Entry Eight: Week X

our student movie screening the other night made all the hard work of making a film so worth it. I was deeply impressed with the outcome and blown away by the filmmaking skills we presumably “didn’t have.” I thought Four Stories in Berlin (Josh T., Joel, Ed, Cynthia) was such an excellent way of juxtaposing and intertwining different explorations of Berlin. I felt together as a group, they totally covered the bases on how you could experience this city and then say something meaningful about it. each vignette was personal, well thought out, and thoroughly entertaining. I especially liked Josh’s take on memory and Jewishness. by introducing the strong image of fences in regard to memory and cultural heritage, Berlin came to mean something completely new to me. it is a city of fences and walls, just as any place is, but coming from the group that focused a lot on mobility and motion through the city, realizing its barriers and obstacles that still do exist was very poignant. I also enjoyed joel’s complex and beautiful aesthetic story of berlin. the use of a musical composition’s structure (the sonata) as the action of his film piece was a super cool idea and made me see the city less as a place of “urban fervor” and more as an intimate place of beauty, peace and mystery. having each story connected by the u-bahn was a superb way to relate, contrast, and intertwine each person’s experience. the film that was never made (Kelly, Sean, Josh H., Jung) followed a similar structure with four different stories but united around the theme of never being made or never being realized. I thought the introspective, self-reflexive perspective this group took was very indicative of how our generation of creators will deal and are dealing with the world before us. this film made me really feel a part of something for some reason; maybe because I related to their explorations of creating (and not creating) or could identify with their ruminations about fitting in with berlin. in any case, I thought it was very smart how each segment made an individual place out of a giant city. I could see how each one of the stories fit and why it meant something to that person. I also thought it was an interesting way to go about a film as more of a “reaction” to something (i.e., falling short of fruition?) rather than a traditional retelling of an experience. the ping pong film (Jesse, Jessica, Nathan, Jon) turned out to be one of the most successful approaches to capturing berlin. I was really glad to see that this group was unafraid of immersing themselves into the underground culture of ping pong and in turn, learning about berlin by becoming a part of it. looking at my group’s film specifically, we were all driven by the idea of being outsiders, tourists and visitors and that is where we found our story. where we chose to identify ourselves as outsiders, this group did an excellent job at becoming “insiders” and shaking off maybe an overly paranoid fear of being touristy. I loved, love, loved seeing the work of my peers and wish it happened more in academic settings. and I have to say, with all the anticipation and anxiety and insane work that led up to our final screening, it was maybe one of the best nights of my life and unbelievably better than senior prom.

Entry Seven: Week IX

i am going to say this with the intention of trying not to make excuses: my critical thinking skills are seriously stunted. with that non-excuse out of the way, let’s talk about Goodbye Lenin, a divided city, nostalgia, and idealistic notions of the past. first of all, I would like to point out that as a “Berlin film,” Goodbye Lenin does a remarkable job of avoiding the commodification of Berlin’s rather rocky history, and addresses the past in a non-accusatory, yet insightful way (at least from an outsider’s perspective). i am not suggesting that ALL the films we watched before Goodbye Lenin commodified the city’s history, but i feel as though this particular film gave a better idea of the different perspectives that exist about Berlin. for me, Goodbye Lenin is about idealism; an idealistic world, an ideal childhood, an idyllic future and past. both Alex and his mother possess different intrinsic beliefs and thus hold their own, sometimes conflicting ideals about the world. Alex, in some light, is a bit of a revolutionary. he seeks change, represents youth and newness, and is receptive to adopting new beliefs. and still, he meanders rather romantically through the ideal East Berlin fantasy he creates for his ailing mother, obsessing over the loss of that part of his life and recreating it in a nostalgic way. living in berlin in 2007, it is crystal clear that the faux-DDR paraphernalia on every street corner in mitte is a popular way to address the city’s communist past and in turn, commodify history. marketed nostalgia of the East (or ostalgia) does little to nothing in terms of giving outsiders or tourists (and maybe even Berliners) any perspective on what a city divided by communism was like. is that even the purpose or responsibility of marketed nostalgia, to enlighten? i would not think so because it goes without saying that anything “East” in Berlin is treated as kitsch and usually void of its own historical implications. getting back to my point about the movie, this is why Alex in is such an excellent example of a new, successful perspective of Berlin that failed to surface in other films we watched. through this character Alex, we see someone who has sought a “Western” existence, acclimated as an East Berliner, and still looks back on his childhood in East Berlin with a certain amount of nostalgia. his jolly, nostalgic fabrication of a still existing East Berlin touches on the kitsch (i.e., Spreewald pickles) and yet positively engages with Berlin’s past; Alex denies the tendency to commodify his experience of East Berlin by remembering himself growing up as an “Ossie.” where Alex might idealize the West and what it offers, I believe he remembers, even celebrates, the East in a way that the West could never be celebrated. Alex’s mother very much idealizes the East in a way that does more in the way of revealing its historical relevance as an alternative to Western capitalism and not simply as a boyhood dream. her idyllic vision of the city does not come through as kitsch, but as a time full of potential – which i feel is a rather rare perspective on Communist Berlin. together, Alex and his mother embrace history by actually uncovering the past where most other Berlin films tell history or tell the past. ultimately, Goodbye Lenin pokes fun at the complexity of division without being condemning and avoids getting “touristy” about the part of history with which it is engaged.