Berlin Babylon (dir. Hubertus Siegert, 2001)
"I have a pretty thorough knowledge of history, but never, to my recollection,
has it produced such madness in such gigantic proportions. All values were changed,
and not only material ones: the laws of the State were flouted, no tradition,
no moral code was respected, Berlin was transformed into the Babylon of the world.
Bars, amusements parks, honky-tonks sprang up like mushrooms.
What we had seen in Austria proved to be just a mild and shy prologue to this witches' sabbath:
for the Germans introduced all their vehemence and methodical organization into the perversion."
(Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964, p.313)
has it produced such madness in such gigantic proportions. All values were changed,
and not only material ones: the laws of the State were flouted, no tradition,
no moral code was respected, Berlin was transformed into the Babylon of the world.
Bars, amusements parks, honky-tonks sprang up like mushrooms.
What we had seen in Austria proved to be just a mild and shy prologue to this witches' sabbath:
for the Germans introduced all their vehemence and methodical organization into the perversion."
(Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964, p.313)
Berlin Babylon (2001) opens with a dark, industrial background, with drops of water running down onto industrial steel and metal, and a prologue retelling the story of the construction of the Tower of Babel, followed by a helicopter areal shot of Berlin around Alexanderplatz (re-created in High Definition by Michael Ballhaus and Ciro Cappellari’s 2009 In Berlin), and set to the alternative, industrial soundtrack of Einstürzende Neubauten.
The film is a collage of areal views and zoomscapes (shot from moving streetcars and the S-Bahn) of major construction sites at Potsdamer Platz, Reichstag, the government buildings at Spreebogen and the Hauptbahnhof, the area around Alexanderplatz, Karl-Marx-Allee, as well as most main streets in Mitte.
These images are combined with close-ups of industrial building materials, insides of dilapidated or abandoned buildings and courtyards in Mitte, Brandmauern (windowless walls that separated rows of urban apartment buildings, and were fire-proof to prevent the spread of apartment fires), voids, fences, cranes, scaffolding, and graffiti-covered facades.
Intercut are observational documentary scenes featuring architects, urban planners, real-estate developers and Senate politicians discussing their vision for what the New Berlin should look like. We are shown star architects Helmut Jahn, Renzo Piano, I.M. Pei at a ceremonial gatherings commemorating the different stages of completion of the Sony Center, the Daimler Building, the new addition to the German Historical Museum, followed by the pouring of cement on the roof of the new Foreign Ministry.
In tune with the soundtrack, the film also shows the demolition of “Neubauten” (new high-rises) which are no longer new. The soundtrack conveys the sound of the 1990s, industrial, experimental, at times atonal and unsettling. The music is also contrasted with actual construction sounds and gaps of silence in the remaining voids.
As Jonathan Kahana pointed out in his study of documentaries,
Sounds are not perceived, as Christian Metz pointed out, the same way that images are. We always know exactly in what direction we are looking: images have a clear location (the screen) and source (the thing in the world that the image resembles). But it is never quite as clear where a sound is coming from or what produces it. The aural object loosens the bonds between the subject and what it perceives, suspending, as Metz says, the “adverse spectacle” of subject and object (Kahana, 148).
Sounds are not perceived, as Christian Metz pointed out, the same way that images are. We always know exactly in what direction we are looking: images have a clear location (the screen) and source (the thing in the world that the image resembles). But it is never quite as clear where a sound is coming from or what produces it. The aural object loosens the bonds between the subject and what it perceives, suspending, as Metz says, the “adverse spectacle” of subject and object (Kahana, 148).
The disembodiment of the industrial sounds and the silences of the voids conveys the disorientation of Berlin as Baustelle (construction site) – a physical reality that also became a cultural and commercial trope representing Berlin of the 1990s in films such as Das Leben ist eine Baustelle (dir. Wolfgang Becker, 1997). This very disembodiment (of image and sound, of the completed and branded Schaustelle and the ongoing Baustelle, and even of the city’s history and its new, re-gentrified image) has marked Berlin since reunification as unique, and is the essence of manufactured nostalgia. What we are witnessing in contemporary Berlin films and culture is a gradual patching-up of this disembodiment, a filling-in of the emptiness and voids, and at the same time a nostalgic engagement with a branded and mediated version of the whole.
The film’s slow pacing, long static shots, and silent close-ups of the construction and architecture in various states of decay and renovation is presented as a way of visualizing the temporal instability between past and present. Siegert uses archival footage – of people climbing over the Wall at Brandenburg Gate in November 1989, the bombing in WWII, areal footage of the ruins, and footage of the demolition of buildings after the war (the old Reichstag dome, Lehrter Bahnhof, Anhalter Bahnhof) – to ground his construction footage in historical continuity, and to give his narrative a historical dimension.
The film spans several years in the history of construction sites in Berlin’s center (we see Potsdamer Platz at several stages of completion [3 weeks later, 3 months later, 2 years later], including the completion ceremony and fireworks).
Siegert provided a historical context to his almost abstract industrial images and sounds, using zoomed-in close-ups on the construction sites and juxtaposing them with a bird-eye perspective (helicopter shots) of the city-scape and a historical narrative dimension of the city, thus precisely illuminating a present moment in time and capturing it on film. This record of Berlin "in the 90th years of the 20th century" as the title in the beginning of the film states, is an important document that grounds many other Berlin documentaries.
Siegert uses references to Babylon, the Tower of Babel, and Benjamin’s Angel of History (“das Zerschlagene zusammenfügen”), narrated by none other than actress Angela Winkler (who also returns as a protagonist of In Berlin), for the same purpose.
This “fear of emptiness” (Siegert) and building restlessness marked Berlin of the 1990s, and Siegert managed to capture it on film. His efforts to (convey the) “experience (of) the city before the construction is complete and Berlin is finished and polished,” is an example of nostalgia projected onto the future (that Svetlana Boym wrote about in 2004). And this future is now. He knew that the construction will one day be complete, and gentrification will transform the city topography and in many ways its identity.
One of the later scenes in the film shows the dancing bodies around the Victory Column during Love Parade - a rare example of the vibrant sub-cultures of Berlin and the people who populate and animate the city that is being (re)constructed.
The last shot of the film is the view of the void next to the Brandenburg Gate, where the Holocaust Memorial will later be erected. The film engages with questions of memory and identity, and “conjures up the imagery of a city swept backwards into the future, uneasily aware of the rubble of the past but wanting to escape at speed” (Hubertus Siegert quoted on the DVD cover).
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