28/06/2010

What if there had been a conspiracy to prevent European cinema from becoming as massively influential as Hollywood? What if unnamed interests had dictated the failure of the construction of a big film studio in Malta back in the 1930s? What if French film legend Micheline Presle had made a film that nowadays mysteriously disappeared from the film archives? What would be the face of today’s European film industry if these (hypothetical) events had taken place? What if actress Maria de Medeiros was caught in a conspiracy while investigates all that?

Belgian director Frédéric Sojcher, whose documentary Cineastes à tout prix was part of Cannes’ Official Selection in 2004, dares to combine all these plot elements in an unexpected film mixing reality and fiction. Hitler in Hollywood had its world premiere last Friday, at the Brussels Film Festival, about a week before it screens in competition at the upcoming Karlovy Vary International Film Festival.

Maria de Medeiros – playing herself, or at least lending her name to a stubborn and colourful version of herself – is making a documentary about 87-year old star Presle. During her interviews she discovers that the actress had been in a film by director Luis Aramcheck.

Presle has never seen that film and Medeiros immediately commits to finding it. Without expecting, however, that such a quest could become so dangerous as she tries to track down clues on the film’s whereabouts in Brussels, Paris, Cannes, Berlin, London, Venice and Malta.

Hard to describe, Hitler in Hollywood refuses easy categorisation, deliberately mixing genres and teasing audiences with fake clues and real facts. It is simultaneously a road movie in search of a missing piece of the European film puzzle, a docufiction, a conspiracy thriller, a manifesto for European cinema and an alarm against the supremacy of the Hollywood industry in the western world. All this served with exquisite irony and (real) statements from several film professionals, including Wim Wenders and Emir Kusturica.

Aesthetically, Hitler in Hollywood seems to evoke a comics’ style and flirts with a visual freedom traditionally left almost exclusively to experimental cinema. In several sequences, the three lead “characters” (Presle, Medeiros and camera operator Thomas, played by Flemish actor Wim Willaert) stand out due to their flashy colours, in a clear opposition to the rest of the characters or sets, which remain black and white and/or unfocused.

The entire film was shot with a digital photo camera; a practical choice, according to Sojcher, as shooting in several countries with a very small crew would make it quite complicated to carry heavier material. The technical outcome of such a choice is a fluid and challenging mise-en-scene. Its resistance to traditional photography and editing is perfectly in keeping with its non-conformist plot. At a time when film projects are increasingly more obliged to follow the constraints of pre-established rules, Hitler in Hollywood stands out as an example of creative freedom.