names and golden bears do their share in promoting a movie and making it a topic over drinks or on Twitter, but there is much more to be found in the hundreds of feature films, documentaries and short movies. Pierrot Lunaire. With one of the more experimental films, controversial director and photographer Bruce LaBruce came to Berlin with his movie Pierrot Lunaire. It is an adaptation of the stage version he once directed in Berlin. Composer and multi-talented Arnold Schönberg wrote the piece in 1912. In unsteady, almost raw black and white pictures, it tells the story of Pierrot Lunaire and his despair of gender confusion and moral prison. The tragedy is narrated only in the form of images and the original music: German speech singing and Chamber Music. Not an easy task, and even as a native speaker, I had to glimpse at the English subtitles every once in a while. At times the singing became chain of sound, the language in it hardly recognizable. The 100-year-old music is in sharp contrast to the pictures on the screen. Shot in shady clubs and dark alleys of contemporary Berlin, the spectator follows Lunaire in his quest for love and acceptance. The form is very experimental, yet not as explicit as one might suggest, considering LaBruce’s Oeuvre. Nymphomaniac. Everyone who expected more skin in Pierrot Lunaire surely got his or her share during the screenings of Lars von Trier’s latest, Nymphomaniac which was shown in an exclusive long version on the Berlinale. It was one of the most anticipated movies but it seems that the additional value of this extended cut was mostly full of even closer shots of the genitals of the characters involved in Trier’s opus about sexual desire, humiliation and self-hatred. To say anything else about the movie is difficult, as this one was only the first of two parts, the other coming to cinemas in a few weeks’ time. Judged on what one could see at the Berlinale, it was a classic von Trier, who is a master in putting universal topics about the human condition into radical contexts and combining them with our darkest sides of being. Another classic is a scandal that follows any film festival von Trier attends. This year, however, it was his male lead Shea LaBeouf. Not only did he walk down the red carpet, his head under a brown paper bag saying “I am not famous anymore,” he
also left the press conference unexpectedly. The Great Museum. Documentaries also had a strong presence. From restored images of Nazi concentration camps that are so gruesome even Alfred Hitchcock quit a project that aimed to compile a movie for occupied Germany out of it, to hybrids that play with the documentary form and blend it with elements of fiction. One of them might not be especially unconventional in its form but it shows in fascinating images a world rarely seen by most. The Great Museum looks behind the curtain of the Kunsthistorische Museum in Vienna. This art museum with a worldwide reputation as one of the best is not only a giant in numbers and its sheer abundance of art in all its forms, but also a huge machinery of administrative work and finances. To keep the balance between those two is one of many daily challenges this, or any, museum faces. From the meticulous restoration of paintings and sculptures to the dissatisfaction BLEEP 31