Intersecting with Eternity
In December 2024, the Berlin International Film Festival announced that it would award Scottish actor Tilda Swinton an Honorary Golden Bear for her lifetime achievement. Tricia Tuttle, director of the festival, said that:
The range of Tilda Swinton’s work is breathtaking. To cinema she brings so much humanity, compassion, intelligence, humour and style, and she expands our ideas of the world through her work. Tilda is one of our modern filmmaking idols, and has also long been part of the Berlinale family. We are delighted to be able to present her with this Honorary Golden Bear.
Swinton responded that:
The Berlinale is the first film festival I ever went to, in 1986 with Derek Jarman and the first film I made, his Caravaggio. It was my portal into the world in which I have made my life’s work — the world of international filmmaking — and I have never forgotten the debt I owe it. To be honoured in this way by this particular festival is deeply touching for me.
The award was presented at the opening ceremony of the 75th Berlin International Film Festival held at the Berlinale Palast on 13 February 2025.
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Swinton’s acceptance speech, featured in both a video recording of the event and in an edited text, is part of our series Intersecting with Eternity, a mini-anthology of literary and artistic works, both past and present, that are part of the unbroken stream of human awareness and poetic self-reflection. It is a companion to The Tower of Reading and an extension of The Other China section of China Heritage.
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The expression ‘intersecting with eternity’ is inspired by a passage in Mary Norris’s excursions into the world of Ancient Greece:
… the real world of crabby landladies and deceptive road signs would crack open and mythology would spill out. You have to pay the rent in the real world, but it’s crazy not to embrace those moments when it intersects with eternity.
— Mary Norris, Greek to Me: adventures of a comma queen, 2019
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In February 2003, the 53rd Berlin Film Festival screened Morning Sun 七八點鐘的太陽, a film that I co-directed with Carma Hinton and Richard Gordon of the Long Bow Group in Boston.
— Geremie R. Barmé
Editor, China Heritage
16 February 2025
The First Anniversary of
Alexei Navalny’s death
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The invisible republic of the spirit, the universal fatherland, has been established among the races and among the nations. Its frontiers are open to all who wish to dwell therein; its only law is that of brotherhood; its only enemies are hatred and arrogance between nations. Whoever makes his home within this invisible realm becomes a citizen of the world. He is the heir, not of one people but of all peoples. Henceforth he is an indweller in all tongues and in all countries, in the universal past and the universal future.
— from Stefan Zweig, Romain Rolland:
The Man and His Work,
New York, 1921, p.355
We quoted these lines from Stefan Zweig in the introduction to Spectres & Souls, the 2018 issue of China Heritage Annual. They also resonate with the passage from Mary Norris, quoted above, and add to the impetus for this series on ‘intersecting with eternity’.
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… I make films as a film fan first and foremost and here’s why, here’s what never changes and what, over the next ten days, you will have spread before you a feast for the heart, a tonic for the soul; the dark, the quietness, the liberty of sound, the uninterrupted voice, the open invitation to revery, being among a whole mess of humanity and trusting that you might actually feel the same as each other for even an instant. The leap of faith, the smoke and mirrors, the beam of light and, since this matters too, the lifelong friendships struck up in juries and screenings and breakfast buffets and nightclubs and coffee queues and on street corners of the Berlinale. And through them the growing possibility of seeing more than one side of things, the sensation of feeling yourself change, feeling yourself challenged, tested, feeling yourself safer, braver, taking your values between finger and thumb and examining them there — recognitions and wheels turning underwater and deep bells ringing, because there’s the magic of detail suspended in space available to all humans; the miracle of timelessness available to all humans, the unbeatable beauty of the earth, the actual value of spoken language, the actual value of unspoken language, the grace and power of the unwatched face, the vulnerability and valiance of human life being lived always and everywhere and every-when. The downright usefulness of the wild, wide screen and so so so so so so many films.
I’m so happy it’s snowing today. It could be 1986; it used to snow every year here. My first Berlinale we traced snow with us on our boots into the Palast. Werner Schroeter was showing Der Rosenkönig at the Delphi and the Teddies were inaugurated. A wall was still up and we used to make it our business to mission over to the east in search of rare vinyl and a wider view, but our minds were focused on that boundary-lessness in here, up there.
We like to think we dignified the cinema we made with our dissidence, our resistance and our determination to find a communion to have faith in. Here’s what occurred to us back then: we can do better as human beings, nothing surer and, on our way, we can do worse than foraging in the cinema, in art, for the breadcrumbs through the forest, to understand exactly how now, as then, in a present when it has perhaps never been more pressing to consider, to weigh with reverence and maturity, what sovereignty means to humans, what history and legacy and an evolved culture might be worth to our sense of ourselves and even what being human means and is worth at all.
We can head for the great independent state of cinema and rest there — an unlimited realm innately inclusive, immune to efforts of occupation, colonization, takeover, ownership, or the development of ‘Riviera property’. A borderless realm and with no policy of exclusion, persecution or deportation. No known address, no visa required.
It’s so very very good for us to wonder at the world and to be surprised by admiration for each other, rather than shocked speechless by our cavalier, mean-spiritedness and cruelty. To notice our myriad variations and to unite in celebrating them, rather than resign ourselves to a submission to entitled domination and the astonishing savagery of spite.
State-perpetuated and internationally enabled mass murder is currently actively terrorising more than one part of our world, currently condemned by the very bodies specifically set up by humans to monitor things on earth unacceptable to human society. These are facts; they need to be faced. So, for the sake of clarity, let’s name it: the inhumane is being perpetrated on our watch. I’m here to name it, without hesitation or doubt in my mind, and to lend my unwavering solidarity to all those who recognise the unacceptable complacency of our greed-addicted governments who make nice with planet wreckers and war criminals wherever they come from.
l’m also here to name my absolute personal faith in culture, in resistance. An enlightened cinema can inspire a civilised world, can lend us the pause, the breath, the reflection that might embolden us to take the best part of ourselves, that capacity for enchantment and openness, for wit and intrigue, that admiration for human flexibility and resource, our capacity to survive things, for thrill and sensation that we find in the witness that cinema represents and build on it out in the open and under the sky, IRL.
So when the chips are down, as might be interpreted at this point in history with particular sharpness, and at any age and stage of our lives — not only the twenty-five year olds — and with the settled acknowledgement that:
- being for something does not ever imply being anti any one; that being for humane solidarity means for humane solidarity with all humans, so invested in common decency and fair representation;
- in the agreement that freedom in the naming of repressive inhumane and criminal movements wherever and whenever is among our essential human rights and deserves our honour and our loyalty;
- on the path to believing, against all odds, in the practical feasibility of fairness on earth, to building brave faith in and voting for reliable human accord and in an inviolable respect among us all without exception for difference and dignity.
Maybe humans, friends, trust in cinema, support big screens wherever we find them, watch everything there, hold the streaming services to their proud claim to be big cinema-supportive and encourage them to spend a large chunk of their squillions on building, renovating and enlivening cinema theatres in every territory they reach. Encourage the curious and fearless distributors and exhibitors among us, by buying ticket after ticket and making it work for them to keep us nourished and inspired with a broad and dynamic cinema ad infinitum. Treasure the fourteen decades of archive film available to us, invaluable traces of our human society and spirit without which our human future, not to say the future of cinema, would be immeasurably the poorer. Embolden a vibrant and responsive internationalist cinema culture for the young and find a film festival, maybe better still, found one, right, in villages and the center of big cities, in refugee camps, in schools and care homes, on wheels, uphills and on inflatable rafts in the ocean — warum denn nicht?! —the more the merrier and size is not everything. It’s all to play for. …
Thank you dear Berlinale for laying out my life’s magic box of faith for all the friends I found here, for forty years of parties and revelations, and for my beautiful shiny Bear.
Long live cinema and all its never-ending promise, a light in the dark that never goes out. Let’s keep looking up.
With all my love,
Tilda
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Source:
- Based on an electronically generated transcript of Tilda Swinton’s remarks, corrected and punctuated by China Heritage.
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