Week 4, and a bit of Week 3.

So as most of you know, I was sick all last week. It was a total bummer. Hopefully I will get to see "A Berlin Romance" one of these days, as I heard it was very good. Needless to say, I did not get any filming done, just alot of CNN-watching. I hope the wildfires are contained by now. This weekend, however, I was very productive--just not regarding school. I was in my first Berlin alleycat bicycle messenger race, did really well, and received LOTS of prizes!! Yeah! This Wednesday, there is another race, the legendary "Helloween" race, in which I will be at a checkpoint making people humiliate themselves for a stamp on their manifests. Enough bikes.
It has been a bit difficult to directly relate the films we have watched these last few weeks (Kuhle Wampe and Germany, Year Zero) to what we have been trying to capture in our film. It seems that the Berlin in these two films is a bygone era; one that is impossible to recapture. I suppose our exposure to these eras cinematically has the potential to inform our work with a sense of historicity. A shot of the subject walking along the street next to an absent building (one whose outlines still exist on the brick but the structure is gone) could evoke a sense of Berlin's berubbled past, for example. Germany, Year Zero seemed incredibly apocalyptic, despite the title's claim otherwise. Any hope of regeneration is dashed with the boy's ultimate suicide, it seems, while the city merely continues on in its desperation behind the rubble. I do not see the Berlin of today, however, to be apocalyptic in any sense. On the contrary, the sheer amount of construction is staggering, and the international appeal for shooting films, traveling, and doing business in this city is high. It is understandable why Berlin would want to move out of its troubled past and simply forget it, but seeing films like Kuhle Wampe and Germany, Year Zero reminds the viewer just how many layers of construction and regeneration this city has undergone through the years, thus effectively conjuring up history, cinematically.
Our group is not attempting to make a film that explicitly comments upon these issues of history, memory, and forgetting. However, merely by way of location, these issues will inevitably be present within the film. If we decide to shoot on Karl-Marx Allee next to the wall, for example, that history will be there, whether or not the film directly comments on its presence. Perhaps in choosing our locations carefully, we will be able to add another layer of potential interpretation, thus geographically specifying our theme of the progressive and necessary mood swings that accompany acclimation to a new city.
On a new note, the reception to our audio film was sehr positive, and people had interesting insights about the film that we had never even addressed in our group. Joel's interpretation was particularly interesting: that the juxtaposition of cattle and people metaphorically joins rather than separates the two. Our project was to juxtapose rural and urban rather than people and cattle, but it is a good sign when the artwork has many potential layers of interpretation, which Joel's commentary certainly evinces.
So we really need to get on the ball about shooting this film. We made a schedule at the beginning and have not stuck to it. We will be having a meeting tonight in which we will (hopefully) solidify a realistic schedule. It has been a bit difficult to employ a certain amount of self discipline regarding socializing and gallavanting around the city on the bike. But the good news is that my german has improved somewhat. I went on a big group ride throughout the city with some messengers the other night, most of whom do not speak english. We eventually barbequed various meats (?) with a disposible grill by the Spree and drank lots of cheap beer. I found that my german language skills (and the elaborate hand gestures that accompany this) greatly improves with beer. Now I know that my tattoo is "der Hammer!" and to avoid the "Kopfstein."