City spaces and national identity
2010; Volume: 80; Issue: 80 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2562-2528
Autores Tópico(s)Polish Historical and Cultural Studies
ResumoIn the streets and spaces of Berlin, the past is said to be part of the present. (1) Moreover, to take Andreas Huyssen's argument even further, Berlin's past has been mediated to the global spectator through cinematic representations of its topography. Certain images and scenes remain in our collective cinematic memory: Homer and Cassiel walking through the voids of the no-man's-land around Potsdamer Platz in Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire (1987). Wenders focused on the West-Berlin topography of division due to the fact that he could not obtain the permission of East-German officials to film in East Berlin at the time. Another cinephiliac moment (2) would be Lola running over the re-opened Oberbaumbrucke (the bridge that used to connect East and West Berlin, and which remained non-operational during the years of division) in Tom Tykwer's Run Lola Run (1998) - one of the first cinematic endeavours in reunited Berlin to transgress between East and West. Another well-remembered example would be a computer-generated statue of Lenin, carried by a helicopter above the Karl-Marx-Allee to the astonishment of Christiane Kerner, who missed the German Reunification while lying in a coma, in Wolfgang Becker's Goodbye Lenin! (2003). And finally, the global spectator is well familiar with the image of the former STASI (GDR secret police) officer, Gert Wiesler, delivering advertisement brochures to mailboxes along the post-wall Korl-Morx-Allee in Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's The Lives of Others (2006), the first German film to address the GDR past in a non-satiric form. Through these cinematic narratives, a new, virtual city map can be drawn. Not only do we perceive the streets, buildings and spaces of Berlin in their historical dimension, we can add a fictionalized cinematic dimension which nonetheless communicates the complexity of the city's psyche. But what does it mean to perceive Berlin through a cinematic dimension? We take pleasure in precisely this kind of crossing of fictionalized and historicized topographies because it allows a more fluid narrative and thus a more subjective and immediate engagement with space. Through such identification, we personalize what is otherwise foreign or abstract space. As the aforementioned iconic images enter our cultural memory, (3) they align themselves next to historical images and become a part of our subjective visual culture. Thus, factual history does not exist in a hierarchical relationship with cinematic history. Rather, the two complement each other, as one flows into the other, and they exist as merged streams of dialogues. The individual's engagement with the city, facilitated by multiple perceptions of space, gains more meaning in light of Nicolas Bourriaud's concept of aesthetics, by which he means that artistic practices establish relations between people and the world, by way of aesthetic objects. (4) I would argue that film, much like art, is also capable of facilitating relational engagement with space. In this paper, I am interested in examining what implications this cinematic dimension of Berlin has on contemporary questions of German identity. Recent films set in Berlin and engaging with Berlin topography and history shift the camera focus, perhaps not surprisingly, towards the East. Streets and locations in these films reflect the changes in the city's fabric. So, what do these films say implicitly by locating their narratives in the East, and more specifically around the Karl-Marx-Allee? And how do viewers identity with the spaces portrayed? [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Perhaps one might view this focus on former East Berlin as a wish to examine, capture, and ultimately preserve a portrayal of streets and spaces, like the Karl-Marx-Allee, within the new discourse and landscape of post-reunification. Thus, streets and urban spaces situate the narratives of division and identity. Rather than looking at postmodern interchangeability (5) and fragmentation of urban space in Berlin, I am interested in the ways in which urban space is inscribed with specific cultural and historical meanings, and thus assumes an active role in current identity discourses. …
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