Master of Cinema

Great cinema is art - every year we welcome an outstanding artist who we consider to be a master of cinema.

We have somebody as a guest this evening who is rated not only by me but by very many cineasts worldwide as being in the league of the best in his profession, of the best living directors, because his works, as varied as they may be, always display a great depth, both in the subject matter and in the artistic approach, that is, the form. And yet it seems as if this one kind of secret knowledge and the names of other directors of the 'now time', whom I am not going to mention to you here, because they do not remotely reach the level he is at, yet are known to considerably more people.
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It has rarely been so difficult for me, and at the same time so easy, to find words to describe what this cinema artist from Russia actually does in the 15 feature films and 17 documentaries, dreamworlds transported 32 times to the screen, dreamworlds even when they would normally be called documentary films. He has been asked what the difference is for him between a feature and documentary, and he replied that the difference lies in the tools you use: you are building the same house, but one is made with large stones, with massive elements, the other with quite fragile and transparent material.
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Or you look at the world as always, and suddenly however everything is different, somehow amazing, and you are surprised at what you can see although it's nothing but reality. But you rediscover it. You look at a landscape or at a street, a sea of narrow standing houses, and you think about how much they actually tell, the things you see, detail after detail. And then we are with somebody, ladies and gentlemen, who masters just this because he believes that film wasn't invented to distract us from the world but to show us it.
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Do you know who made the biggest film in the world? And not only in terms of length: 54 hours of film and 20 years production time - and this is the best part of it - who has also made the biggest author film of all time? And despite this, his feet have remained firmly on the ground, because he is somebody who thinks anyway that the stories he tells are much more important than he himself. You can already tell, ladies and gentlemen, that I am very happy that he is here - please join me in welcoming our guest of honour this evening - the most enduring cinema narrator of all times, the film director who is identified by the whole world with a term from Germany, namely with the word "Heimat" - Ladies and gentlemen: E d g a r R e i t z !
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This evening is dedicated to a man whose name over many decades has been pronounced with great awe and extraordinary respect throughout the world of film, and I hope that you will soon understand why. That's at least how I feel. And if back then somebody had told me that one day I would hand an award to him, to this genius of cinema, I wouldn't have believed it. "Back then", this was mere 24 years ago but I still remember it: how I sank deeper and deeper into my seat when, being a young film critic at the time, I marvelled at the depth that opened up on the screen in front of my eyes... Ladies and Gentlemen, please welcome with me one of the truly great masters of cinema of our present times- Mister Raoul Ruiz!!
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For his works encompassing 11 feature films and other works so far Zhang Yimou has received over 50 awards and prizes, I repeat, over 50 - in Berlin, Venice, Cannes, Tokyo, New York, Los Angeles, even in his own country. In Montreal he was declared to be one of the 10 outstanding film directors in the world. And we now add our small prize, a "special mention" compared to those many and much bigger awards: we are delighted to declare him to be a "Master of Cinema" today... Ladies and gentlemen, I am proud to have you here, please be so kind as to come on stage... Z h a n g Y i m o u !
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Compared to the massive amount of syndicated, standardised TV shows and mainstream cinema we see everyday, the films by Iosseliani seem to be wonderful creations of poetic wizardry, enchantments of reality. "Reality" is actually the catchword for his kind of cinema: Iosseliani doesn't use reality to give form to big and important ideas; I think he would find such theatrical enterprises rather funny.
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Most people - not including those who have come together here tonight, but people in general - who are exposed to some kind of film almost every day, at least on TV, would find one thing surprising, amazing or actually not even possible: that cinema can be on as high a level as world literature - that there are cinema artists who are able to create pieces of art compared to which watching most other films becomes a laughable, trivial thing to do. However, there are not many of them - maybe 60, 70 artists, I reckon, worldwide, in this entire century - who belong to this Olympus of real masters of cinema - and he certainly is one of them, our guest today, Theodor Angelopoulos!
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