OUT OF BASIC PRACTICALITY, most festivals are content to build their programs on a “best of” format based on works submitted. This year’s DocLisboa, however, took a more ambitious curatorial approach: Any path one took through the hundred-plus films on offer guaranteed the opportunity to graduate with a new thesis on both the history and the current state of documentary film. While this will undoubtedly cement the festival’s reputation as an affair designed for fetishists of the genre, beyond merely filmic concerns, its framing by retrospectives of Harun Farocki and Jean Rouch—representing sociological and anthropological stances, respectively—allow for a probing of the great uncertainties of the present.
Where Europe is concerned, this was poetically undertaken by Ivette Löcker and Nikolaus Geyrhalter, whose films Nachtschichten (Night Shifts, 2010) and Abendland (Nightfall, 2010) perform the Joycean task of employing nightscapes to explore the problems that haunt us in daylight—whether we wish to remain blind to them or not. Löcker’s Nachtschichten follows a selection of individuals who—by choice or necessity, their activities illicit or vocational—live as nighthawks in Central Europe’s largest city, Berlin. Geyrhalter’s Abendland takes a similar approach, only widening the scenic focus onto the entire European continent over a patchwork of scenes that move gracefully from the institutional (an EU parliamentary session) to the ecclesiastical (a conference at the Vatican) to careless revelry (a stadium megarave.) Where Nachtschichten is more character-based, with its revolving cast of shadows speaking freely to the camera, Abendland adapts a metonymic approach: While no one scene is returned to, each feeds the next, forming a rich inner narrative logic.
