BERLINALE 2020 - The American Sector
70th BERLINALE FILM FESTIVAL“I have decided to scalp you,” states Wednesday Addams (Christina Ricci) in an iconic scene of Addams Family Values (1993), as she goes mischievously off-script during the summer camp play for Thanksgiving, the most quintessentially American among American holidays. Taking a left turn from history, she brings up the practice of tearing the human scalps of defeated enemies for their subsequent exhibition as trophies, a brutality long swept under the rug of history in the Land of the Free. The scene may come to mind with delightful irony while watching The American Sector, a documentary about the fragments of the Berlin Wall scattered and displayed in different capacities across the United States.
The very first shot of the film is a close-up of one of such pieces of reinforced concrete. A quick introduction to our inert, dismembered protagonist whose combined fragments ran for nearly one hundred thousand miles along the border between East and West Germany, itself an eventual symbol of the Iron Curtain’s ideological division during the Cold War: the Capitalist West and the Communist East. The Wall becomes a constant presence, a mute carcass-protagonist that doesn’t tell much of a story about its past by itself, but quietly endures the varied and oftentimes vague or recontextualised interpretations of its legacy.
The storytelling of The American Sector, much like the Berlin Wall portions themselves, spreads far and wide throughout the United States in a manner that could almost feel random at first. Without a voice over narration – directors Courtney Stephens and Pacho Velez can be heard asking questions during interviews only a couple of times – the camera travels from luxury hotels in Dallas to Washington’s Newseum and back to a food truck in California through establishing shots that frame these pieces of concrete as either monolithic landmarks or unremarkable chunks of urban landscapes, and everything in between.
As such, the early minutes of the documentary may feel like scrambled pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that, once placed together through the magic of montage, metaphorically rebuilds the Wall to reveal a picture of its historical meanings and contradictions. It does so through the voices of mostly American citizens from diverse backgrounds, as well as some immigrant workers that have encountered these pieces of cement and – so they say – history. Illinois school kids, roaming through Eureka College on a sunny day, tell what they know of the official course of events, complete with a vague stroke of Reaganian heroism. At Microsoft’s headquarters, a piece is displayed along a plaque that describes it as a work of unknown artists (technique: “graffiti on concrete”), a step further in the duchampian ready-made’s chain of appropriation. A private homeowner in Hollywood Hills boasts about the logistics of having his fragment of the Wall shipped from Germany and owning a piece of “the canvas of modern history”.
It’s when The American Sector contrasts these kinds of testimonies against deeper, more analytical and contextualized ones that it gets its point across. The demolition of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany marked the symbolic end of the Cold War, the fall of communism in Europe and the triumph of the Capitalist West, along with its celebrated values of freedom and democracy.
The retrieval of its pieces was, in a way, the scalping of the Eastern Bloc. As an African American interviewee at the University of Virginia (UVA) remarks, such a proud display of victory comes across as hypocritical when, at the time of filming, the campus only acknowledged its past with slavery with a single plaque – minimal recognition in relation to the four fragments of concrete shipped from across the Atlantic (UVA has since built the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers on campus grounds). A sharp contrast to a man that, later on in the documentary, claims the Berlin Wall Memorial in Ohio represents European lives that, just like generations of African Americans, were willing to risk death for any semblance of freedom. “We weren’t alone in being oppressed, nor have we been alone in resisting.”
In the face of such diverse interpretations and meanings – or lack thereof – this collection of interviews is a deviously simplistic formal approach that hides thought-provoking power. What is the significance of “owning” a piece of history, if such a thing is even possible? What’s the point of having it within reach of the nearest museum or street corner? Humanity constantly repeats its mistakes because of its failure to learn from history, according to a popular aphorism. But the passage of time inevitably brings about oblivion to what can only be understood when lived in the flesh. The American Sector is the kind of cinema that can, in a way, delay the unstoppable, hopefully in the form of insightful, empathetic memory instead of a Thanksgiving punchline.