One of many commemoration ceremonies, eleven years after the GDR uprising. The report combines a Saarland politician’s thoughtful speech with idyllic shots of a high-spirited population: at open air swimming pools, playing cards or on camping sites. “Do you know what we commemorate today?” the reporter asks. The answers are deeply irritating.
The narrator of the film was diagnosed with proprioception disorder by her physiotherapist: She lacks a normal awareness of her body in space and thus a reference to the world around her. Dancing as a therapy might help. Instead, she takes a ghost train into Finland’s television history, to the 1960s, when ordinances forbade spontaneous dancing because of a Medieval decree.
Young people were robbed of their body awareness, Finland, with its peculiar position between the blocks of the Cold War, stood untethered in the political geography of the time. Connections were made through television, Swiss campaigns for the independence of the West African province of Biafra, the weightless moon landing, U.S. American stars from soap operas and TV western shows. Travelling without moving. Do ghosts have proprioception? Wouldn’t they float out of this world otherwise? Or are they kept tethered to the ground by film and television recordings?
Photosensitivity warning: Contains flashes of light that may trigger seizures for people with visual sensitivities.
Narrated by the incarnate ghost of a deceased real hair donor. In the post-war era, the export of real hair wigs contributed to Asia’s economic development, with Hong Kong as a major hub. In its heyday in the 1960s, “Asian real hair” was popular with wealthy U.S. women, but then the USA imposed an embargo on the product, now classified as “communist hair”. This is where the intricate and innovatively realised story begins: Starting with complex economical and sociopolitical contexts, it weaves a thread that runs through various historical and dreamlike staged levels.
Hong Kong was and is a space of in-between-ness – between East and West, between communism and capitalism. Perhaps that is why there are so many spooks in the city, one protagonist speculates. Just like the well-travelled ghost, an eternally wandering entity and contemporary witness of an imperial and colonialist past.
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The history of communism as the story of its crises: The two authors Ralph Giordano and Hans-Ulrich Barth take up various uprisings and protests to demonstrate the discrepancy between the claim to power and the reality in “socialist imperialism.” A more nuanced light is shed on individual uprisings, while at the same time feeding into stereotypical Cold War images of the enemy.
On 23 August 1989, the people in the Baltic states demonstrated their solidarity against the Soviet occupation and took to the streets for their sovereignty. They formed an over 600-kilometres-long human chain stretching through Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. Touching images of a one-of-a-kind event, captured in a lyrical composition.
While the communist authorities decide the conditions for an official registration of the Solidarność movement inside, the masses demonstrate in front of the court outside. A contemporary document of the moment when the power of the people seemed to make a lasting cultural opening no longer just a promise but a possibility. At the time, “undesirable” at the Leipzig festival.
“Stay calm and level-headed!” Endless armoured convoys, radio stations broadcasting their potentially last announcements and the Slovak Communist Party meeting Czech party representatives. Shaky images and wailing sirens testify to the tension as Warsaw Pact troops march into Bratislava, too, to suppress the Prague Spring.
The Latvian director’s graduation film from Moscow Film School does not deliver images loyal to the regime but is a testimony to her journalistic background. When the independence struggle is to be suppressed by military power, the people in Riga erect barricades. Laila Pakalniņa captured the dramatic events whose topicality is frightening.
No images of value but “confused material.” For decades, footage secretly filmed in August 1968 in Prague was hidden in archives under this label. Evald Schorm recovered the illegal material and composed it to the beat of Tchaikovsky recordings, in keeping with its expressive nature. The film could finally be publicly shown in 1990.
Everyday life in casual street scenes in the Leningrad spring in the 1960s. A taxi driver suddenly remembers his transport missions on the so-called “road of life” during the German Wehrmacht’s 900-day blockade in World War Two. Iconographic images from the time of the Siege of Leningrad offer insights into how the people lived then.
A representative of the Volgograd Section of the German-Soviet Friendship Society recalls German “comrades who fought against Hitler here […] and at other front sectors.” Equalisation with the people in the Soviet Union is completed at the Mamayev Kurgan memorial: The (German) visitors merge with the survivors who mourn their fallen.
What happened in the GDR on 17 June 1953? Using a lot of original footage, Norddeutscher Rundfunk looks back on the events in a detailed report marking their 20th anniversary and shows different interpretations and explanations. Agent coup? Workers’ revolt? Popular uprising? The interpretations were controversial, even among contemporary witnesses and Western historians.
