Translating Alan Berliner
September 26th, 2010 by Mónica Savirón.
What kind of a person must a filmmaker be? Martin Scorsese asks himself this question, while recognizing that the only thing he can do to show to Elia Kazan how much his films have influenced his life and career, how much his way of filming has always spoken to him, artistically and personally, is by making films as well. That’s why Scorsese decided to direct “Letter to Elia,” a film homage that premieres this year at the New York Film Festival. This same identification, keen analysis, and admiration towards someone else’s work brought me from Spain to New York two years ago, to be close to the experiments in time, light and motion of independent filmmaker and media artist Alan Berliner. Why? After amassing a body of work that includes fifteen films and more than thirty audio and video installations, Alan Berliner has perfected a unique alchemical process of storytelling, in which the way a story is told is as important as the story itself; each of his projects solves its own form and content puzzle in unique and satisfying ways. All his work (which uses homes movies, found imagery, found photographs, archival images, and sound) is a virtual lesson in film history. His explorations have documented the full breadth of human emotion – anger, fear, vulnerability, love, care, determination, delicacy, humor, and death — real moments born from real emotions, often from his own family, his friends, and of course, from and within himself. Alan Berliner is, I like to say, an artist who inhabits a wizard’s world where the unexpected is, necessarily, the only thing expected.
After all this time collaborating with Alan Berliner, I’m still opening the first of many boxes that hold the mysteries of his creative process. Having direct access to a cineaste with a unique way of combining the arithmetic of personal and audiovisual connections, and witnessing his endless passion and untiring daily work routine, has given me the co-ordinates of a landscape where love, art, lifestyle, and films are, essentially, the very same thing. Alan Berliner’s frame of mind is, I have learned, a place where cinematic language looks for reinvention, memory, and beauty, to survive. In a career devoted to pushing the boundaries of cinematic storytelling, his most recent film, “Translating Edwin Honig: A Poet’s Alzheimer’s,” which has its world premiere at the New York Film Festival, takes Berliner’s experiments with montage, identity, and memory farther than he’s ever gone before. And this is the story behind it.
Just a few months ago, Alan Berliner was in the middle of making a feature-length film about memory loss titled, “Lost on Memory Lane,” centered around his cousin, friend and former mentor — the poet, translator, critic, and teacher, Edwin Honig. After reflecting upon several years worth of footage documenting Edwin’s journey through Alzheimer’s disease, Alan was moved to consider a radical “re-think” of his relationship to the material, and began experimenting with new strategies for presenting Edwin’s condition — ideas that were more daring and provocative than his original plans. He began by making two new short films, “56 Ways of Saying “I Don’t Remember,” and “Time and Again” (a title borrowed from an anthology of Edwin’s poems,) each of which uses repetition and quick cutting to restructure the poet’s speech and thought process. The result is an acknowledgement of the power of language, highlighting Edwin’s percussive and guttural vocabulary of words, sounds, songs and mutterings. Berliner then built four other short films around them, resulting in a 19-minute suite of six films, each individually titled, whose collective strength gives Alan’s portrait of Edwin an honesty, more humanity, and a sense of dignity as we see him gradually fading towards the end of his life. “Translating Edwin Honig: A Poet’s Alzheimer’s” stands on its own as a powerful statement about a poet who may have lost his control of language, but not his relationship to words. It also serves as an introduction to the longer film project which will be completed in 2011, and which has now been forever altered and liberated by the playful process that generated these six new approaches. This ability to play with alternate possibilities for interconnecting images and sounds, and to reinvent his dialectical process, is at the heart of the grammar of Alan Berliner’s filmmaking.
In a form reminiscent of the film, “32 Short Films About Glenn Gould” (1993), by François Girard, and under the artistic spell of the late portraits of painter Francis Bacon, Alan Berliner, juxtaposing, pushing, and pulling, has found many surprising ways to create the unwritten, and fragile symphony of getting old. Through the sensitivity of the lens of Alan’s long-time friend and cameraman, Ian Vollmer, Edwin talks, wonders, thinks, remembers, forgets, whistles, whispers, sings, yells, and growls — looking at himself and at the camera, which in Berliner’s films is just another member of the family. If we are aware of the influence that the early cinema, and the Bauhaus (a word that, meaningfully enough can be translated as “House of Building” or “Building School,”) as well as artists like Picasso and Mondrian have had in Alan Berliner’s imaginarium, we’ll understand “Translating Edwin Honig” much better. The shots of Edwin are edited in a kind of temporal cubism, intercut from different stages of his memory loss, different placements of the camera, each with a different face, a different attitude, and a different language to be “translated” — in his attempt to struggle against the hurricane that has brought such havoc and emptiness to his mind. Like in Alain Resnais’ “Last Year at Marienbad,” the repetitions try to fix the memories of Edwin Honig in an uncertain place and time, creating the rhythm of the editing, giving a different physicality to his eyes, hands, and ears, trapping us in a loop where the “brutality of fact” performs its known reality, over and over again. As Resnais main character said, the story is back to its starting point leaving us “losing our way forever in the stillness of night.”
Alan Berliner has used film and interactive installations as a medium to better understand his relationship with his family (past, present, and future), with identity, with his city (New York), with religious ritual, and with art. His films talk to each other, back and forth, and selected images are repeated from one work to another like the DNA of a family tree. A shot of the Statue of Liberty first appeared in “Intimate Stranger” (1991), a film portrait of Alan’s grandfather, Joseph Cassuto, and then, five years later, in “Nobody’s Business,” a film about Alan’s relationship with his father, Oscar Berliner. The same repetition (persistence may be a better word) happens with a shot of Alan’s mother, when she was quite young, playing Kadima on the beach. In the last section of “Translating Edwin Honig: A Poet’s Alzheimer’s,” Alan asks Edwin what “one thing” he would say to millions of people watching him in a film, (“Remember how to forget.” is his answer), which is reminiscent of the moment when Alan asked the same sort of question to his father in “Nobody’s Business.” Edwin repeats the filmmaker’s last name several times, “Berliner, Berliner, Berliner,” like Alan himself did in “The Sweetest Sound” (2001), his film about names. And Edwin misunderstands Alan when he’s asked about his childhood, mistaking the word “childhood” for the word “charity,” not unlike the way Oscar did when Alan asked him about the best attitude towards death (his father thought he was asking about the best attitude towards sex…). “Nobody’s Business” was a tour-de-force, a boxing ring where questions and answers between father and son are flung around like jabs and punches. And there are connections with other films as well – for instance, Alan cites “Marlene,” by Maximilian Schell, as another example of a film in which the main character, in this case Marlene Dietrich, doesn’t want to collaborate with the filmmaker, and thinks the whole project is a big waste of time. Edwin Honig, who just turned 91, is also a strong spirit, and Alzheimer’s disease is making his ability to engage in conversation progressively more difficult. Instead of surrendering, and in despite of the daunting challenge of this situation, Alan is turning to the more lyrical fun and freedom of his experimental collage films from the 1980’s, in particular, the poetic symphony “Everywhere at Once” (1985).
Literature has been a very important element of Alan Berliner’s creative process, and not only because books surround him during every step of making a film. It works as a thread that interweaves throughout Alan’s conceptual “architecture,” like train rails, windows and bridges. For him, the sound of a small bell, or the click of a metronome is the end of a cinematic sequence, as easily as a period defines the end of a sentence. In both his films and his installation projects, there are poems, letters, handwriting, typewriters, and even haikus — his video installation “Playing God” (2008) is a “seven-screen slot-machine-like game” that allows seemingly infinite possible “poetic” word combinations contained within the 837 words that comprise the story of creation in the book of Genesis. And that’s only an example of his meticulous, organized, but also very organic sense of detail. When Alan Berliner went to Japan with his mother in 1990 (“the trip of our lives,” he calls it) for “Intimate Stranger,” he shot the commemorative party that the Japanese had arranged in honor of his grandfather, Joseph Cassuto. In preparing for the visit, Berliner knew the names of all his grandfather’s Japanese colleagues, their spouses, and their children, their birthdays, wedding dates, and dozens of other personal details (culled from decades of intimate correspondence) many of which they themselves probably had forgotten (or never thought it important enough to remember). Obsession, in film related activities, seems to be a gesture of responsibility and gratitude. In his interview with David Sylvester, Francis Bacon says, “after all, the only thing that makes anybody interesting is their dedication.” Alan Berliner is a classic example of an artist who simply cannot breathe if he cannot forge new paths for storytelling or invent new and authentic personal audio-visual statements at the cutting-edge. In the film “Cameraman: The Life and Work of Jack Cardiff”, by Craig McCall, also presented at the New York Film Festival, Martin Scorsese talks about the Technicolor era as a period where color became the film itself, where films were like paintings that moved physically, emotionally, and psychologically — something that allowed contemporary British filmmaking at the time to explore roads beyond the traditional standards. That is also something that we could say about the avant-garde cinema, though Scorsese was referring to the Hollywood film industry. The academic Gloria Floren, in her essay “Avant-Garde (Experimental) Films” declares that “whether it be in manipulation in narrative materials, in highly stylized visual representation, or in radical departures from the norms or conventions current at the time, avant-garde film is always a vehicle for the filmmaker’s expression.” Far from pretending to imprison the avant-garde world under the low ceiling of a simple definition, Alan Berliner’s artistic and mythic explorations – often using documentary materials in innovative ways – defy categorization, defy expectations, and push the boundaries of both genres in new directions. That has and will always make his work special, and different.
Seen as a whole, all of Alan’s films are, in one way or another, obsessed with sounds, stories, home movies, relationships, memories, and legacies from the past. In many ways, he’s been assembling and building his own ongoing cinematic family album. Joseph Cassuto died in 1974, but we can look at his face, his smiles, and his universal worries, 36 years later while the wheel of history is knocking on our door. And if in “The Family Album” a boat was a metaphor of the universal journey to death, in “Translating Edwin Honig. A Poet’s Alzheimer’s,” musicality becomes the way to transcend memories as we navigate toward our final days. Alan Berliner’s creations are all so different and yet, at the same time, so interconnected. In “The Family Album” (1986), Berliner worked with found footage (even the title was borrowed from an old home movie title card; the original title had been “Children of All Ages”), serendipity and the intense passion of a “collector” — gathering anonymous home movies and audiotapes from more than 75 different families. He also uncovered a reel of home movies from the 1930’s, shot by the personal cinematographer of the President of the American Express Bank, which is also used in the film. As Alan Berliner likes to say, “if someone from Mars learned about life on Earth solely based on our home movies, it would seem that every season is summer, every month is August, every day is Sunday, and that our lives are just one long series of celebrations – a planet of leisure without any struggle.”
Text and videos by Mónica Savirón.
