looking at some of the many Berlinale resumées

.. looking for some final Berlinale essentials? .. ok here are some more official statements translated and put online via signandsight .. with further links to go.

The reviewer of the linked article likes especially a corean film, which indeed sounds kind of promising – but the never forget the latest film ‘RR’ of James Benning was presented as well …:

.. Korean director Hong Sangsoo’s “Night and Day”, a comedy about male existence which is also a tragedy about the fundamental contradiction between words and deeds.

His films function like mosaics which only form into solid characters and stories when observed from a distance. But the real rewards come from getting up closer. Because this is where the characters and the words they speak begin to oscillate weirdly, before separating into individual images in odd-ball zooms and pans and every now and then a pig knocks its snout against a window as if against the wall separating dream and reality. On first glance and in many of its details “Night and Day” is funny and malicious enough. But unlike all the films (and this goes for most of them) which content themselves with naive cliched illustration, unlike all the tiring productions which only want to make the viewer believe what he sees, ... (read entire article)

... between utopias and these quite other sites, these heterotopias, there might be a sort of mixed, joint experience, which would be the mirror. The mirror is, after all, a utopia, since it is a placeless place. In the mirror, I see myself there where I am not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface; I am over there, there where I am not, a sort of shadow that gives my own visibility to myself, that enables me to see myself there where I am absent: such is the utopia of the mirror. But it is also a heterotopia in so far as the mirror does exist in reality, where it exerts a sort of counteraction on the position that I occupy. From the standpoint of the mirror I discover my absence from the place where I am since I see myself over there. Starting from this gaze that is, as it were, directed toward me, from the ground of this virtual space that is on the other side of the glass, I come back toward myself; I begin again to direct my eyes toward myself and to reconstitute myself there where I am. The mirror functions as a heterotopia in this respect: it makes this place that I occupy at the moment when I look at myself in the glass at once absolutely real, connected with all the space that surrounds it, and absolutely unreal, since in order to be perceived it has to pass through this virtual point which is over there. (Heterotopias, M.Foucault, 1967)