A Prize in Berlin, 2003

February 2003. The transatlantic forecast was cold and overcast, with winter squalls and a chance of chemical or nuclear warfare. The immediate post-9/11 era was not a great time to travel. I went to the Berlin Film Festival to present an American Cinema Foundation prize named for Polish director Andrzej Wajda, for merit and courage in filmmaking. Chosen by a jury from eastern and central Europe, that year the winner was Russian filmmaker Alexander Sokurov.

After months of a military buildup, much of the world was apprehensive to the point of dread about an impending special military operation: America was about to launch war in the Middle East, and we made no secret of it. Most of our allies begged us to reconsider. By 2003, the goodwill we retained from the end of the Cold War had waned; the worldwide admiration we’d earned with our prosperity was rapidly fading with it. Yet not one of the invited guests connected our American prize to war in Iraq. Russian, Polish, and German officials came to the award ceremony in a post-WWII, post-Cold War gesture of reconciliation. Today, with Ukraine as the backdrop, the Polish Film Institute, the European Film Academy, and others are calling for boycotts of Russian films and cultural events. I understand the emotion, but I think it would be a mistake, not just culturally or morally. It would be a fateful blunder.

One example of what film art can help do in the real world: The twilight years of Communism brought biting comedy and satire to socialist screens, films from younger directors like Yuri Mamin’s Adonis XIV and Fountain; Russia’s Plumbum, Hungary’s Countdown, and Poland’s King Size. The only places where most of these films could be seen outside their countries, either in Europe or here, were film festivals, like the ones in Moscow, Budapest, and Karlovy Vary. Our job was being there on the spot to demonstrate that at least some of Hollywood was paying attention to them, getting them written about, and screened in the West.

Freedom Film Festival shows of Russian and Serbian films in Moscow were done in cooperation with the Moscow Film Festival and its director, Kirill Razlogov. Later, in a reciprocal visit, we hosted Razlogov at festivals in Los Angeles and Santa Barbara. We used to run into each other at other countries as well.

(Here’s a video clip from Azerbaijan in 2000, with both of us looking glumly official at about 4 minutes in.)

The world has never lacked dishonest filmmakers. It’s not difficult to see why it makes sense to encourage the honest ones. It’s easy to recognize the art of the best, a Krysztof Zanussi, Istvan Szabo, Jiri Menzel, Andrzej Wajda or an Alexander Sokurov. What about the rest, the ones making movies at less than Olympian levels of art? Doesn’t this open us up to propaganda? Sometimes it’s harder than you’d think to decide, Is this film propaganda or not? There are degrees of it.

First, eliminate films that are outright sponsored by a Ministry of Culture (or, to be fair, the US Information Agency’s various descendants). Also, cross off the ones that can be reasonably said to be coerced. That still leaves a gray area for films that may be sincere and even aspire to be art, but unquestionably reflect a national point of view. Was The Green Berets a propaganda film? Was Red Dawn? A lot of the yes/no perception has to do with who you are, and whether or not your country is currently a pariah overseas.

I’m not naïve about the limits and risks of cultural exchanges, or of communication with people who don’t exactly bear us much goodwill. There’s a danger of moral equivalence at a time when clarity is called for. But regardless of what happens in Ukraine, after the war Russia will still exist and will still be a factor in the world.

Back to the dark days of mid-winter 2003: Berlin’s mayor Klaus Wowereit hosted the Wajda Prize ceremony in the ornate 19th century city hall. At the last minute, Alexander Sokurov was in the hospital, half-blind and unable to travel. He has struggled with serious eye problems all his life. (Sokurov pages 21, 22 in this PDF). The Russian representing the Ministry of Culture accepted the award on Sokurov’s behalf. Referring to the $10,000 that accompanied the trophy, he joked that this is the first time in history when a Russian artist had ever trusted his government to hand over money.

I’m not claiming that Russia, or any country, has some kind of right to have its films seen in the USA. I am saying that if my right as an American to see their films were to be impaired, the reason would have to be extraordinary. Mind you, there’s no official push for that, but even a vague, general, unanimous governmental, academic, and media policy of shunning their films and TV, and frowning on favorable mention of them would dry up their few opportunities to be seen in the West.

Unlike even the chilliest years of the Cold War, when adventurous western reporters and others made a point of traveling to “enemy” eastern Europe, there’s less media interest now in keeping an American presence at key cultural events in Russia and Hungary. There’s less of an attempt to keep even unofficial channels open. It’s not fashionable anymore.

Hungary isn’t part of the Ukraine war, but is shunned in the European Union for a number of reasons, one of them cultural: its government’s unabashed social conservatism. An informal but widely observed shallow boycott of travel to Hungary’s biggest film events in Budapest and Miskolc has done real damage to the country’s ability to show its whole image to the world. It weakens the very artists it should have strengthened.

Personally, I disagree with Orban on LGBT issues, as my friends on this site would guess, but so what? I’m not Hungarian. You go to a place like that to find out what the Hungarians think. Or that’s the way it’s supposed to work. You wouldn’t go to the Ouagadougou film festival as an outsider’s effort to subvert Burkina Faso, right?

Right? Picture this: You’re a film curator. A challenge for mainstream critics and film buyers with not-particularly-PC realist films from that part of Europe is when they’re too good—too powerful and compelling, too honest to ignore. You have to decide how much of your limited trust with the public is worth putting at risk to get it seen, leaving it up to an audience to respond to its thoughtful if sometimes unfashionable ideas. The need to consider a decision like that predates Putin and Orban, and will probably outlive them as well.

A postscript: Our prizewinner in 2003, Alexander Sokurov, issued a statement last year against the special military operation in Ukraine. It is claimed in the western press that he is currently confined to Russia. At this time we don’t have trustworthy information.

I haven’t had contact with him in nearly twenty years and have no way of independently judging Sokurov, but he’s no Seventies-style “refusenik”; he’s Russian to his bones, one of his country’s best film artists. If the stories are true, he’s a stubborn old patriot who just disagrees strongly with his own government. That in itself is far from being a uniquely Russian situation.

These articles are derived from lectures, talks and web posts. Most have also been posted on Ricochet.com.