Andrew J. Webber (Cambridge) p.5-23
2006 Issue 1
Abstract
This essay takes as its focus the treatment of space in Berlin films since the Wende, asking how this city, so freighted with historical meaning and yet also, at key temporal and spatial points, vacated of its historical fabric, is figured after unification. The focus of the essay will be on key topographic structures, hinging or blocking the relationship between the inside and outside of urban experience: walls, doors, and windows. Through readings of the representation of these features as framing devices in several films of divergent styles (Klier’s Ostkreuz; Roehler’s Die Unberührbare; Haußmann’s Sonnenallee; Becker’s Das Leben ist eine Baustelle; Ataman’s Lola und Bilidikid; Tykwer’s Lola rennt), I will show the special ambivalence attached to the negotiation of both interior and exterior space in the filmic representation of Berlin. What emerges after the historical ‘turn’ is a cinema apparently divided between entrenchment or return on the one hand and a turn towards new freedom of movement on the other. Whatever their surface mood and character, however, each of these films in fact articulates an ambiguous, intermeshed relation between these two modes, and the architectural framing features provide a focus for that double-bind.