Weeks One and Two

WEEK ONE

After surviving my hectic travels in Frankfurt and Munich I am relieved to finally arrive in Berlin where I have a place to stay for more than a night. But more so I am excited to be back in the city that I loved when I briefly visited it before and the city about which I am going to be learning a great deal and making a film. On our first afternoon in the city we took the U-Bahn to Potsdammerplatz and walked around the Sony center. We then walked towards the Brandenburger Tor and Unter den Linden, stopping at the Holocaust memorial to walk through the vast landscape of stone blocks. As I was refreshing my memory about where certain landmarks in the city are I was also re-discovering how great the city really is and how excited I am to be able to come back and get to know it in much greater detail.

On our first day of class, we watched the film Displaced Person. Initially I felt slightly overwhelmed at the depth of the film and I was not sure what to think about the message that the film was trying to give. For me, the most powerful image in the film was the clip of Hitler approaching the Eiffel Tower with his comrades. The camera follows him as he walks toward the tower, and then he turns around slightly so you can see his facial profile. To me, this image embodies a “displaced person.” I felt that the clips of the women running along the train, frantically waving, where quite haunting. Whether or not they were actually waving to Hitler, the idea that he was the recipient of their affection was clearly conveyed in the context of the film. Overall, I feel that this film is a type of metafiction, as it takes clips from any context and places them together in such a way that collectively they conveys a universal message. The clips may not have all been from the same time, but when they are all put together, in that instant, it does not matter if they were not shot in sequence. I have seen this technique in a few novels but never before in film and I think it makes this film particularly interesting.

Our first class with Thorsten was exciting because I was not sure what to expect or what the specific outcome of the class was. The structure of the class is very interesting, and I think it will be great to learn about certain places and ideas on one day and then to visit these places on another. I feel that we are very fortunate to have Thorsten to be our “guide” to the sites of Jewish Berlin and Holocaust memorial, as he seems so experienced and competent in the subject matter. I look forward to visiting all of the sites, especially Sachsenhausen.

As far as the film project goes, my group met once last week to talk about our initial ideas and goals for the film. Immediately I could see that we all have very distinct ideas but our ideas all blend and mesh well with one another and we are all open to each other’s ideas. Our initial plan was to center the film around different modes of transportation in Berlin and how the city “moves”. I liked this idea because to me, postwar and “postwall” Berlin is all about new movement and connection. Because the city was divided for so long, I think it would be important to reflect on the idea that now people can move from east to west so freely. We wanted to use different modes of transportation, walking, biking, U-Bahn and S-Bahn, to show a kind of progression of movement in postwall Berlin. I am very excited about our ideas and I think we all work well together, but I am concerned about the actual film process. We have all these ideas and concepts but I have no idea how we are going to capture them and present them in a semi-cohesive matter.



WEEK TWO

This week we began on Tuesday with Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a Big City. I really enjoyed the simplicity of the film and the use of montage. I feel that montage is a powerful way of conveying a certain feeling or idea. Most of the montage scenes that I have seen are used to portray a feeling of panic or excitement, but in Ruttmann’s film he uses montage throughout the film to portray several different feelings or moods. I feel that the film captures several different aspects of the city, from the industrial to the leisurely. Although the musical score is not the original music, I feel it complements the film very well. I think that a symphony itself is a good analogy for a city, as it is comprised of several different parts and comes together to function as a whole.

I am glad that we began this week discussing montage because in our group meeting we repeatedly brought up the use of montage in our film to portray certain feelings. I think it would be great to create a montage using several clips of the U-Bahn rushing by, along with other images, to portray the fast-paced and exciting side of Berlin. In all of our discussions about our film we bring up montage as a way of portraying a certain idea or concept.

Wednesday we met at the Jewish Museum for our first class with Thorsten. The class went really well and I feel we had some great discussions. It was interesting to start the discussion by talking about what we as Americans feel ashamed about our country’s past. I agreed with some of the issues brought up and disagreed with others, but I feel it was an interesting approach to begin our discussion on Holocaust memorial in modern-day Berlin. The readings for that day discussed the creation of memorials in Germany and the difference between memorials in the East from the West. In the East, memorials portrayed the suffering of the Jews as a resistance to fascism to promote the communist GDR. The monuments also failed to emphasize the fact that the majority of the victims were Jews, but that they were people of common beliefs that rose up together. These East German monuments took the suffering of the Jews and turned it into a way of disgracing fascism and promoting communism. This idea is very interesting to me, and I feel that taking the suffering of thousands of innocent people in vain is almost as much a crime as those committed by the Nazis. In the West, I got the impression that the government tried to cover up the Nazi past and concentrate on recovering from the war. Some of the buildings began to be used for industrial purposes, one in particular was dismantled for its valuable construction material. The discussion ended with the idea of authenticity and what makes a monument authentic. Can a new building be built and made to look authentic or does it have to be a standing structure from when the actual events took place? Personally, I feel that when discussing monuments and memorials it is important to consider not only authenticity but also feeling. I feel that a monument can be meaningful without being authentic, and of the two, I feel that meaning is more important than authenticity when it comes to monuments. However, some may feel that authenticity is more important, and from the authenticity comes the meaning.

On Friday we had our first workshop. For our short film project, my group chose the acoustic project. I am a little apprehensive about the project and I am not sure what we are going to focus on but I am also excited to see what we can accomplish. As far as our major film project goes, my group changed our film idea quite drastically. We have decided to stick with the different transportation around the city, but use them to portray the various moods of the city. We want to use a cyclical patter, portraying one mood, followed by the others, and then back to the first mood, portraying it in a different way. In this way, we can show that the city has several different moods and that the same aspect of the city can make you feel a certain way when it is in a certain context. For example, taking the U-Bahn can be either very exciting or make you feel incredibly tired and apathetic. I think we have a more organized and focused idea. Now all we have to do is write a screenplay…