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Rotraut Pape

Berlin Wall: Vertival Horizon

Doc. expérimental | hdv | couleur | 131:0 | Allemagne | 2015

The wall and what it symbolized stood out as a negative horizon throughout my entire life, which began in 1956 in Berlin, five years before the construction of the wall. Only one week after the wall came down, its disappearance was already foreseeable. I set out with a camera one last time to film continuously along the wall on November 17th 1989. The two-and-a-half hour route begins at the river Spree in Kreuzberg, follows the painted wall along deserted streets to Checkpoint Charlie, around Potsdamer Platz up to the Brandenburg Gate, ending after seven kilometers behind a desolate Reichstag with a view across the Spree, where the new government buildings now stand.

Filmmaker, artist, university professor. Born 1956 in Berlin, studied fine art / experimental film at the University of Fine Arts Hamburg. She specialized early on the media of film/video/computer, though was interested less in their technological possibilities – although she mastered these with virtuosity – than in their artistic potential to develop formulations for interrogating society politically and ethically. Performance and installation play a major role in her work (including in her videos and films), both as actual performances and as interactive experimental arrangements. Screenings, exhibitions, publications and talks at home and abroad. Professor for Film/Video at the Academy of Art and Design Offenbach.