BERLINALE (BERLIN INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL) BERLIN FEBRUARY 7-17, 2008 This year's Berlinale (the 58th Berlin International Film Festival), like that of many Berlinales past, was soaked in history. Given its Cold War inception and combative orientation since then (in 1970 director George Stevens led a jury walkout in protest of a film critical of the Vietnam War, for example), it would be difficult for it to be otherwise. As wide-ranging and colossal as the city in which it is located, a social focus ran through the offerings from the retrospectives of Luis Bunuel, Francesco Rosi, or American films on the Vietnam War, to films based around the struggles of homosexuals in Egypt and hip-hop musicians in Uganda. It was present in the new documentaries from the cataclysm in Iraq, like Full Battle Rattle (2008, by Tony Gerber and Jesse Moss), and Heavy Metal, in Baghdad (2007, by Suroosh Alvi and Eddy Moretti). So, one of the world's largest--and for the European market, most crucial--film festivals was far more than a fashionable premiere for new films. Contained in various forums and alternative groupings that have proliferated over the years, festival offerings ranged from potential blockbusters to the more experimental fare as shown on tiers of the Sony Center at Potsdamer Platz, such as Isabella Rossellini's take on the sex lives of insects in Green Porno (2008), to revisited structuralist classics. By any measure one of the more extraordinary offerings on hand was the epic 190-minute docufiction United Red Army (2007) by Japanese new wave director Koji Wakamatsu. Now 72 years old, Wakamatsu was smack in the middle of the militant New Left in Japan and often sought to explode the erotically charged and scandalous pink eiga genre from within in films like Secrets Behind the Wall (1965), Go, Go Second Time Virgin (1969), and Ecstasy of the Angels (1972), all of which were shown at the Berlinale in a tribute to the filmmaker. United Red Army is several films in one: a black-and-white documentary of the Japanese student and antiwar movement (in the form of a relentless display of demonstrations, riots, and statistics of arrests and killings, which convey an inexorable and violently contested history); a partly fictionalized account of the relationships of members of the various militant student factions that ultimately join forces as the United Red Army; and a docudrama of the United Red Army itself in its clandestine mountain base. Wakamatsu's film culminates in the group's takeover of a mountain ski lodge in Asama in 1972 and the ensuing firefight with police. For the sake of a certain realism, Wakamatsu shot these scenes at his own mountain cabin, destroying it in the process. Scored to rumbling, splintering psychedelic music by Sonic Youth's Jim O'Rourke, Wakamatsu presents one of the starkest portraits yet committed to film of the disintegration of once hopeful, revolutionary idealism into despair, fanaticism, and mad fratricidal violence. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] This year's Berlinale was riddled with dilemmas of history. Documentaries ranged from portraits of Vaclav Havel and Ariel Sharon to the denizens of Mafrouza (a poor section of Cairo) to Isaac Julien's Derek (2008) and Jesus Christ Savior (2008) by Peter Geyer. Typical of the festival, the results of these were wildly uneven. …