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.