CinemaNerdz

Unknown Pleasures and Paul Thomas Anderson’s Junun in Berlin

Dina Paulson-McEwen

Unknown Pleasures, this year’s eighth installment of the Berlin American Independent Film Festival, screened fifteen films, including a program of shorts, at four locations throughout the city from June 3 through June 18. The UP, as they call themselves, offers un-Hollywood movements of current American cinema (on days with multiple screenings one could live in this world a bit, believing America only produces this kind of serious, quirky, deeply curious filmic content). “Consistent in form and content, varied and adventurous, the films make for intelligent and engaging cinema that defies both Hollywood and mainstream independent film,” writes the UP on their festival website.

I had the opportunity to see Paul Thomas Anderson’s quietly extraordinary documentary, Junun, at the festival’s Kino Arsenal location in Berlin’s Sony Plaza along Potsdamer Strasse this year. The multi-level building, walls strewn with Marlene Dietrich and movie posters, also houses a film and television museum and a cinephile’s dream book shop. Nearby, in Potsdamer Platz, a remaining portion of the Wall has been covered with hundreds of multicolored wads of gum. There was something ethnographic, encompassing and performance artsy about this, which made seeing Junun, a fifty-four-minute documentary following Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood, Israeli composer Shye Ben Tzur, and the Indian ensemble Rajasthan Express as they record an album in Rajasthan, India, feel just right in a city full of memorializing spaces that, like the film, recognizes history as both living and past.

It is rare for art to be so breathtaking that it stands on its own without a supplemental narrative or structure needed to present it and magnify its meaning. The beginning parts of Junun, unbroken shots of the musicians rehearsing, felt slow to me. But, by focusing on their music – an astonishing mix of big band sound, string instruments including the kamaicha, flute, rhythm guitar, bass, keyboards, drum- and digital-programming with lyrics in Hebrew, Hindu, and Urdu – I was addicted from the get-go. To that point, as the film went on, Junun emerged as a film clearly not about narrative momentum but about reconceptualizing the moment, suggesting the quietest of moments can produce the most awesome of arts. The ability to be in solitude with oneself and make art in community can be an ancestral brainchild, given beautiful feeling when one of the musicians in the Rajasthan Express explains how he came to play his instrument: his father played it, as did his father’s father and his father’s father’s father.

The electricity goes out, a wild bird flaps around their rehearsal space (inside the stunning Mehrangarh Fort in Rajasthan) and drone shots, courtesy of producer Nigel Godrich’s device, sweep over the small, squished-together, pastel-colored houses of Rajasthan below. These actions of nuance are poetic motifs, backdrops to punctuate the focus and care the artists show one another during rehearsals and recordings. These pieces provide light comedy and, with the drone footage, by emphasizing the tremendous height and palatialness of the fort offer an attentive nod to the charge of art and music and to the musicians who make it happen. A good documentarian is part historian, part journalist and part gift-giver, a story-seeker in a place that promises a hearty narrative body; a good documentarian absorbs that story and offers an opportunity for others to be intimate with its insides and makes space for the contemplation it inspires.

Bravo to Anderson on his first documentary accomplishment with Junun, certainly, but encore applause, for this assiduous story belongs to the musicians. It is through them that sound becomes an experience I can only describe as synonymous with the very best of humanity-focused storytelling, or in other words: pure love.

Dina Paulson-McEwen

Dina Paulson-McEwen is the author of Parts of love (Finishing Line Press, 2018), a 2017 finalist in the Finishing Line Press New Women’s Voices Chapbook Competition. Her work appears in Flash Fiction Magazine, FlashFlood, Minola Review, Dying Dahlia Review, The Ham Free Press, The Hungry Chimera, and elsewhere and has been exhibited at Hudson Guild Gallery and San Juan Capistrano Library. Dina is the assistant managing editor at Compose | A Journal of Simply Good Writing and an editor at Flash Fiction Magazine. She works with creative thinkers through her company, Aqua Editing. She lives in Princeton, New Jersey.
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