The Art of Overcoming the Wall: Cinematic Reflections on the Berlin Border

Abstract

This dissertation examines the iconography of the Berlin Wall—the West-facing façade of the intra-German border—that materialized in the 1980s through a series of filmic encounters that sought to question, challenge, reframe, and, in some instances, reinforce the visual rhetoric of the geopolitical divide and the Wall as its most prominent and potent symbol. As a study in visual literacy and cinematic (re)mediation of borderscapes, my project explores the Wall’s significance as a concrete barrier, a multimedia image, and a reflective screen for collective projections. Further, I contend that, counter to common postwall era narratives, the demise of the Berlin Wall ushered in a new era marked by a global proliferation of borders and bordering practices on an unprecedented scale. In approaching the Wall as one of the most notorious border fortification systems of the twentieth century, my study focuses on films and other artworks that emerged at critical junctures in Berlin’s history: 1961 as the first provisional barrier was being erected; mid-1980s when the West Berlin Wall was gradually transformed into an open-air gallery and a contested public platform while the divided city prepared to commemorate the 25th anniversary of its erection; the sudden collapse of the border in 1989 and the media frenzy that ensued in its aftermath; finally, the 20th and 30th anniversary of the fall of the Wall, an event that attracted global attention to the (re)unified capital and the Wall’s lingering, ghostly presence. I argue that films produced prior to the destruction of the border like Cynthia Beatt’s Cycling the Frame, Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire, and Ross McElwee’s and Marilyn Levine’s Something to Do with the Wall attempt to counteract the affective aporias and anxieties triggered by the Wall’s unyielding presence by underscoring the agency of the subject and reframing the Wall through cinematic means while alerting their audience to the trappings of mediation and the gaze of the camera. In turn, films released after the Wende like Cynthia Beatt’s follow-up project The Invisible Frame, Jürgen Böttcher’s The Wall, Bartek Konopka’s Rabbit à la Berlin, and Courtney Stephens’ and Pacho Velez’ The American Sector deal with apparitions and after-images of the Wall as part of a memoryscape threatened by collective amnesia, institutional processes of musealization, and more borderscapes. Their documentaries function as expeditions in search of new meanings and new frames that have in the meantime (re)materialized across the city in the form of smaller borders and less conspicuous artificial dividers. The films and artworks discussed in my project confront border politics with border poetics. They question the authority of borders and the limits they impose on civic society by probing and actively contesting their short-lived, transient power on the space of the screen.