Halfway through Cannes...

Verena Lueken has watched the films by David Cronenberg, Carlos Reygadas, Lars von Trier, and Marco Tullio Giordana. A lot of sex and blood, she writes in the FAZ. Her favourite: Michael Haneke's "Cache": "a highly concentrated cold story... laid over by a quite precise sense of threat that is produced by the relatively harmless video tapes that are sent to an educated middle class family. Who sent them remains unclear to the end, but what happens in the meantime and the performances of Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche, how they begin to spy on and mistrust one another, elevate the film beyond the rest of the weekend program." Daniel Kothenschulte also had an exciting weekend in Cannes, as he writes in the Frankfurter Rundschau. He considers Gus van Sant's "Last Days" (trailer here), about the last days of Kurt Cobain, to be a highly romantic masterpiece: "If he's a romantic, then he's also clearly a Richard Wagner of silence, a Caspar David Friedrich without the need to be perfect, a John Wesley Turner without the perfumed palette." Kothenschulte accuses Lars von Trier of anti-Americanism with "Manderlay", his continuation of "Dogville": "Von Trier knows another country of unlimited opportunity, better than the USA, which he has never visited. It is in the darkness of the cinema. And in the presumed emptiness of the thousand heads which try to make sense of the smart nonsense that their hungry eyes devour."


Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 17.05.2005

Alfred Schlienger has seen Ruedi Häusermann's "V. v. V. - Verneigung vor Valentin" at the Theater Basel. He was more impressed by a mobile phone ringing in the audience than the play itself: "The woman, not especially young, rifled around in her bag for half an eternity, finally got hold of the thing, but instead of turning it off, began a cheery chat in the middle of the performance; first one assumes this to be a gag on the part of the director – after all, comedian Karl Valentin (on whom the play is based - ed) had to compete with the smoke and noise of Munich's cabarets. The well-intended hypothesis soon proves false. The woman simply doesn't know what she's doing. In soccer, such hooligans are banned from the stadium."


Berliner Zeitung, 17.05.2005

Sebastian Preuss has visited a new exhibition of works by artist Norbert Bisky in Berlin's Künstlerhaus Bethanien gallery. Bisky is son of Lothar Bisky, the chairman of the PDS, successor party to the former East-German communist party, and brother of writer Jens Bisky. Preuss comments: "Bisky's painting is by no means clear in its message, although on the surface it seems to be. The homo-erotic atmosphere with blonde, suntanned boys is reminiscent of the Hitler Youth or the socialist Young Pioneers. The lush realism does not fail to evoke totalitarian propagandistic art. This is the art of seductive superficiality. But is its message as up-front as it seems?" With his first solo show in 2001, Bisky became the overnight darling of the media and collectors. Some have since grown tired of the endless repetition of blond boys in his work. But Preuss comments that the paintings now on display have changed in other respects. "Little remains of the deceptive idylls. A world of violence and ghastly details has replaced the beaming faces and robust complexions. Fire storms and burning aeroplanes shoot across the field where the half-naked boys play. Weapons, bloody wounds and torn-off limbs turn the youthful pleasure garden into a sadistic purgatory. Desire, playfulness and death are so interwoven that the Marquis de Sade would feel right at home."


Die Welt, 14.05.2005

Nathan Gardels talks with anthropologist and conservative Catholic Rene Girard, who argues in favour of the critique of relativism pronounced by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger before he became Pope Benedict XVI. Girard sees Catholicism as being above all other religions: "My entire work has aimed at showing that Christianity is a higher belief, and not merely another mythology. In mythology, an angry mob mobilises against scapegoats, making them responsible for one large crisis or another. The crisis ends with the victimisation of the guilty scapegoat through collective violence. This establishes a new order, ordained by God himself." In Christianity, by contrast, "the holy establishment of a faith through collective violence against a scapegoat is exposed as a lie. (...) This debunking of the lie of collective violence is the hallmark of Christianity, which builds on the Jewish faith. This is what makes it unique, what gives it veritable singularity."


Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 14.05.2005

In a dossier on the 60th anniversary of the end of the Second World War, historian Norbert Frei observes a modification in the Germans' notion of their history, even among the so-called 68er generation. "A radical change in perspective is seen for example in former far-left historian Jörg Friedrich, with his expressionist cascades about the Allied bomb war. Such a change may still be the exception. But even a casual glance will assure you that certain circles that previously interpreted everything, even the private sphere, as 'political', are today astonishingly un-political in their 'privatising' view of history. This view now blurs the differences between perpetrators, victims and tacit supporters of the Nazi regime.