Thessaloniki Dispatch. Exhibitions.

For the last decade, the Thessaloniki International Film Festival, now in its 47th year, has embellished its official program with video installations, painting and art exhibitions, revealing another side of movie directors. In the past, visitors to the festival have revelled in paintings and collages by Sergei Paradjanov and Peter Greenaway and photos by David Cronenberg, John Boorman and others, often related to tributes and retrospectives.

This year, the festival excelled itself with eight different exhibitions, including a video musical, The Rape of the Sabine Women, by New York-based Eve Sussman, and work by Chinese video artist Cao Fei. Despina Mouzaki, the Director of the festival, put it aptly: "With these exhibitions, not only are we honoring the complete work of cinematic creators, but also highlighting the close relationship of the seventh art with its 'sister' visual arts and the continuous way they replenish each other."

As Wim Wenders was being given an almost complete retrospective of his films, and was himself extremely present throughout the festival, giving master classes, press conferences and introducing his films, it wasn't surprising to find a large exhibition devoted to his photographs and those of his German photographer wife, Donata (née Schmidt). Called Still Images of Moving Pictures, the exhibition featured mostly stills taken on the sets and locations of his films from 1993 after marrying his sixth wife, 20 years his junior. The fact of her relative youth (she is 41), seems to have given Wenders, whom many consider has a bright future behind him, a new lease of life, and perhaps is partly responsible for his decision to return to Germany after ten years in America.

Nevertheless, what the photos show is that Wenders has always been continually on the move as much as his characters in his motion pictures or pictures in motion. "Sometimes I think my true profession is a 'traveller'," he explained. He took to becoming the still photographer on his films because he feels that actors dislike or don't respond to some strange photographer arriving on set. Both he and Donata, whose photos are much more "artistic" than practical, have already won the confidence of the cast. Yet some of the best photos are the more personal ones - an amused Kurosawa watching Wenders and a corpulent Francis Coppola bathing in a river in Nevada; a partly paralyzed Antonioni directing Beyond the Clouds, and a raddled Nicholas Ray, close to death, warmly embracing Wenders with a tearful Dennis Hopper looking on.

Another husband and wife collaboration was seen in an exhibition entitled Imaginative Eye, Imaginative Hand, paintings, objects and scenes from films by the Czech surrealist Jan Svankmajer and his designer wife Eva Svankmajerova, who died just over a year ago. Needless to say, especially to those filmgoers who admire the weird and wonderful films, there is much to delight in the paintings, sculptures and marionettes and tactile art.

However, the exhibition that stood out from all the others, for its setting almost as much as the photos, was Turkey CinemaScope: The World of Nuri Bilge Ceylan, displayed in the Bezesteni, a 15th-century Turkish market building with six domes, restored during the 1990s. Those who know Ceylan's films, mainly Clouds of May (1999), Distant (2005) and the recent Climates (2006), will not be surprised that the Turkish director has a great eye.

All in color and the shape of a CinemaScope screen, the photos capture eerie landscapes, which one critic appropriately compared to the paintings of Pieter Breugel, the Elder and spectral cities, with isolated people unchanged from medieval times peering at the camera. It's the sort of exhibition that can only make one return to cinema with an awakened visual appreciation.

Posted by dwhudson at November 29, 2006 9:28 AM