

- Had a Volspark Hasenheide Picnic dinner and a movie night at Nora's. Saw Naissance des Piuevres, a French film, with German subtitles. Lucky for us, it is not so dialogue heavy. I liked it. The strange sport of synchronised swimming, as practiced by bored suburban/ small city teens. One thing that stood out was that the film often avoids establishing and long shots. Closeups and underwater shots detach the sport from the overall purpose it has and emphasise its surreal side. Then this is in contrast with a world of teens, bottled up and bored and harbouring secret crushes on each other, in a drab stretch of suburbia we never really see the shape of. This draws the viewer in, I think, to the limited perspective and subjective world of the film's main characters.