Journeys from Berlin/1971

In “Journeys from Berlin/1971” there are five characters: a man, woman, and adolescent girl who “appear” only on the sound track; a female psychoanalytic patient in her early 50s; and a therapist, or analyst, played alternately by a man, woman, and nine-year-old boy. The speech of the analytic session is synchronous with the image. The voice-over of the other three people bears a constantly shifting relationship to a recurrent gamut of images: views from a moving train window and from various apartment windows in Berlin, London, and New York; tracking shots scanning a mantlepiece cluttered with objects; aerial views of Stonehenge and the Berlin Wall; and a sequence of highly formalized editing that deals with a man and woman walking in an outdoor urban space. The patient reminisces, falls asleep, harangues the analyst, complains, and finally gets around to examining her own suicide attempt in Berlin in 1971. The man and woman of the soundtrack prepare dinner and read to each other from the writings of various revolutionaries. The inevitable comparisons are made – and rejected – between 19th-century Russian and contemporary German acts of political violence. Interwoven with these voices is the adolescent girl reading from a (her?) diary, kept during the 1950s. The subject matter of the film is pursued and elaborated in parallel – sometimes contingent, sometimes contrasting – investigations of political violence/suicide; self-determination/the power of the State; psychological introspection/political engagement; self knowledge/altruism; and American/European relations to these matters. The film utilizes formal strategies that gained prominence in 1960’s art and dancemaking, namely the inherent expressiveness of quotidian gesture and imagery, and the relativity of meaning resulting from “radical,” random, or ambiguous juxtapositions.