Viewing posts written by: Ben Gook
Ben Gook is a Melbourne-based critic who has written about cinema for
TheVine, The Big Issue and academic outlets. He majored in Cinema
Studies at The University of Melbourne and is completing a PhD about
remembrance of the GDR in contemporary German culture.
International film festivals, for all their smug self-congratulation, still operate in a (sub)culture which takes the majority of its cues from the mainstream. To wit, barely anyone goes to see a German crime trilogy by three of the most shrewd directors operating in Europe today, but there’s a line snaking around the block for a middling documentary about a goddamn restaurant (El Bulli). The effects of the current fetishisation of food, chefs and restaurants, particularly as visual pleasure, are evident here—but so too is a longer-standing logic in the film market and film audience: Germans make films about their traumatic past which are worth seeing, anything else they make, is not. Basically.
