‘You can probably not even bring yourself to say something like that. Even though you maybe should say it, because it’s also part of our lives.'
These lines close the rough cut of Chetna Vora’s Frauen in Berlin. The film was intended as her Abschlussfilm(graduation film) at East Germany’s film school, the Hochschule für Film und Fernsehen (HFF) in 1981. In retrospect, these words look like a prophecy. After reviewing the 139-minute rough cut, the HFF demanded that graduating student Vora shorten her film to approximately half an hour.
A record of the school’s internal review remains lost.[1] Yet the fact alone that there was a 139-minute rough cut compared to the required 30 minutes shows that Vora ‘could not bring herself to it.’ But to what exactly? How the HFF could have accepted the film can be seen in the radically shortened version entitled ANSICHTEN, ANSPRÜCHE – FRAUEN ÜBER SICH SELBST (OPINIONS, EXPECTATIONS – WOMEN ABOUT THEMSELVES), which the HFF ultimately made out of the footage in 1983 and in which merely four of the fifteen women appear.[2] In Vora’s rough cut, however, there are five women protagonists (woman with bright t-shirt in a kitchen, strong woman with four children, dark-haired woman at the window, a Hungarian woman who lives in Berlin, short-haired widow), who provide detailed accounts of marriage, divorce, family, and professions, and ten secondary character who, in part, only make short statements.
The short version frames the interviews with title cards (narration was common, as seen in many other student productions), while Vora had allowed several women to speak more than once throughout the whole film. The short version identifies the women by name, in Vora’s version they remain anonymous. Vora was unable to complete her film, but her Hauptprüfungsfilm (main exam film) Oyoyo of 1980[3] suggests that she would also not have identified her interview subjects by name in a final version and she would not have isolated and patronised their statements with narration.
Vora’s rough cut is made up of two parts. The first can be summed up as ‘women’s experiences in partnerships, family, and professional life.’ It is framed by long shots of a Paternoster. This part, with three women who take turns talking and surrounded by shorter statements from other women, still best corresponds to the HFF’s view of what an interview-based documentary should be. The short version still suggest certain similarities to this part, in that it maintains the three protagonists in the same order, even if very shortened. Without a doubt, the short version therefore robs the women of their emancipatory achievements.[4]
With 90 minutes, the far longer second part could perhaps by summed up as ‘wishes and disillusion.’ More freely and with faster editing, Vora cuts together eleven women and concludes with another long report on (their) experiences. While the women in the first part belong to the same generation and are in their thirties, the second part includes interviews with an approximately twelve year old girl, two women who lived through the Weimar Republic and the Nazi era, and a woman who was in her twenties as the Wall was built. Here, the women’s stories are less frequently told in full, but are therefore more strongly interlocked. There is also striking formal play: One interview is exclusively visual, in one a woman is partly seen wearing a mask, and images from one interview are used as cutaways with the melody of a music box.
The beginning of the second part is surprising, featuring a kind of microstudy of the question of the difference between women’s relationships to women and men and women’s relationships. First, a twelve-year-old girl gives her account, followed by two women in their twenties – they say nothing. Maybe a couple? Here, the time-consuming procedure of hair washing in a kitchen is shown. A bikini-clad woman heats water on the stove and, with the help of several bowls, she washes her hair. And finally, one who is in her 30s, about tense physical contact between (heterosexual?) women.
Asked about happiness and desires, the women describe the boundaries imposed on them by the realities of their private, professional, and social lives. Like the Paternoster part one, Vora and her cinematographer Thomas Plenert also find a strong image for part two: a massive tree trapped between two buildings. One suspects that these images, which imply containment, but also the passage of time and breaking away, may have made the functionaries at the HFF just as uncomfortable as the women’s reflections.
The eighty year old female communist may have been a concrete target.[5] Her impersonal, official, and opportunistic language sets her apart from the other women and makes her their polar opposite. She comes across like an exclamation point to the others’ very free and personal contributions. Whether this was perceived as a provocation – shortly after, the twelve-year-old says, ‘I don’t know what Communism should change so that things becomes different’ – must remain speculation.
Unlike the title FRAUEN IN BERLIN implies, the women are not filmed at notable East Berlin locations, but instead in what appear to be their apartments. The home as the classic site of the woman in bourgeois society hardly corresponds to East Germany’s desire to change social structures. There are only occasional exterior shots of partly identifiable streets. Here too, the women are again placed visually in their home, in interviews on balconies or a zoom from a cityscape filmed through a window to a woman sitting on a windowsill. The women’s apartments offered the possibility of catching a glimpse of their daily life – like when one of their sons comes home in the middle of the interview and a sandwich is made before filming and talking continue.
Chetna Vora is sometimes audible with her questions, especially at cuts, and small dialogues develop with the interview subjects. In the last interview, the roles even briefly reverse and Vora is asked about the subject of wearing make-up in her own culture and for her personally. Maybe we have the rough cut to thank for these interactions between the director and her interview subjects. Would Vora have cleaned up these parts if she had been able to finish her work? In a few spots, it appears impossible when the transition between follow-up questions and answers is so tight that trimming the cuts would have cut off statements.
Silhouettes
Even more than the its incompleteness, the rough cut’s survival on a VHS tape with poor visual quality influences the film’s impact. It was shot on 16mm reversal film.[6] Vora edited[7] the camera original with Petra Heymann.[8] This made her rough cut especially vulnerable when the school demanded Vora make drastic cuts. Since camera original and work print are one here – the same material – any intervention in the rough cut meant the destruction of Vora’s intention. The only way to save her film was by making a copy.[9] This was only possible unofficially with the help of private contacts. Vora took the 16mm reels of the rough cut and the separate sound reels out of the school without permission. The copy was made by projecting the footage with a 16mm projector, presumably onto a sheet, and re-filming it with a VHS camera.
As adventurous as this technical set-up seems from today’s perspective, in the East Germany of 1981, it was determined by the technical and political framework of both the latest video technology and controlled film recording and reproduction technology. As far as the participants’ memories can reconstruct it,[10] Thomas Plenert or others with personal connections to the Volksbühne may have had contact to Klaus Freymuth, a freelance filmmaker with his own studio.[11] In his 1989 handbook ‘Filmpraxis’, Freymuth mentions filmmakers using this kind of video transfer of film footage: ‘Most simply, one uses a colour camera which transfers the projected image from an even, white wall in a pitch black room. […] The quality that can be achieved with this method is quite modest.’[12]
A PAL VHS[13] can only reproduce a fraction of the resolution of normal 16mm film.[14] This results in an obvious degradation in visual quality for the rough cut. Today, this VHS is the only known material evidence of Vora’s rough cut, [15] because the film school discovered the 16mm reels were missing and had them confiscated. Ever since, the 16mm film is missing both in the form of the rough cut as well as in terms of unused footage. The preservation of the camera original as the mere 23-minute montage ANSICHTEN, ANSPRÜCHE – FRAUEN ÜBER SICH SELBST seems quite cynical, but still the comparison with the VHS brings to light what was permanently lost with the rough cut.[16] (Ill. 1 and 2).
