Issue 9: HOMETOWN is here 🏙️
Plus, an exclusive newsletter feature about Berlin Cinema, and a feature on Toronto's secret repertory cinema...
Issue 9: HOMETOWN + Launch Party
There’s no place like home… our newest issue is now live! 🏙️
From downtown Toronto to convenience stores in Hong Kong rom coms, Scooby-Doo’s Coolsville, a stone cottage in Limpopo South Africa, an abandoned Alabama mall, Middle Earth, London’s Docklands, a 1945 cinema in small-town Ireland, and beyond… this issue is all about what makes us feel at home on screen.
Check out the full issue:
We’re also hosting a launch party in Toronto this Thursday, March 14th! Join us for an evening of readings:
Feature - Berlin Cinema
by Elle Carroll
Living in Berlin well after the turn of the 21st century is to simultaneously feel as though you have just missed both the wildest parties and worst episodes of modern history. The latter tends to be more visible, manifesting in bronze stones bearing the names of Holocaust victims set into the sidewalk or an abandoned watchtower in a park now best known for its drug dealing problem. Before arriving, I had never lived in a city so unblinkingly accustomed to cycles of obliteration and fraught resurrection, nor had I lived anywhere so chronically allergic to self-preservation. I soon realized I didn’t know how.
There is no whole in Berlin, only fragments—memorials mired in varying degrees of controversy, faithful reconstructions of destroyed buildings that openly acknowledge their historical mimicry, and walls pockmarked with bullet holes large enough to press your thumb into. As such there are no unbroken lines through time and space. I often imagine Berlin as a half-empty cabinet of curiosities; in lieu of a historical continuum, one encounters only jarringly arranged fossils. Outside the U-bahn station at Wittenbergplatz, itself rebuilt in the Art Nouveau style of its 1913 original, there is a large sign listing the names of various concentration camps. I pass it each time I head to the nearby department store to buy American-brand peanut butter.
Film is an exclusive art form in the truest sense; what the camera looks away from is as crucial as what it chooses to see. Something about Berlin cinema, however, seems to refute this basic principle. Berlin cinema, in retrospect, is the only holistic proof of the city as it once was. You’ll never get a real sense of the Berlin Wall from the short row of concrete panels standing in Potsdamer Platz, each one half-buried under several unsanitary layers of chewed-up gum. Moving beneath the leafy canopy of Tiergarten or between sleekly designed government buildings you can hardly envision all 16 square kilometers of your surroundings hollowed out from above. In a city of perpetually warring political, architectural, and militaristic imaginations, Berlin cinema becomes a statement of fact, the only incontrovertible proof that any of its previous incarnations existed in the present tense.
It figures. Film history began in Berlin: Max and Emil Skladanowsky debuted their Bioscop projector to a paying audience here in November 1895, nearly two months before the Lumière Brothers debuted the Cinématographe in Paris. In the decades that followed Berlin became a cinema city and, by 1927, a movie star in its own right via Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis, a dazzlingly kinetic silent documentary that whirled through its streets from industrial morning ‘til hedonistic evening.
But by 1945, Ruttmann’s Berlin was gone, leveled by Allied bombing raids. In 1948, the skies once again empty but the streets still choked with rubble, the Italian neorealist filmmaker Roberto Rosselini made its ruins into the backdrop for Germany Year Zero, in which a motherless child wanders a city occupied by foreign soldiers and the last dregs of its prewar population. Rosselini’s Berlin is in such a dilapidated state that referring to it as “inhabited” feels almost too generous an adjective. The senseless and self-reproducing suffering that permeates Germany Year Zero is palpable in every exterior shot, and it eventually culminates in a staggeringly hopeless denouement.
Just over a decade later, a new Berlin had already sprung up, its razor wire boundaries congruent to the irreconcilable ideological ones separating the Soviets from the Western Allies. Up went the Wall in 1961, its visual gravitas and symbolic gravity pulling filmmakers towards it. Berlin cinema entered a new era of essential documentation, less in regards to how the Wall looked than to how it felt to live on either side of its strange shadow.
Gradually the Wall revealed itself as a surprisingly multi-faceted performer. In Andrzej Żuławski’s Possession it acts as a shoo-in metaphor of division, reflecting the self-destruction wrought by a couple tearing their marriage and themselves apart. It’s another grotesque monster in a movie not lacking in that department, serpentine and lying in wait at the foot of an apartment building where bloody horrors unfold. In Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire, however, the Wall is more of a fact of life than a frightening symbol of repression. It’s inert, almost non-threatening—a dissonant but not disharmonious chord in Wender’s deeply sympathetic urban symphony.
I came to Berlin cinema to orient myself in a city that seemed to rebuff such efforts. I needed to understand how to live in a city like this after a century like that, with all its residual pathologies. To understand what it meant to live here now required understanding how other people lived in their former Berlins, disparate cities populated by the teenage drug addicts lurking in subway stations in Christiane F. or assorted Cold War spies and defectors in Funeral in Berlin or dreamers in search of themselves in the East German productions Solo Sunny and Coming Out.
Certain throughlines began to emerge, however intangible or ephemeral. Berlin darkness, for instance, is not like darkness elsewhere. Night transforms every version of this city (including the one outside my window) into something to be either subsumed by or fended off with furious hedonism. The way a certain haze descends on the city from autumn until spring, made alternatively from fog and smog and mist but somehow more than the sum of its parts, is a permanent feature. Always there, always gray—a perpetual Berlin gray that washes the city out so completely that in order to give it a romantic Manhattan-esque treatment in Oh Boy, filmmaker Jan-Ole Gerster had to negate it with his own sumptuous black and white palette.
Occasionally one of these former Berlins will overlap with mine seamlessly. I pull books from the shelves of the library frequented by Wings of Desire’s angels, the only meaningful visual difference being the uptick in Macbooks. Out its enormous window sits the sloped roof of the Philharmonie; you’ll find a similar view in Tár. In Tár there is the Berlin I recognize and now call home, and that alone is enough to make me grateful the film exists. My Berlin won’t last because no Berlin lasts, and I’ll miss it when it’s gone. Still, I take some comfort knowing it’s preserved in Tár, creepily dark subterranean passages and all.
Elle Carroll is a writer based in Berlin.
T.O. REP REC: Market Video
In the Mood’s monthly recommendation of what to see in Toronto’s repertory venues.
While building our Hometown issue, we felt compelled to highlight some of the great work happening in our own hometown, starting with Market Video, Toronto’s secret micro-cinema which screens films you probably won't see anywhere else. If the allure of a mysterious “DM for location” model doesn't convince you, maybe their pleasingly esoteric selection of films will. “I try to avoid both certified classics and on-the-nose genre,” they told us recently, “[...] that can mean both someone like Maurice Piallat, who’s famous but underrated, or a film by a one-and-done director with 2 Letterboxd logs.”
The films they’ve screened include a 1970 French Giallo (L’étrangleur, Paul Vecchiali); a bonkers 1989 remake of Dr. Caligari by porn director Steven Sayadian; and events that combine music and film, like Extermination Music Night: The Lost Tapes, a documentary about Toronto's brief-lived, renegade concert series that kept getting shut down by cops. “When you're only trying to fill 20 seats, you can take certain liberties.”
Market Video traces the origins of their series to a disgruntled, eagle-eyed viewer who complained that a screening of In the Realm of the Senses (Nagisa Ōshima) they organised was in the wrong aspect ratio. And so the series now lives on to screen films properly: “Though we may tell ourselves nice little lies about why we do the things we do,” they told us, “a substantial amount of human endeavour is ultimately spite-based. And, of course, intent on redressing the grievances of a person who no longer lives in the city and does not know who I am.”
Market Video is an appreciated shot-in-the-arm for a city whose film identity sometimes begins and ends with a prudent entity like TIFF. “It would be great if Toronto had a La Clef Revival (a shuttered theatre that Parisian cineastes illegally occupied for months while staging daily screenings, eventually rioting in the streets when they were raided by police and evicted). Or an Anthology Film Archives that it could take for granted (as, judging by the screenings I’ve gone to there, New Yorkers most certainly do).” But for the time being, our sometimes staid film scene (“It feels tenuously robust though broadly conservative.”) has exciting efforts like Market Video, along with a few other indie series which we will be featuring here in future newsletters.
This month, Market Video’s theme is sci-fi, and we heartily recommend checking out Wolf Gremm’s Kamikaze ‘89 on March 31st. The film stars Rainer Werner Fassbinder in his final acting role as a police detective investigating a shadowy corporation in a future dystopian Berlin. Featuring music by Edward Froese (Tangerine Dream), Fassbinder in a leopard print suit, and an inventive approach to production design, Kamikaze ‘89 is a campy curio not to be missed.
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Some hand-picked highlights from our new issue…
In the Interest of Time: Walking Through the Convenience Stores of Hong Kong Rom Coms
by Jaime Chu
The way it works in rom coms from Hong Kong at the turn of the millennium, in the sultry hours between dinner and the last train, the sterile glow of the chain convenience store appears like a lighthouse for working girls and their emotional crises. Millennials might have been the last generation that grew up with the idea that some conversations must be had in person, so even though it has some of the worst lighting to stage any meet-cute, break-up, or run-in with an ex, the 24-hour convenience store remains a bastion of a public space with at least one witness. Revisiting the iconic scenes in 24-hour convenience stores at the heart of Hong Kong island, the rules of romance become clear: romantic drama needs an audience, and the audience needs a place to salvage time, or kill it, or hide from it.
Love in a Puff (2007)
Jimmy and Cherie would have never met without 7-Eleven. Against the backdrop of a landmark 2007 legislation that banned indoor smoking in Hong Kong, Love in a Puff is a comedy of convenience that gives us the pairing of a reluctant couple against all odds, without any grand romantic justification. The Harbour Road 7-Eleven in Wan Chai where Jimmy and Cherie meet for the first time buying cigarettes—he is drunk; she is bored—occupies a block of nondescript, prime real estate cornered by government offices, glossy commercial buildings, and upscale restaurants—a neighbourhood so out of the way that no one really volunteers to go there without a higher force of reason.
Over the course of the film, Cherie and Jimmy’s relationship develops in different parts of the city that resemble ordinary routines—Cantonese diner, karaoke, phone bills, 7-Eleven microwave spaghetti bolognese—but made strange by the detours in their conspiracy as horny smokers trying to survive in a smoke-free world. The war on smoking is supposed to signify the progress of a modernizing city, but it has also rendered certain precariously democratized communal spaces obsolete—where else would you find a creative director, a chef, a Sephora saleswoman, and a Pakistani delivery worker fraternizing in anti-work solidarity? But even then, Love in a Puff could not have predicted that by 2024, no well-meaning romantic lead would be caught flirting with a police officer on a smoking break in a back alley.
Docklands Diary
January. A new year, another new flat; this time it’s Limehouse, London Borough of Tower Hamlets. “So much history!” a friend exclaims, and I smile and nod as if it wasn’t the only half-decent place we could afford. London’s my hometown, but I hardly know this area. Wikipedia tells me that Ian McKellen owns the local pub. This is promising.
February. From our balcony, the skyline is framed by London’s two financial districts: the City to the west, Canary Wharf to the east. Between them runs the river, as if caught in a terrible tug of war. Tracing its curves on Google Maps, I find a blurred oasis at the end of my street: the walled garden of a former warehouse, converted some decades ago into the home of David Lean. I quickly learn to love the river.
March. Flicking channels on a hungover Sunday I land on The Limehouse Golem, a fairly typical period portrayal of the East End as a grubby canvas for murder, drugs, and prostitution. It was shot in Manchester and Leeds. London has changed all over, but the Docklands more so than most areas since the closure of the docks in the 1960s and ’70s. Limehouse no longer has any hope of playing its Victorian self.
April. The local station is shut, so I head towards Canary Wharf. I’m reminded why I rarely come here, despite the allure of rapid transport links across the city: the soulless concrete, overpriced coffee, zombies in suits. Tower Hamlets is one of the poorest boroughs in London, but it’s also home to some of the highest-paid people in the world. Canary Wharf was one of the main filming locations for Danny Boyle’s post-apocalyptic film 28 Days Later, and that’s exactly how it feels today.
Submissions OPEN for Issue 10: TEN
We’re now accepting submissions for Issue 10: TEN until April 30th. Check out our submission guidelines here:
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