There is an eerie uncanniness underlying daily routines in a sanatorium high atop the Swiss Alps in Thomas Mann’s literary classic The Magic Mountain. Its protagonist Hans comes to visit a relative and, his own health failing with a lung ailment, ends up staying for many years. As the residents cocoon, feverish, from looming mortality, time and a sense of reality bend, and an outside world lurching toward war recedes. When the book came out in 1924, the locals of the resort town were less than happy about it, we hear an art museum guide explain to visitors in Davos. They were tired of being known as a retreat for ill people, and publicity around the novel only reinforced that image. The documentary by Vienna-based filmmaking duo Daniel Hoesl and Julia Niemann has its world premiere in #Visions du Reel#, a Swiss festival forced online by the world’s current lung disease crisis.
A century on from Mann’s novel, the town of #Davos now has a new claim to fame. A popular ski resort, it is also the annual host venue of the #World Economic Forum#, a meeting place for the most influential of global leaders and business elites. But who gets to define the essence of a place — those who can import an event and attract the most media fanfare through money and power, or those who subsist there year-round? And is Davos really, as the WEF’s organisers would have it, where the globe’s good work gets done and its newest wars averted, or is it still in its way an out-of-touch bubble of creeping malady, where something’s not quite right?
A forum?
It’s instructive to watch Davos in counterpoint to The Forum, Marcus Vetter’s Swiss-German take on the World Economic Forum, which opened #DOK Leipzig# in 2019, to reflect on just how different two documentaries inspired by the same phenomenon can be. To some extent that has been determined by access. The WEF sessions are invitation-only, their attendance strictly controlled to satisfy security, discretion, and an air of exclusivity. Vetter’s was the first independent film team permitted behind the scenes in the event’s fifty-year history, and watching his film you would think that the Forum is Davos. It presents as nothing more than a picturesque backdrop for the event, a whirlwind bustle of flashbulbs and big names shown with such breathless, high-stakes gravitas it is hard to imagine an off-season reversion to more peaceful moments. The Forum is not simply a glossy promotional vehicle for the WEF — it questions whether its model of spoken #diplomacy through civil niceties is out of date and complicit in shoring up a status quo of global power abuses — but, as it shadows founder and chairman #Klaus Schwab# and interviews those with a vested, participatory stake in the event, trying to jam in as much of the frenzy of touted significant moments as possible, its deference to Schwab’s vision and a sense of wary debt to the access given is apparent.
who gets to define the essence of a place…?
By contrast, the exclusion (we can assume) of the Davos crew from the more closed quarters of power-brokering was perhaps a creative blessing. There is room to breathe and contemplate, in this film, as we are taken into spaces of the village that do not exist solely to give shape to the Forum. On a cattle farm, a calf is still-born. The milking is done; members of the family who run the place rue the tough economic times. Asylum seekers meet at a centre. Undocumented, their welcome is insecure, at the opposite end to the world’s most exclusive guest list of influencers. Tension over the presence of the Forum bristles in many quarters. A member of a Portuguese fishing club voices his reluctance to eat trout from the lake, given the «piss and puke» from Davos attendees ends up in there. Activists gather to prepare outright protests. «Asshole meets shithole» sums up one sign on Trump’s inclusion. At a town meeting to confirm WEF’s required security budget, a long-term resident says he has come to increasingly doubt over the decades that the cost-benefit ratio of playing host is worth it for Davos, as it’s made the seat of the forging of harmful, secret arrangements. A glimpse into WEF happenings is also afforded us. Schwab pussyfoots around a reporter’s questions on Trump and delegate representation, saying he has to «remain diplomatic». Young climate activist #Greta Thunberg# has claimed the people who’ve flown in to attend Davos are «weird,» says a news anchor. «A Day in the Life of a Refugee,» an interactive theatre simulation, subjects participants to border-crossing humiliations, so that they may more imaginatively identify with those who bear the brunt of power-broking. Will they take a new empathy away with them, or simply a reinforced complacency, confirming Davos’s outsourcing as a resort for the corrupt and ailing of spirit, pedaling false worthiness?
