Arts/Review

E. European films at Vancouver fest

The Vancouver International Film Fes-
tival will present this fall, as in past years, a
batch of Easter European films. But in
1990, the emphasis is on the cinema of resis-
tance against the old bureaucratic command
system we used to call “existing socialism,”
with entries ranging from movies that have
languished on the shelf for more than two
decades to those made as recently as last
year.

Time was when we would have con-
sidered such films as the work of anti-social
malcontents, CIA plants or worse. But glas-
nost sparked a series of mainly bloodless
revolutions during the past year that shook
up the structures of virtually every country
we’ dcalled socialist, and it left its casualties:
several bureaucratic regimes and a line of
thought formerly held by many left wing
people around the world. We’ve had to re-
think virtually every belief, from faith in
existing socialism to some basic ideological

_tenets previously considered unassailable.

Seen in this light, the film festival’s offer-
ings from Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia,
Romania, Hungary, Poland and Bulgaria
take on a new legitimacy. But the question
arises: in attacking the old order, do Eastern
Europe’s cinematic rebels offer progressive
alternatives?

We can’t give a definitive answer. Con-
strained as the Tribune is by time anda small
staff, we could only attend one pre-screen-
ing. The Czechoslovakian film, Strange
Beings, was made last year, shortly before

.the “velvet revolution” that saw a former
political prisoner attain the highest office in
the land.

Part surrealistic and highly symbolic,
Strange Beings revolves around a mid-level
bureaucrat who takes his mistress/secretary
and a young soldier on a wild journey to his
home town, ostensibly to attend the funeral
of an aunt. Each represents a different gen-
eration: the bureaucrat, one year from retire-
ment, is a former resistance fighter; his
secretary, a Sixties-era survivor whose hus-
band we learn fled after the crushing of the
Prague Spring in 1968; the soldier and
chauffeur, in his early twenties, is a com-
pliant servant of the old order whose faith is
about to be seriously shaken.

Fear is palpable in Strange Beings, from
the police who stop vehicles for inspection
at will to black-clad youths who look like
roadside spectres in the glare of headlights.
The bureaucrat himself is both a source of
fear and its victim; he can shower lesser
mortals with favours, or have them con-
signed to perdition, but his own world is
unravelling, and his only escape is self-
deception. :

The bureaucrat clings to the belief that he
is still the socialist fighter of old. Passing a
truck full of labourers, he mentally projects
himself into their midst, conducting a sing-
along. Greeting women working an arid
plot, he praises their labour, only to be re-
buffed with sarcasm and indignation. “Do
you think we need you to get the job done?”
he is taunted.

The middle-aged secretary, representing
a generation that lives in compromise after
its ideals have been destroyed, sustains her
lover, the bureaucrat, with sexual favours
and general supportiveness. But she in turn
seeks sustenance from the young soldier,
almost literally in one sexually explicit
scene. He in turn represents the hope of
renewal, but in that scene, he is symbolically
impaled against a bale of wire, Christ-like in
sacrifice.

Indeed, Christ imagery is employed
throughout Strange Beings, implying either
a call to return to pre-revolutionary tradi-
tions — a frequent theme in post-socialist
Eastern Europe — or to the sacrifices that
must be made to bring about change.

Yet this film pays homage to progressive
values, too. In arguing with a black-clad

young couple of the punk persuasion, the

bureaucrat accuses them of wearing the
colour of fascism, who retort that they them-
selves are anti-racist and are the victims of
fascist attacks around the world. When the
bureaucrat protests that he worked hard to
get where he is, he is challenged with this
remark: “In doing so, you forgot where you
started from.”

The camera work in Strange Beings is
creative, with frequent close-ups, pans and
scenes shot through colour filters to give a
surreal effect. Some of the editing is rough,
and the cuts jumpy, but generally this film
can be credited with using innovative ap-
proaches.

2K

Several other Eastern European films
will .be shown at the festival, which runs
Sept. 28-Oct. 14 at five theatres. Included
are:
¢ Pictures of the Old World (Czechos-
lovakia), on the passing of old rural ways.

¢ The Ear (Czechoslovakia), about a
bureaucrat’s struggle to survive the Stalinist
purges in the 1950s.

¢ Time of the Servants (Czechos-
lovakia), a satirical look at opportunism and
treachery.

¢ Who is Right? (Romania), on a plant
catastrophe during the Ceaucescu era.

¢ The Dream Brigade (Hungary), con-
cerning a Hungarian work brigade’s adapta-
tion of a Russian play in defiance of their
superiors.

¢ Memories of a River (Hungary); a
Jewish logger’s life is turned upside down
by a girl’s ritualistic murder in the days of
the Austro-Hungarian empire.

¢ Meteo (Hungary), a science fiction film
about the invention of software to beat a
game of chance.

¢ The Interrogation (Poland), about a
cabaret singer jailed for no apparent reason.

¢ Farewell to Autumn (Poland), set in
the 1920s on the eve of the Communist
revolution.

¢ Margarit and Margarita (Bulgaria)
tackles corruption, prostitution and homo-
sexuality through the exploits of two rebel-
lious teenage lovers.

* The Ambush (Yugoslavia), a 1969
Cannes prize-winning film, later prohibited,
concerning a young revolutionary in imme-
diate post-war Serbia.

¢ The Role of My Family in the World
Revolution (Yugoslavia), an early Seven-
ties film banned for two decades, about a
bourgeois family during the revolution.

oka

The film festival features some 150 films
from 40 countries, including the United
States. Well worth the viewing, either at the
festival or on video, is Lines of Fire. In
August, 1988, thousands of students in Bur-
ma took to the streets of the capital, Ran-
goon, to call for an end to the dictatorship
which has ruled the southeast Asian nation
since 1962. The answer was bullets. An es-
timated 40,000 have died since then. Hun-
dreds of students fled to the hills, to join one
of the several mainly ethnic-based armies
that are seeking to overcome mutual pre-
judices and unite against the military regime
of Gen. Ne Win.

In 1989 New York film maker Brian
Beker crossed from Thailand into Burma
several times, risking death to produce this
62-minute documentary. He interviewed
rebel leaders and the notorious Gen. Khun
Sa, considered one of the main traffickers in
heroin.

Lines of Fire makes the point that the
former Reagan administration’s drug pol-
icies help prop up dealers like Khun Sa, and
support military oppression of liberation
forces. Equally damning is the expose of
Thailand’s military-backed government,
which handéd over Burmese student rev-

Scene from Yugoslavian film, The Ambush.

olutionaries to the dictatorship in return for
cheap teak wood.

The documentary also makes it clear that
the long-range aims of the still disparate
rebel forces are still uncertain, other than to

lated Burma into a federation of national
groups. Not a perfect documentary, but one
which breaks new: ground in exposing one
of the world’s least known struggles.

establish democracy and restructure the iso- —Dan Keeton
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