Müller's multicultural contradictions

The Locarno International Film Festival launches the fourth showcase under Marco Müller with a competition of first or second features and the usual mixture of potential crowd-pleasers and intellectual stimuli


Marco Müller - the director of 'the most Mediterranean of the Nordic festivals and the most German of the Latin festivals' - tells jørn rossing jensen about his desire to share the strange discoveries he has made in cinema

When in doubt Marco Müller will never turn to his head. 'My response to a film is based on emotional and on intellectual reactions. But I always end up with the film that has stirred my feelings, even if I do not understand why. I will probably see it another two or three times and still not get the clue, but I prefer it to the film which on an intellectual level is strong, but which I would not wish to watch again,' says the 42-year-old director of the Locarno International Film Festival.
Getting ready for his fourth edition of the festival, which last year had a record number of 140,000 admissions and catered for 5,000 film professionals, Müller is this year very close to what he sees as the ideal showcase of the Lake Maggiore.
He claims to share the 'logical background of any festival maker': he has an Italian passport, he is one quarter Swiss, yet he is not 100% certain where he belongs, having lived and worked in several countries around the world.
Born in a German-French-Brazilian-Italian family 'with the linguistic schizophrenia involved,' he began studying Chinese, and later joined the first exchange group of postgraduates in 1974 to visit the People's Republic in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution.
In China, he hoped to further his studies of human races and cultural anthropology. 'I hoped to pursue my research,' he says, 'but I was denied access to books labelled as 'feudal', or subjects of the old heritage regarded as 'superstitious'. Instead I found myself spending a lot of time in the movie theatres.
'At the time there were few Chinese films to see, so I sat through loads of Rumanian, Albanian and Korean films. From my childhood I have been a passionate movie-goer, but this was indeed far from my usual viewing habits.'
'Before I left for China — knowing I would be deprived the pleasure of Hollywood films for some time — I forced my Roman girlfriend to the cinema for two Raoul Walsh westerns and a William Castle horror film, to store as many forbidden images as possible.
'As China gradually lifted the ban on the old films, I became more and more occupied with cinema, trying to establish a film chronology of a country which had a rich history, and had at a certain time been the Hollywood of the Orient.'
Upon his return to Italy, Müller began teaching ethnomusicology at the same time as working as a consultant for the film festival in Pesaro, which had planned to stage a showcase of Chinese films. He went on to organise a Chinese retrospective of 135 features in Turin 1982.
His selection eventually caused a frontal clash with Chinese bureaucracy, partly because he had included films from the Cultural Revolution and the Japanese occupation, and partly because his book on Chinese Cinema did not share official points of view.
'I think I became a festival maker simply from the desire of sharing with other people the strange discoveries I had made in China. I was continuing to watch Chinese films on tape, or on my trips to Hong Kong.
'I wanted people to know that China had remade The Phantom of the Opera long before Hollywood, and that there was a group of Chinese directors whose work had been shelved and forgotten, but who were the most exciting talents in world cinema.
'Pesaro gave me the job as a programmer, and I started preparing a series of Asian film seasons. I slowly started the fascinating work of learning as much as possible about as many different film cultures as I could in a limited period of time.
'I do not think my life would have been the same had I not made the journey from Eastern Asia to Central Asia, via India through the Islamic countries, then to the Eastern Soviet republics, Eastern Europe, to finally land in Western Europe.'
On the way Müller made contacts with filmmakers he later introduced internationally at the festivals he programmed. He organised the first Western-European screenings of the work of Russian director Kira Muratova, and later of two forbidden films by Polish director Krszysztof Kieslowski.
The Pessaro assignment lasted till 1989, when he was offered the job of succeeding the late Hubert Bals as director of the Rotterdam Film Festival. He was already acquainted with the festival, having catered for its Asian entries.
'In Rotterdam I finally understood what it meant to assemble a festival machine which would consume a lot of films for large groups of audiences. To create an excitement about films that nobody knew anything about.
'I still feel myself a part of a Latin culture that could conflict with the general Calvinist attitude in Rotterdam, so I was very happy when I was asked by Locarno to take over what is the most Mediterranean of the Nordic festivals, and the most German of the Latin festivals.
'After a difficult period, when audiences had exceeded only a few thousand, David Streiff had got the event back on its rails and devised a policy which depended greatly on the active support of the Swiss distributors. But at the same time the film professionals, press and media were losing interest because it was only considered a national event, although it both offered a second chance to films underrated at other festivals, and gambled on new filmmakers.'
Negotiating his contract with Locarno, Müller instigated a radical change in festival regulations, limiting the main selection to world or international premières, and allocating more resources to retrospectives with thorough documentation.
At the same time he trimmed the festival organisation, headhunting staff from similar organisations, to revamp the showcase from one year to the other. He thinks he still needs another two or three years to succeed totally.
'Locarno should not try to compete with Venice or any other festival. We want to occupy another space, as a meeting place for everything which is new in film, and which the major festivals cannot accommodate.
'I see Locarno as a European mixture of Telluride and Sundance, the American centres of innovative cinema, where new films will attract an attention they would be totally without if presented by the large festivals.
'The place is interesting in itself because of the multi-cultural nature of Switzerland. It's the belly-button of the European festival map. Different experiences will meet and mix in an unusual way, and as Locarno is a public event, the feedback of the audience is instant.'
Müller still collaborates with the Swiss exhibitors, but in most cases he shows 'new films which will capture the audiences on their own terms, and not because they have won some kind of award in Cannes.' And he never hides his own preferences. Often he programmes new and very special cinema with big American box office attractions on the Piazza Grande — last year Speed and Pulp Fiction — so that audiences will have to see both films if they want to be sure of a seat.
'I believe that the industrial system of what we used to call cinema virtually ceased to exist in the early 1950s. The machine is still producing films, but I see only independent cinema and personal, though bigger-budget, filmmaking as being in a position to represent the changes in films and in society.
'On the other hand I do not believe in assessing films according to geography. It is often a recipe from the festival director's cuisine that if one year he has plenty of films from a specific country it is because he has spotted a trend.
'In the 1995 line-up we have a surprisingly strong series of Japanese features, but it is a simple coincidence. Three productions we had been waiting for were suddenly ready, and somehow we managed to squeeze all of them into the programme.
'I like the selection to contradict itself. We have three Japanese actioners, and probably the most cultural European film of the year, The Institute Benjamenta. Two French features anchored in the country's social reality oppose one from an American spiritual science-fiction humanist director.'
During the Locarno fest, Swiss distributors unspool to their own market, screening their upcoming releases to national exhibitors. The festival itself provides a sales and marketing service to the films in the programme.
Organised since last year by Francine Brücher, an experienced distributor with, among others, Metropolis, this office will invite over 50 international buyers to attend the festival and scout for new product.
'I see it as a very important part of the job to make sure that the films we present do not go unnoticed, trying to prolong their active lives, which means we should help them find distribution channels above and beyond the festival circuit.
'The Swiss buyers are here anyway, and a lot of French, German and Italian distributors come on their own. The sales and marketing service will make the producers of the films showing here liaise with the sales companies, which could further channel their product.
'It is difficult to attach figures to this effort because negotiations will start here and probably be concluded at another market. But the people in the trade are gradually learning that Locarno is a place to make strange discoveries which they might like to share with others.'
JØRN ROSSING JENSEN

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