the others

"Goodbye Lenin which, while a good movie, is more about the character's relationship with his mother than it is an accurate portrayal of life in East Germany. Goodbye Lenin seems to reduce the Ossi existence to communist commodification -- to be an Ossi is about what kind of pickles you eat -- whereas Sonnenallee allows its characters to be much more than consumers. In interviews with the makers of Goodbye Lenin, they have mentioned that much of their inspiration for their treatment of East Germans came from TV shows on East Germans...."

orangesitcom, from imdb

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i won't ever watch "the lives of others" and dread that i have to watch "goodbye lenin" again.

i had a talk with eric and questioned him about new german cinema, post-fassbinder. i wanted to ask if there were filmmakers who tried to portray identity which are foreign to themselves in film. as an example fassinder portrays women, he is known to be a woman's film director, unlike bergman who is known to use women to talk about himself. "me boss, you sneakers", would be a great example of the film that i am searching for.

i am searching for an alternative cinema, which tells the stories of immigrants, turkish, women, auslanders, elderly people, outsiders, and etc. i do not want to want another coming of age, romantic, action, comedy, genre film.

some film that i have found, that may be interesting, though some are a bit on the genre side.

Sonnenalle (1999)
Herr Lehmann (2003)
Knockin' on Heaven's Door (1997)
Erleuchtung garantiert
Architekten (1990)
Das Expriment
Eierdiebe (2003)
Agnes und seine Brüder
Montag kommen die Fenster

today i woke up at 6am to go shooting at the glass factory, it was strange being in a abandoned factory all alone, and walking in the pitch black. inside the glass factory, i forget that i am in berlin. it does not help to make me feel safe, that we are but a few blocks away from neo-nazi town. the last time my friend was at the glass factory, he spotted the neo-nazi and gangster, hanging out there. it is strange how this glass factory can be home to so many different people.

i must admit, i was scared.

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i quickly climbed up to the roof on the sixth floor, and tried to shoot the sunrise. the roof was icy and frozen over, so it very slippery, i had to crawl around, and still i had a tendency to slip. i felt a bit unsafe. i spent about an hour on the roof and it was surreal, all alone on top of an abandoned glass factory, as if this is a place i can call my own for this one moment, just this one moment. this must be how the graffit artist, nazis, and gangster feel, a sense of home berlin, where nothing is really owned, always shifting.

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the hour i spent filming the sunrise, most of what had been a waste. the footage was overexposed. having nevered worked with a video camera before i didn't know how to use its functions properly. i turned the shutter speed to the fastest one possible hoping that it capture the sunrise, because that is what i would do for a picture camera. however this still caused overexposure. i talked to some people and they said to fool around with the AE, which functions as the aperture, and to this i was clueless.

this is not the first time i have run into issues filming.

the day before i film in a heavily vegetated area, and it was dark, still 2pm, but dark. because the camera had to focus on so much and there was less light, it seem to blur everything together. the footage is trash. all together i have a few hours of footage but much of it can't use because of my ignorance of how to use the camera.

i can't wait for the editing process.

mirrors

a few weeks ago, i was riding the u-bahn home and in front of me there was a young woman. she was crying. her eyes were red, swollen from the tears and what may have caused it. the young man she was with neglected to comfort her and instead talked away with his buddy. her head leaned against the sideboard while, the young men howled and laughed. i sat and looked away to my left and i saw her reflection on the glass. beyond the glass i saw a two men also laughing and talking. the mirror image of the girl nestled perfectly into one of the man's neck. it made me very happy to look in the mirror and see the girl's image, instead of titling her head away from the source of her pain, in the mirror she leans into comfort. to me, still today, the image of her in the mirror stays with me.

i thought to myself, "this is cinema", this is a mirror, this is my vision, i like it and it makes me happy.

when we went to the camp, i wonder to myself the difference between people being lead there. before it was prisoner, now we are being like on a tour.

i like the rain and wind that day. it gave me a reminder of the conditions for living in the camp. i am glad for the weather.

while walking through the camp, i looked at people watching the camp. many people talked about subjects outside of the camp, like plans and the weather, but not relating it back to the circumstances of the past. it must have been difficult to line up in cold rain, we simply walked to the nearest building like good tourists.

i would have apperciate more time for our cinema and berlin class, because one day is used for screening, we only have one day for discussion and lecture in a week. that is not enough time to do both and class is rushed.

recently i had rethink my appoarch to my film. i do not know enough german to be able to write a poem in german. i have watch some tarkovsky and antonioni films, and have been wondering about cinematic space. why does tarkovsky cinema often get compared to poetry? to create poetry does not mean i have to write words, luckily in the cinema, i can also use images and sound, and so much more.

new german cinema

when i watch the new german cinema of the 90's, i feel nostalgia for fassbinder and his generation. i wonder about what has happen, why has the film industry become so youth oriented? filmmakers like becker and tyker, will eventually make film about themselves and their generation, however where is the older generation? are they not making film anymore? i would like to watch a film about something else rather than coming of age or a romantic comedy drama. or would i have to look towards austria, just like i do for poetry, to rikle and bachmann.

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i don't believe in the myth that berlin is a city without memory, a city of nostalgia.

i can believe that a film like adam's apple will never be made in berlin.

our time in berlin is almost over

when i first went to the memorial for the murder jews of europe i saw a tiny bird. and i followed the small bird, i followed it for about 10-15 minutes. then i realize that i would've liked to film it, so i pulled out my camera and while i was doing so, the bird flew away. i spend the next hour walking around the memorial, not with the mission of looking for the bird, i wanted to walk around more. it was cold. when i finally found the bird, i pulled out my camera and it flew away very fast. it did not fly away into the sky when i was walking with it, only when i pulled out my camera.

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i have a camera but for the first five weeks i refused to take pictures with it. i did not want to pose, take pictures of a past experience, i felt that i would rather experience the time at hand. i rather liked the experience of following the bird and walking with it, when i had the camera i felt rushed and quite unnatural. i like walking slowly.

if my film will be about memory and experience, how will i ever have any footage if i don't film my experiences?

our time in berlin is almost finish.

i have come to greater level apperciation for the complexity of the filmmaking process. now that i have begun to work on a film of my own, i can see how difficult it is to get everything coordinated.

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take for example a typical narrative, most shots are of close-ups or mid-long shots, and they usually have the interaction between two people, not including the cameraman, so that makes a minimal of three people. i have one person. when i shoot myself walking, i cannot have the camera follow me, the image can be stagnate. when we are so attuned to the present day moving following people, it is different to watch still space, still life, and look at a photograph, that is what is not expected in film.

and also the handheld options is not one that warrant, because it is too shaky, it gives me a headache watching such footage, so i won't want to put the same difficulties for my viewers.

i've come to appreciate herzog's fata morgana much more, and many other documentary film makers, now that i realized how much creativity had to be put into creating a solid progression of images and sounds.

at first i wanted to film myself walking through empty space. i like walking. and it has turned out quite differently because the images don't seem to match or have much energy or substance. i think of the scene from "where is my friend's house", where the little boy run up a hill and it crosses zig zag, so it takes him a while to reach the top, yet he is running fast. or i think of the scene where a person will be walking in the distant and as time passes he comes closer and passes by the camera. i like how space can be traveled over time and how it can be displayed through cinema.

however i find it difficult to film such a scene in berlin because we don't have many hills or vast expanses of land, and any of such places are usually filled with people, or illegal to trespass. i also have difficult framing the picture, and have to do many re-take and at many time do not know how the image will turn out, so i have to keep on coming and re-shoting it.