Monday 14 May, 2007

Berliner Zeitung 14.05.2007

The Cannes Film Festival starts on Wednesday. Festival director Thierry Fremeaux speaks with Marcus Rothe about the films in competition: "This year new borders are a major theme. Nowadays these are less geographical and more intellectual, a thing of the mind. Some examples: Chinese director Wong Kar-wai shot a film in the USA with French money: a real case of globalisation. Fatih Akin's film is about the universal dialogue of Western and Islamic cultures. And the Austrian Ulrich Seidl shows in 'Import/Export' that the relations between the West and the post-communist Eastern Europe are no longer political, but economic in nature."


Frankfurter Rundschau 12.05.2007

Ina Hartwig is excited to find that passion is still burning in the literature industry. The proof is in the recent edition of the literary magazine Bella triste published by students in Hildesheim. A pure celebration of poetry, by poets. "There is one thing this edition is not, and that is cool. It's hot, fired up and passionate. An orgy of avowal which has latched onto the poem of all things! Spanning the gamut from the die-hard absolutism of youth to the macro-view steeled by experience. As diverse as the individual positions might be, the writers are united in a glow of belief bordering on naivity in poetry today."


Saturday 12 May, 2007

Die Welt 12.05.2007

"Two Polish camps are facing off today. A Poland of suspicion, fear and revenge is struggling with a Poland of hope, courage and dialogue," writes Adam Michnik, chief editor of the daily Gazeta Wyborcza and former Solidarnosc leader, on Poland under the Kaczynski brothers. "The Solidarnosc veterans believed they would come to power after the fall of the dictatorship. But the guilty communists weren't penalised and the virtuous Solidarnosc activists weren't recompensed. Feelings of being treated unfairly led to bitterness, envy and aggression, aimed at revenge on former enemies and seemingly successful former friends. But the losers refused to recognise that achieving freedom was Poland's biggest success in the last 300 years." See our feature "In search of lost sense," by Adam Michnik.


Neue Zürcher Zeitung 12.05.2007

Karin Wenger reports from Iraq on the increasingly difficult situation for intellectuals and artists in the country. A true cultural life no longer exists - and critical intellectuals are even threatened in exile: "Teaching continues at universities in Baghdad, but only two to three days a week, explains an Iraqi physics teacher. This is to avoid subjecting students and professors to unnecessary danger on the streets and in the universities, she says. But she will say no more about the dangers intellectuals are subjected to in Baghdad, because rumours have been going around for more than half a year that intellectuals are no longer safe even in exile, and that hired killers are sent to silence them from Baghdad.... Word has it that above all Iran is increasingly making its influence felt, chasing Sunni academics, who are in the majority, into exile, murdering them and replacing them with Shiites sympathetic to its cause."


Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 12.05.2007

Having read Amartya Sen's book "Identity and Violence", Mark Siemons is thoroughly convinced by Sen's dual imperative, that different cultures should be recognised, but also that the individual should have the freedom to decide for or against belonging to a culture. "A fear of cultural relativism is in the air which threatens to perforate our own principles. It seems that the confrontation with fundamentalism is breeding in the west a growing desire for a comparable reduction in complexity, a backwards turn of the screw away from the differentiation we have achieved, for a world that can be understood according to fixed cultural and religious systems. A society like the German one should feel guilty if its profile cannot be reduced to the clearly delineated denominator of 'leitkultur' (defining culture).


Die Tageszeitung 14.05.2007

Curator Alexander Horwath explains to Brigitte Werneburg in an interview why films at the upcoming documenta will be shown in the old fashioned way, in the cinema. "Take Kurt Kren's 'Tree Again': a tree in Vermont, a 3 minute film, filmed in stills over the course of 50 days, no sound. This can affect you as a viewer in ways you will never experience anywhere else. In many exhibitions you would be hard put even to notice that this was a work with no sound because all sorts of sounds will be coming in from elsewhere. And that this is a three-minute art work, time crystallised, not a loop."