Panorama

Panorama

»WHAT HAS ALWAYS INTERESTED ME IS NON-NARRATIVE CINEMA, WHERE YOU CAN CREATE TENSION WITHOUT HAVING TO SAY SOMETHING SPECIFIC, WHERE ONE SHOT CAN CONTAIN AN ENTIRE CRIME STORY.«
CHANTAL AKERMAN

Anyone looking specifically for stories in the Panorama films is bound to be disappointed. As viewers, we are accustomed to the traditional ninety-minute dramaturgy. The boundaries of this narrative form arouses mistrust. Can certain subjects actually be communicated in this way? Any artistic intervention that goes beyond these bounds challenges our viewing habits. But how liberating that can be!

Chantal Akerman resisted the kind of films that simply intended to please. »Cinema«, she said, »is a dangerous tool«. Her short film debut Blow Up My Town (1968) took a radical approach in its destructive vision of an angry 18-year-old. By varying repetitions in her films, Akerman mastered the art of fragmentary narration, which touched the very bottom of our soul. She referred to it as »storytelling in fragments«. Ignoring standard narrative conventions, she created real moments of truth in film. In her last production No Home Movie, she explored her relationship with her mother, an Auschwitz survivor. Akerman saw herself as an outsider, who belonged nowhere. I Don’t Belong Anywhere is thus the title of a portrait of Akerman, the great film-maker who took her own life in Paris on October 5, 2015, aged only 65. Panorama adopts a political stance both in terms of content and artistic form, since the one determines the other. The protagonists that populate these films are defiant. The forms of rebellion against norms that make people unhappy or cannot be fulfilled span a broad spectrum. They range from writer Sibylle Berg to a juvenile delinquent in Standing Tall – which literally means »head held high«. This, too, could be the motto of Panorama. Evidence of this is Something Better to Come, a long-term study in which Hanna Polak shows Yula’s development into adulthood over a period of fourteen years. This film, the setting and its main character make a lasting impression on the viewer. Growing up under unimaginably difficult conditions in Europe’s biggest waste dump, Yula retains her independence and dignity. Just like the activists in God Is Not Working on Sunday!: Rwanda’s population faces the enormous task of overcoming the trauma of genocide. One strategy is a direct confrontation between victims and perpetrators. In the Future we have to preoccupy ourselves with hitherto ostracised identities. We offer assistance today with our short film programmes. In Talk to Me, Marta Prus takes a radical look at the relationship between director and protagonist when she focuses in her film on her own increasingly complex relationship. Ruth Beckermann, too, is interested in an unusual love story: In The Dreamed Ones, two actors in a sound studio relive the great love story between Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann. It is highly evocative. In Chevalier, Athina Rachel Tsangari pokes fun at male competitiveness and presents her crisis-plagued home country of Greece on a luxury yacht in the Aegean. It is a painful experiment, but we should not allow our pleasure to be diminished by constantly focusing on searching for the story.
_Betty Schiel