A Programmer's Chronicles, December 2006
In the mountains by Gertjan Zuilhof
Before I was able to investigate the hot-blooded new cinema of tropical Asia for the IFFR, for a decade I took an annual winter trip through the German-speaking centre of Europe.
It was the year of Michael Pilz’ Feldberg when I first came to Austria for the Rotterdam Film Festival. I think the film was premièred at the Austrian Film Days in Wels, but a beautiful old cinema in Vienna was rented for this visitor from Rotterdam in order to do justice to the radiant 35mm image and to have the best experience of the minimal yet meticulous soundtrack. I was impressed by the craftsmanship and the visual and audio purism even though I couldn’t know at the time that Pilz was about to abandon working with classical film techniques and become a pioneer in using handy video formats.
Maybe Pilz wanted to try it one more time: to make a film that recognizes the extremes of purism in cinema while also being state-of-the-art in its sound and vision. And so very expensive for an avant-garde film. A film that could measure up technically to mainstream cinema and which the maker and therefore only allowed to be screened in qualified cinema. This was a demanding if not impossible paradox and the beautiful, secretive and pure Feldberg remained as seldom screened exception to the rule that avant-garde is a poverty-stricken art.
Feldberg can be described as a drama film, because it has two actors, but it is above all a masterclass in cinematographically capturing a breathtaking mountain landscape. Pilz is himself a talented cameraman, but on this occasion he turned to Peter Schreiner. Only later, for instance after seeing Schreiner’s own film Blaue Ferne (1994), is possible to see just how essential Schreiner’s contribution was to Pilz’ masterpiece.
This year, a film was presented that took me back to the early 1990s. To 1990 itself, to be precise. To the year of Feldberg. We’re talking about the stunning Bellavista by Peter Schreiner indeed, cameraman on Feldberg. Beautiful, calm and self-assured in black and white and shot in one location, a forgotten German-speaking enclave in the Italian Alps, the kind I thought no longer existed. Schreiner deliberately allowed a lot to pass him by. He filmed his small archaic community as it were with archaic means. He has picked up where he left off in his closely related film I Cimbri (1991) after having not filmed for a long time. The power of his work has remained equally strong. Beautifully captured light in the endless grey tones between black and white may well have something timeless.
And they are not only beautiful shots of the mountain village Sappada/Pladen/Plodn (depending on which language you speak) in the sun or in the snow.
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