EXBERLINER Issue 164, October 2017

DON’T MISS
One World Berlin
This 12th edition of
the human rights film
festival tackles the
crimes of Germany’s
NSU, reproductive
rights and the
integration of LGBTQ
refugees. Highlights
include the European
premiere of Care in
Chaos, a devastating
doc about a rise in
attacks on US abortion
clinics under
Trump. Oct 12-18,
various venues
Uranium Film Festival
An impressively
diverse showcase of
recent films about
nuclear power and
the risks of radioactivity,
including
acclaimed British
feature All That Remains,
which blends
CGI, live-action and
archival footage to
tell the story of a
Nagasaki survivor. Oct
10-15, Moviemento
Mixed Messages
Kanchi Wichmann’s
funny and perceptive
web series follows
a London lesbian’s
attempts to navigate
Berlin’s queer scene.
We celebrate its
DVD release with
this one-off Exblicks
screening, with
the filmmaker in
attendance. Oct 30,
Lichtblick Kino
Swedish writer-director Ruben Östlund on his surprise
Palme d’Or winner The Square. By Paul O’Callaghan
The film (see review, page
30), about a museum curator
(Claes Bang) whose personal
and professional lives begin to
unravel after he’s mugged, is both a
playful satire of the Stockholm art
scene and a sincere meditation on
social responsibility. It hits German
screens on Oct 19.
The view of the art world in The
Square seems conflicted. Does
that reflect your own feelings? My
impression is that the scene is its
own world, a bit disconnected from
what’s going on outside the walls of
museums. It chimes with my own
experience of the film world, like the
decadence you see in Cannes. For
me it was important to attack this a
little. Today, there’s so much theory
used to justify the art that’s being
made. And if you scratch away at the
surface, you often see that the emperor
is naked, that the artist doesn’t
actually have that much to say.
The film also seems unsure
whether art can change people
for the better. I definitely think you
can use art to educate people. The
Square started out as a real art piece
that a friend and I exhibited in a
museum in Sweden. We wanted to
create a symbolic place where we are
reminded of our common responsibilities,
something like a pedestrian
crossing – lines in the street denoting
an agreement that cars should be
careful with pedestrians. Our square
created a small movement. A group
of disabled people demonstrated
there when they had benefits taken
away from them. Others used it as
a space to protest violence after a
terrorist attack. But I think this sort
of thing is sometimes missing from
today’s art world. Back when Marcel
Duchamp put a urinal in a gallery,
it was a genuine provocation that
really got people discussing the purpose
of the space. Nowadays, that
kind of object is put into a room, and
it doesn’t raise any real questions.
WHAT’S ON — Film
“There’s a downside to
political correctness.”
Why did you choose to explore the
world from the perspective of a
curator? To be a curator you need to
manoeuvre yourself in a very socially
skilful way. How do you get money?
How do you ensure that you’re
controversial enough, but not too
controversial? In a publicly funded
museum, you also have this sense
instilled in you that this is something
important for society. A curator has
so many factors to consider when
making decisions, so I thought this
was an interesting perspective.
Your films deal with the tension
between what people want to
say and do versus what they feel
they should say and do. Recently I
experienced one of these situations
myself. One of the parents at my
kids’ school had a small role in The
Square. I saw him after we won the
Palme d’Or and he was so happy, but
I’d forgotten to tell him he’d been cut
out of the film! As he walked away I
imagined him finding out when he
finally saw it, and wondering why
the hell I hadn’t said anything. In the
end I was very rational and told him.
He was disappointed, of course, but
now I no longer have to deal with the
guilt! What I like about a situation
like this is that it’s easy to identify
the wrong choice. A lot of scenes in
my films are based around a dilemma
where you have two or more choices,
but none of them are easy.
Pedro Almodóvar said this was
a film about the “dictatorship of
being politically correct”. Do you
agree? I don’t have any problem
with political correctness, it’s an
essential part of the march towards
equality. But I will say that with
my previous films, people have
sometimes been provoked on an
emotional level, having not really
reflected on what they’ve seen.
And that’s perhaps the downside
of political correctness. The reaction
becomes very emotional and
un-intellectual. In some ways a
consensus forms around how you’re
meant to discuss or depict certain
groups of people, and I think that
can inhibit meaningful debate. n
32 EXBERLINER 164