Well, it's day five of the Berlinale, and i have been true to my word: haven't bothered to see a damned thing!

This must be the worst festival experience i've had in some 40 years of attending film festivals.

So much for that, since it's ridiculous. Not one single person on the damned staff has the courtesy to try to be civil. I don't understand why the bear is the symbol of this festival: it should be pigs.

However, i shall try to make it to the panel discussion with Marc Siegel, and if i can't get into that, that's it.

Never again.

Anyway, the installations at the DAADGalerie and Galerie Barbara Weiss proved to be a good contrast, because Phil Collins's pieces were... problematic, shall we say, but Heike Baranowsky's installations worked quite well.

Just a quick note: Phil Collins created pieces which were essentially narrative pieces. Just projecting one of the pieces ("soy mi madre") on a wall does not an installation make. In fact, it detracted from whatever qualities the piece might have had as a dramatic work. But Heike Baranowsky's pieces (the three-projected images of rather barren landscapes; the two monitor piece of mother and baby and fishtank, with the images in black-and-white with the only "color" being the orange goldfishes in the tanks) worked quite nicely as installations, because there was never the sense of narrative continuity which compelled a different attention span.

I'll have to think more about this, since it was also an issue with the installations at the Akademie der Kunste. (James Benning's installation, like Heike Baranowsky's pair, was successful, and for the same reason.)

One thing: i did find those galleries, so now i'm feeling a little more confident that i can find some of these places.

But the Berlinale: may it be plagued by locusts in its 60 years.