Berlin Wall: Vertical Horizon (Die Mauer – der Vertikale Horizont)

The wall and what it symbolized stood out as a negative horizon throughout my entire life, which began in
1956 in Berlin, five years before the construction of the wall. Only one week after the wall came down, its disappearance was already foreseeable. I set out with a camera one last time to film continuously along the wall on November 17th 1989. The two-and-a-half hour route begins at the river Spree in Kreuzberg, follows the painted wall along deserted streets to Checkpoint Charlie,around Potsdamer Platz up to the Brandenburg Gate, ending after seven kilometers behind a desolate Reichstag with a view across the Spree, where the new government buildings now stand. During a quarter of a century, I set out many times on the path along the trace, which the wall had left through Berlin’s city center. When Christo and Jeanne-Claude wrapped the Reichstag in polypropylene fabric, to the first Love Parade moving through the Brandenburg Gate, to the anniversary of German reunification.The film epically profiles the Berlin Wall in its physical immenseness and emotional presence in the everyday life of a city – and also the impact of its disappearance on the city: a visual long-term observation of German reunification. After 25 years, the scar left in the cityscape by the wall has almost healed. Life grew at breathtaking speed on both sides, over the death strip which was no man’s land. The project is a memorial to this process. (Rotraut Pape)

Rotraut Pape, D 1989-2014, 15-channel split-screen projection, 131 min
(cinema premiere with live commentary by Rotraut Pape)
Gast/ guest: Rotraut Pape
WATCH SOME CLIPS: HERE.