Courtney Stephens and Pacho Velez: "Cinema can provide a record and shape values, and move us and make us more curious, but lived experience is what gets us wisdom"
berlinaleCLAPPER: How did you come up with the idea for this documentary? Was that the idea you bot set out to do from the beginning, or was it conceived as something different that changed along the way?
PACHO VELEZ: It was our shared interest in the Cold War, and how its legacy has shaped present-day politics, that first led to the idea for The American Sector. My last film, The Reagan Show (2017), took a close look at Reagan’s use of public relations during his summits with Mikhail Gorbachev. While working on that film, I spent a month at the Reagan Presidential Library. Every day, I found myself eating my lunch at the library’s picnic table, right beside a panel of the wall. Eavesdropping on the mix of history and mythology, fantasy and memory, that the sight of it provoked, I started wondering: how had this slab of concrete ended up here? How many were there around the country? And, most importantly, what did they mean?
COURTNEY STEPHENS: I live in Los Angeles and, in 2009, had by chance encountered a public performance. A large “wall” made of board had been built across Wilshire Boulevard, one of the city’s major East / West thoroughfares, and citizens were invited to tear it down to mark the November anniversary of the Wall’s fall. I learned years later that the event was the work of the Wende Museum of the Cold War, an idiosyncratic collection focused on the material history of East Germany and the Eastern bloc countries. They have also brought several pieces of the real Wall to Los Angeles. Ten panels of the Wall now reside at 5900 Wilshire, in front of a high-rise that houses the Sundance offices, among other things. Berlin and LA are sister cities - but Los Angeles is often seen as almost ahistorical, while Berlin is seen as deeply historical. These objects too, are both light and heavy.
How did you go about tracing the Berlin Wall panels all over the globe? How long did filming last? How did you select and contact the interviewees for the respective panels, considering they range from children to European immigrants and wealthy Californians?
C: Well we didn’t go beyond America’s borders, we were interested specifically in the Wall’s instantiation here - and in fact, neither Pacho and I had been to German until we premiered the film at the Berlinale in February.
We filmed over the course of about three years, whenever we had time and resources and could meet to do it, as Pacho and I live across the country from each other. It felt like an obscure kind of scavenger hunt - which was really a pretense for various types of encounters.
As far as meeting people, some were people connected to these artifacts in an official capacity - curators or private owners, but we also stopped and had conversations about the Berlin Wall at chili cook-offs, rest stops, with fellow motel guests. The thoughts people shared with us, some of which made it into the film, would have been extraneous to an official Cold War history, but gave nuance to a story that is ultimately about the complexities and contradictions of American society. The Wall was a catalyst for talking about the concerns of Americans today: the Southern border, monuments, economics. Making a film about a thing instead of a person, these free-associations let the object “speak.” It felt as if, despite wild regional variation, we were sewing a single thread through the fabric of the nation. We tried to select, in the final edit, a range of people who help you to realize that the Wall’s impact and meaning is not a stable thing, and is as complex as the makeup of America.
Montage plays an essential role in how the story is told, like a jigsaw puzzle put back together without an evident narrative thread at first. But you had to piece it back together yourselves, first, figure out what comes first, second and so on. At what point, and why, did you decide to tell it that way?
P: Yes, exactly! Since we avoid voice-over and explanatory text in The American Sector, our editing becomes our most powerful tool for conveying our point-of-view. We thought about it like a collage, generating ideas by juxtaposing unexpected images. It was pretty clear from the start that the film would be constructed this way.
We knew that we were mixing elements of a road trip film, historical essay, and a personal documentary. Looking for models, we returned to the work of classic documentarians of America’s Cold War psyche. In particular, McElwee’s Sherman’s March (1985), with its mix of personal events from the director’s life, reflections on the legacy of the Civil War in the South, and fears of nuclear annihilation; Agnes Varda’s Mur Murs (1981), about street murals and the artists who paint them on the East Side of Los Angeles, and Jorgen Leth’s 66 Scenes from America (1982), a quirky, indexical film in which each shot is like a postcard, collected while on a roadtrip down the length of Route 66. Our film also owes a debt to filmmakers like James Benning, and Thom Andersen, whose recent short, Get Out of the Car (2010), was another reference. Most of these films are essayistic - structured around ideas and locations rather than dramatic narratives - and we went into our project knowing that we would need to figure out how to edit the different scenes and encounters so that the film’s ideas build upon each other, generating forward motion for the audience.
Screening your film at the Berlinale must have held a special significance for Berliners. What was their response to your documentary? Have you screened it to an American audience?
C: Yes, very much so. Ground zero for the wall - what could be more thrilling? And also to start a conversation about walls and borders in the lead up to the American election. Unfortunately, as you can imagine, the pandemic has halted festivals and things are still up in the air. We haven’t premiered the film in America yet, no. We’re looking forward to doing so!
To be honest, there were a lot of despairing moments along the way, where it seemed like a crazy thing to do, chasing around cement slabs. But it also felt important because we had something to say about how the legacy of the Cold War and how it still shapes American perspectives. Recent invocation of the word “freedom” around social distancing is case in point.
Around the final minutes of the film, there is a reference to a specific wall a certain president wants to build on the southern border of the United States. There is a well-known aphorism that states, “Those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it”. Was that something on your mind when you conceived your film?
P: We started making the film right around Trump’s election, and while it’s not ever explicitly referenced in our film, Trump’s fascination with building a wall along the Mexican border is part of the film’s larger context, for sure. But I see the same dynamics at work in ostensibly “progressive” neighborhoods that organize against the construction of affordable housing as well. People love the pursuit of freedom in the abstract, just not always in their backyards.
What role do you think documentaries – and cinema, in general – can accomplish in building, preserving or even transforming historical memory? Do you think that role should change or be expanded somehow?
C: It’s a big question and I’m not sure if we’re the ones to say. I think cinema and certainly media in general plays a roll in how people envision their own biographies, and what world-historical moments mean - like the Berlin Wall coming down, for example. Cinema can provide a record and shape values, and move us and make us more curious, but lived experience is what gets us wisdom I think.
Was there anything that you had to leave out of the final cut, or anything you wanted to expand upon but couldn’t? Perhaps something for another documentary?
P: There were a couple of roadside attractions that had no place in the film, but drew our attention - a place called Carhenge in Alliance, Nebraska. It is what it sounds like, a replica of Stonehenge built out of old cars. We’re interested in going back there. And there was also an old salt mine in Hutchinson, Kansas. It’s so big that they host underground bicycle races, and it’s also used as the storage site for the original negative of The Wizard of Oz. It felt like a resonant site for . . . something.
Your film premiered at Berlinale, and as we have seen at SXSW being cancelled due to COVID-19 multiple filmmakers have struggled to gain significant traction, how integral is the festival run in the independent circuit, and was a plan in place if Berlinale was cancelled?
C: It’s strange to say now but it didn’t feel, leading up to Berlin, like any of these cancellations were probable or even possible. Within a week of our return things were shifting very rapidly, so we didn’t have a backup plan, no. It definitely felt like the momentum halted, and we’ll have to see how it goes from here. It’s disappointing but the non-fiction of real life is so urgent at this moment that what can one say? What is the relative importance of anything, reality seems to be asking.
Making a film about the meaning and impact of a wall feels all too timely in this current pollical climate, do you see many parallels with the Berlin wall and Trump’s wall?
P: More than Trump’s border wall, right now, in the middle of COVID crisis, I think that the Berlin Wall is a good mirror for reflecting upon what Americans want from their government. At what point is the political class so out-of-sync with its citizens that society reaches an inflection point? . . . That’s what’s on my mind these days.
Do you both have anything on the cards in regards to upcoming projects you can talk about?
P: I’m making a new documentary about looking for love online in New York City. We had to stop production because of COVID, but hopefully, we’ll get back to it soon.
C: I just finished a short film about piano tuning, and am working on adapting the writings of Lucretius.
THE AMERICAN SECTOR premiered at the 70th Berlinale and is currently awaiting distribution. Read CLAPPER’s review here