Cycling the Frame (1988) and The Invisible Frame (2009), dir. Cynthia Beatt
Cynthia Beatt’s two documentary films Cycling the Frame (1988) and The Invisible Frame (2009), premiered in Berlin during the celebrations of the Twentieth Anniversary of the Fall of the Wall, in November 2009, and were released together on one DVD in 2010. Both films can be contextualized among other Wall- and reunification films that engage with the many transformation in the city topography, such as After the Fall (dir. Eric Black, Frauke Sandig, 2000), Berlin Babylon (dir. Hubertus Siegert, 2001), and Berlin: Sinfonie einer Groβstadt (dir. Thomas Schadt, 2002). In the same vein as Brian Ladd, the author of the much-quoted Ghosts of Berlin (1998), does in the documentary After the Fall, Beatt’s protagonist Tilda Swinton moves first through the divided and later through the reunited city on bicycle, seeking out the physical and emotional remains of the Wall.
In Cynthia Beatt’s first film from 1988, the year before the Berlin Wall fell, we watch Tilda Swinton climb up on several viewing platforms along the stretch of the Wall and looking over into the East, contemplating watchtowers and border guards, and waving at them as she rides past them. By the time Beatt and Swinton teamed up for their second film and bike ride together, the Wall had completely vanished and its conceptual re-tracing and re-imagining became the premise of the second film. In his work on Berlin, Brian Ladd observes that “The desire to forget the past can manifest itself in an effort to destroy its traces.” This fear of forgetting, as well as of the erasure of history (“sweeping under a trap door”) is also evident in Beatt’s second film, as Swinton tries to retrace the path of the Wall.
Cycling the Frame (1988, 27min) opens with Cynthia Beatt’s camera following Tilda Swinton’s bike going towards the Brandenburg Gate (from Tiergarten) and we see the Wall in front of it. She turns left (towards the Reichtag) and bikes along the Spree, passing some tourists along the path. Along the way, she also passes different zone demarcations, such as “Fin de Secteur Français” and “Achtung! Zonengrenze verläuft in der Mitte des Flieβes” (Warning! The zone border runs through the river.) She climbs up the viewing platform, overlooking the city on the other side of the Wall. We can see buildings and cars of East-Berlin. She climbs up another viewing platform, overlooking the no-man’s-land in-between the walls and buildings. The border guards are opening the gates for a military truck to pass. The juxtaposition of this border-guarding routine with the urban setting, as well as with nature is startling. She stops by a lake to feed the fish, and says she wants to swim and ride her bicycle right into the lake. Of course at the time, it was impossible to swim in those lakes along the border lines, the GDR border guards were instructed to open fire on anyone who would come close to the Wall.
As Peter Schneider reminds us in his Wall-novel,
"The border between the two German states, especially between the two halves of Berlin, is said to be the best guarded and the most difficult to trespass border in the world. The border ring around West-Berlin is 165km long, consisting of cement plates that run 106km, and metal-cast fences that run 55.1km. Along the border ring, there are 260 watchtowers, where twice as many border guards hold watch day and night" (Schneider 48).
As Peter Schneider reminds us in his Wall-novel,
"The border between the two German states, especially between the two halves of Berlin, is said to be the best guarded and the most difficult to trespass border in the world. The border ring around West-Berlin is 165km long, consisting of cement plates that run 106km, and metal-cast fences that run 55.1km. Along the border ring, there are 260 watchtowers, where twice as many border guards hold watch day and night" (Schneider 48).
We hear Tilda Swinton’s voice-over narration: “I’m a train which goes along walls. I’m a wall-train.” She finds train tracks that are cut off by the Wall and the death strip. A sign post in the middle of the tracks reads: “Fin de Secteur Français. Danger. End of French Sector. Gefahr.” This abandonment of the original function of the industrial progress in the name of border division is also presented as a bizarre image. The signified “danger” is not in crossing the train tracks as originally expected, but in the very absence of the train, in its ideological impossibility. The image of train-tracks going to no-where is similar to that romanticized by Peter Schneider in In Berlin. It was very common in divided Berlin for train track to be interrupted, disjointed, or altogether abandoned because of the Wall. In the first film, Swinton positions herself as a train that goes along walls, rather than though them. She says: “It’s strange the way it is sort of a quiet place, and the train used to go through here, and now it’s just redundant. Looking, it’s like the tracks are looking over the Wall. Really sad. Disjointed.”
Swinton takes a Palaroid photo of the Wall and the watchtower behind it. She contemplates: “I wonder if border guards get that sort of illness that computer scientists get, when their eyes go funny. I wonder if border guards when they go home they have to look at their families through binoculars. I wonder how much they can see.” All these signified binoculars and lenses, ways of seeing and questions of perception present a world in which general perception has obviously been skewed (by ideology). She takes a ferry boat at Kladow bridge. On the boat she contemplates: “What if the Wall goes on and on forever? What if it just fell down? Trees do. And they’re stronger. I wish they’d built a wall out of trees. At least it would still be alive.” At Griebnitzsee we see the sign that reads: “The border lies in the middle of the lake. Grenzverlauf in Seemitte” Overlooking the houses on the other side of the lake, Swinton comments: “People living there cannot go swimming. What must it be like on a hot summer’s day to look at that cool, inviting water?”
She stops in front of a metal gate in the Wall, and comments: “All those people in need to make a statement on the Wall. Or on the pavements by the Wall.” She looks under the metal gate into the no-man’s-land. The writing on the pavement in front of the gate reads: “Tor zur Hölle” (gate to hell); the graffiti on the gate includes a swastika and “Fuck.”
She comes to the Gropius Bau (we see broken windows, the façade is damaged) and the Wall runs right outside the main entrance. She rides along the Wall next to the Topography of Terror (the site of the former Gestapo jail cells). Stops to read a note on the Wall: “Berlin wird Mauerfrei” (Berlin will be wall-less). Standing on the porch of Gropius Bau, next to the Wall, she says “This is completely mad, this place.” A sign on the fence at the Topography of Terror reads: “Warnung! Das Betreten dieses Gebietes und des Seitenstreifens ist wegen Munitionsablagerungen aus dem 2. Weltkrieg lebensgefährlich“ (Attention! Entering of the area is forbidden because of the life-threatening WWII weapons depositions!) Swinton responds to that with: “Stupid fools!”
In the closing scene of the film, she comes back to the Brandenburg Gate. She stands in front of the Wall and contemplates: “What am I going to do? I am alright. I am really ok. Everything will be alright. Everything will come out in the wash. Everything will be as it should be, and that is it. Finito.”
The repeated act of cycling along the traces of the Berlin Wall calls to mind both Andreas Huyssen’s much-quoted metaphor for Berlin as palimpsest – a surface containing all the historical layers of its many erased and reconstructed and retold pasts – as well as the three repeated sequences of Lola’s run across Berlin, each time learning something new that helps her advance the narrative and come closer to her goal. What do these repetitions, this cycling, and spinning signify?
The Invisible Frame (2009, 60min) starts with the same opening shot of Tilda Swinton biking through the Tiergarten towards the Brandenburg Gate in June 2009. Along the side of the road, more tour busses are parked, and there is visibly more traffic. Cars are parked in the middle section of the road. The Brandenburg Gate is open’ it is no longer obstructed by the Wall. She comments: “21 Years. What have I learned in 21 years?”
She stops at the Documentation Center and the remaining stretch of the Wall at Bornholmer Strasse, goes up the Docu-center and overlooks the re-constructed no-man’s-land from the viewing platforms at the top of the center. We see info posters showing the church being blown up in the middle of no-man’s-land. Tilda comments: “I want to know what the Wall was like from the other side.” We see bikers passing over Wall demarcation on the pavement: “They’re building another wall somewhere else now,” Tilda remarks. She bikes through Mauerpark. She stops at the pedestrian bridge, Schwedter Steg (from Solo Sunny and Sommer vorm Balkon). On her way through Prenzlauer Berg, she rides past buildings under scaffolding at (Norwegerstrasse and Islandische Strasse). Gentrification is sweeping through the city core. She bikes into a factory – we see buildings along the former death strip are being utilized again. She bikes past streets with street names like: Einheit, Kuckucksruf, Freiheit (Unity, Cuckoo’s Calling, Freedom).
She stops to go into one of the remaining watchtowers somewhere on the outskirts of the city. She sits down on a dock by the river with the book Alone in Berlin by Hans Fallada, and she has a postcard of a watchtower and the death strip. She contemplates:
All these odds and end, these bits of walls, watchtowers, binoculars, uniforms and photographs, they are like the archaeological remains of some long, long, long dead civilization. Sort of pre-13. Hundred. Sort of Byzantine. So far, pre-historic, that there is no way of understanding how it all worked. But it was 20 years ago! Where is it all? Where are the people, the men in these watchtowers? Why must we guess everything? It’s all underground, it’s a like a trap door that was just shut, and a carpet has been rolled over it. Vanished underneath it, acres and acres of shame, unwritten history. Such a bad idea. Everything will come out in the wash. […] This Wall, this ex-Wall, this manifestation of the ghost Wall. It was here. It felt so much more invisible than it is now. It has my attention in a way that it never did before. One can really taste the brutality of it all, in the way it was built up, because one sees that what divided was just space, just land, just streets, and just people, families, and communities, and a nation. And brutality was submerged before, ameliorated and translated into some kind of stoic acceptance.
All these odds and end, these bits of walls, watchtowers, binoculars, uniforms and photographs, they are like the archaeological remains of some long, long, long dead civilization. Sort of pre-13. Hundred. Sort of Byzantine. So far, pre-historic, that there is no way of understanding how it all worked. But it was 20 years ago! Where is it all? Where are the people, the men in these watchtowers? Why must we guess everything? It’s all underground, it’s a like a trap door that was just shut, and a carpet has been rolled over it. Vanished underneath it, acres and acres of shame, unwritten history. Such a bad idea. Everything will come out in the wash. […] This Wall, this ex-Wall, this manifestation of the ghost Wall. It was here. It felt so much more invisible than it is now. It has my attention in a way that it never did before. One can really taste the brutality of it all, in the way it was built up, because one sees that what divided was just space, just land, just streets, and just people, families, and communities, and a nation. And brutality was submerged before, ameliorated and translated into some kind of stoic acceptance.
She climbs up a viewing platform in a field with nothing to view. Much like the abandoned train tracks in the earlier film, the original function of some structures has disappeared. She passes memorial sites along the Wall-path: a stone plaque reads: “Den Opfern 1961-1989” (To the victims of 1961-1989).
At Havelland Radweg, she sits on a bench next to an arrow sign that points to the right of the path and reads: “Ein weites Feld” (A Wide Field – which is also the title of Günter Grass’ post-reunification novel from 1995, that takes place in Berlin between the Fall of the Wall in 1989 and German Reunification in 1990). On her way she passes many memorials to the victims of the Wall, such as the commemorative plate to 20-year-old Chris Gueffroy (died Feb.5, 1989) – the last DDR refugee to be shot by border guards.
Standing at a crossroad, she holds a map, not knowing which way to go next. “Maps are very fake things. They tell you that time has stopped, and it hasn’t. It’s going on, remaking itself, all the time. […] Where am I now? Am I in the East or in the West? Does it matter? Why does it matter? Because it means a history, a point of view, and it means a perspective.”
Significantly, in the final scene, she ends her trip by biking through the Brandenburg Gate, and walking her bike into the Pariser Platz (which was cut off by the Wall in the first film). She says: “Open doors, open eyes, open ears, open air, open country, open season, open fields, open hearts, open minds, open locks, open borders, open future, open sky, open arms, open Sesame!” The final image of the film I a long shot of Tilda Swinton looking at the Brandenburg Gate, now from the other side.
The special features on the DVD include a segment of “Parallel Scenes – A leaf in time 1988-2009.” Fourteen frames from both films are juxtaposed on a split screen, staring with the opening shot of Swinton biking towards the Brandenburg Gate (biking towards the Wall in the first film, framed on the left side of the screen). In the ninth juxtaposed scene she is hiding from the rain under a bridge on the outskirts of Berlin in the first film, while the bridge is no longer there in the second film – she merely circles her bike on the spot where it used to stand, and only the uneven marks on the pavement indicate that something used to be there. In the eleventh scene, in the first film, she says: “Oh wall, oh wall, of pretty wall. It would be funny if you did fall. And people could over you step, and go about their business,” while looking over the Berlin-Brandenburg landscape on the outskirts of the city. This comment is interesting, considering that we are shown, on several occasions people stepping over and biking over the Wall demarcations on the ground throughout the city. In the juxtaposed frames the past is foreshadowing the present.
The Wall, of course, does fall, only a year after the first film was made, and people do indeed step over it daily to go about their business. In the thirteenth scene, we see the Spree river and the Oberbaumbrücke (half ruined in the first film, and completely restored in the second), a tourist boat is passing under the bridge in the second film, which would have been impossible in the first, since the bridge was not functional and the river marked the border between Friedrichshain (East) and Kreuzberg (West) and thus was off limits to any civilian traffic. In the final, fourteenth scene we return to the Brandenburg Gate. In the first film Swinton stands facing the Wall in front of the Gate and the Gate is inaccessible to her (tourists are seen on top of the viewing platform next to the Gate, looking over the Wall). In the second film, she bikes through the Gate onto Pariser Platz, and turns to look at the gate from the East side which was previously inaccessible to her. The camera briefly freezes both images of Swinton standing with her back to us, next to her bike, gazing up at the Brandenburg Gate (in one frame from the West, in the other frame from the East side of the Gate).
This dual image, reassembled through post-production editing montage, breaks the linearity of time, its limitations, and aesthetically breaks through ideology of narratives. It tells a different story; Sesame is open; the Wall did fall. But on the split screen we see the two images of the Gate exist simultaneously in two dimensions, two ideologies, two geographic directions. It exists both in 1988-2009, and now. By re-constructing the same image twice, the filmmaker makes time explicit to us that. She makes us conscious of our own and the city’s entanglement with history and time. The constructedness of the scene (Tilda Swinton facing away from the camera, holding her bike, and gazing up at the Gate – in both frames) also makes us aware of the repetition, and of the very constructedness of the scene: on the left frame the Gate is closed on the right it is open.
In The Invisible frame, (an engagement and an examination of) nostalgia is in the temporal gap between the two films, in the space between the juxtaposed frames from 1988 and 2009, in the very invisibility of both the frame (Wall) that surrounded West-Berlin and filmic frames of the missing or invisible images of the years between the two films.
The end title reads: “Dedicated to the people of Palestine.”
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