2026 | Retrospective

The Fall of the Wall, Dissolving Borders, Hip-Hop and Digicams

Slacker by Richard Linklater

Section head Heleen Gerritsen and Annika Haupts, member of the selection committee and programme coordinator, talk about the background and highlights of the Berlinale Retrospective “Lost in the 90s”.

I. Berlin Films

The opposing East-West poles of the Retrospective are in Texas (Slacker) and Inner Mongolia (Johanna d'Arc of Mongolia). Berlin is more or less smack in the middle. Why are the city and films set here particularly pertinent for 1990s cinema?

Heleen Gerritsen: I think Berlin is the best possible locale for a retrospective of 1990s films. The events surrounding the fall of the Berlin Wall sent shock waves around the world, and that was represented on film too, of course. On top of that, our archive holds a large number of relevant works. But it was first and foremost the political upheaval in the city that made it a logical subject to choose.

Annika Haupts: Berlin in that era was a place full of contrasts and fissures. It wasn’t just the extremes of East and West. There was a no-man’s-land in the middle of the city, around Potsdamer Platz, that inspired artists to grapple with those kinds of spaces and the sub-cultures that flourished in those urban wastelands. One example is the film Prince in Hell.

The selection for the Berlin chapter homes in on contemporary documentaries and, in the narrative films, various countercultures. What motivated that double focus?

Heleen Gerritsen: With the documentaries, we were simply persuaded by the images, the protagonists, and the different milieus you see in them. In Berlin, Bahnhof Friedrichstrasse 1990, you see in real terms how the political situation impacted not only the infrastructure, but also the people and their fate. We are interested in exposing especially younger audiences, to a real picture of what it was like back then, even if it feels like the Friedrichstrasse train station has been under construction forever.

Annika Haupts: Counter-cultures are a feature of the entire programme. It is something that links all the films. The narrative films that deal with sub or counter-cultures are very close to the attitude of the era, the zeitgeist. That was a curatorial leitmotif for us. The narrative films are very convincing in their depictions of the worlds they are portraying. Lola and Billy the Kid for instance, paints a precise picture of the city’s Turkish community.

The programme includes films by two idiosyncratic international directors, Dušan Makavejev and Jean-Luc Godard. What characterises their perspective on Berlin after the fall of the Wall?

Heleen Gerritsen: Dušan Makavejev is an outstanding representative of the Yugoslav Black Wave. He brought the movement’s provocative style to Berlin. That includes a pretty anarchic use of archive material, in this case from perhaps the worst Soviet propaganda film ever made – The Fall of Berlin (1950). In his film, Gorilla Bathes at Noon, Makavejev builds scenes with the actor who played Stalin in that film into his story of a Russian officer wandering around newly-united Berlin, so that the historical misrepresentation of the former film collides with the neo-capitalist present. A wild mix.

And Godard?

Heleen Gerritsen: Godard is just Godard! In his Germany Year 90 Nine Zero, a sequel to his 60s science-fiction film Alphaville, Eddie Constantine once again appears as Lemmy Caution, which is, of course, nothing more than a narrative vehicle to illustrate the political upheaval in the city.

Annika Haupts: You have to watch the film perhaps 20 times to really get all the references to German history and to coming to terms (or not) with that history. Gorilla Bathes at Noon and Germany Year 90 Nine Zero are good examples of taking an artistic approach to the historical situation.

Many of the Berlin productions premiered at the Berlinale. In addition to those “re-visits” can we also expect discoveries?

Heleen Gerritsen: First and foremost we must mention Sunny Point, a true treasure that we dug up. It used the fall of the Berlin Wall to comedic effect long before Good Bye, Lenin! or Berlin Blues – the film was a powerful feature film debut that is very funny and that the Kinemathek has picked up for distribution.

Annika Haupts: There are also several mid-length films. The Border Guard and Shortcut to Istanbul were both graduation films – by Stefan Trampe and Andreas Dresen – for the Konrad Wolf film school, which we are showing as a double bill. Eastern Landscape, which is showing before the Godard film, found its images of the defunct East German state at a landfill. They are images of farewell and mourning that we can show as a 35 mm print.

Sunny Point by Wolf Vogel

II. East meets West | West meets East

How did your tenure as the director of the “goEast” festival inform your experiences with Eastern European cinema in the 1990s?

Heleen Gerritsen: In fact, it was during my time at “goEast” that I really discovered the nineties. Although it was difficult even to get prints of films from eastern Europe that were of screenable quality. The archival systems and film production itself were being completely restructured. Before that, everything was organised by the state. After the state-run studios were dissolved, there was a vacuum in many eastern European countries. But films were still produced, sometimes at the initiative of filmmakers who had footage from the studios stored in their home refrigerators. There are really crazy stories! At the same time, for many eastern European filmmakers, the nineties were a painful time; they had been employees of the state studios and suddenly their future was totally uncertain.

How are those experiences reflected in the Retrospective?

Heleen Gerritsen: I saw the Ukrainian film Raspad for the first time in 2019 at the Dovzhenko Centre in Kyiv. But there were also many more films there that impressed me with their energy. You felt it right away – censorship is gone! People could tackle subjects that until then had been absolutely taboo. You see that with Raspad, the first narrative feature about the Chernobyl catastrophe, but also very acutely with Orange Vests, a documentary that wears the spirit of perestroika.

In the nineties, western filmmakers headed east, while easterners headed west. How did their motives and perspectives differ?

Heleen Gerritsen: That is an easy answer – the westerners were curious and seeking adventure, the easterners needed financing.
Nonetheless, the encounter was significant for both sides. The Orange Vests collective met Helke Sander and other feminist filmmakers, which was part of what inspired the women to make the movie. Werner Herzog always loves to travel, and with Bells from the Deep, he made a film which tells a lot about faith and superstition in Russia. The desire to grapple with spirituality as a reaction to the fall of communism is also an element in Krzysztof Kieślowski’s film The Double Life of Veronique. Ulrike Ottinger had always been inspired by eastern Europe and Asia. She began shooting Johanna d’Arc of Mongolia in 1989, a brave moment to choose.

Annika Haupts: Another East-West interweave is evident in the very lovely and creative animated short In My Neighbourhood, which was made at the DEFA animation studio in Dresden and borrows from American hip-hop culture.

The Double Life of Veronique by Krzysztof Kieślowski

III. The End of History?

The American films in the programme are set far away from the historic upheavals in Europe. How are they related to the European productions, which seem far more relevant to contemporary history?

Heleen Gerritsen: The thesis posited by political scientist Francis Fukuyama that with the end of the Soviet Union, liberal democracy would assert itself globally has famously proven invalid. The triumphant global march of market capitalism and neo-liberalism, the entire “American dream”, provoked a reaction in the nineties in the form of a counter-movement. One example is Slacker, Richard Linklater’s film about young people simply living day to day, who have no interest at all in capitalist careers or consumption, which in a sense is how they process the aforementioned shock waves from Berlin. That left traces on cinema.
There were developments in the independent film scene, but also in the Black cultural milieu. Spike Lee could not have made his early films in the Hollywood studio system. Bamboozled is a pretty crass film that is highly critical of the American media, the television landscape, and US entertainment altogether. Which means it can also be read as a criticism of capitalism. Hip-hop is key in that context.

Annika Haupts: Films like Boyz n the Hood and Juice established a benchmark for how life in the “hood” with all its lines of conflict could be portrayed.

In the US films, we see an aesthetic rather than a political disruption. To what extent is that related to the fact that they were made from the point-of-view of young outsiders?

Annika Haupts: In that respect, it is relevant that the digicam came into widespread use in the late nineties. That technical revolution made it possible to make films without a large budget and for specific audiences. That was the case with Dirty Girls, a short film that director Michael Lucid initially shot for his classmates. The new format opened up new spaces both in front of and behind the camera. That is quite clear in Spike Jonze’s Video Days, a long skateboard video that was possible because the light and affordable camera could be taken on to the streets or attached to a skateboard.

Heleen Gerritsen: The use of that technology in music videos back then was also what made MTV so influential. Which is why I would have liked to have had more music videos in the programme. In the nineties, MTV was an insane source of creativity, and there too, east met west. It was not until the end of last year that MTV stopped broadcasting music videos. Which was really the end of an era.
I think a lot of people still find it psychologically difficult to accept that the nineties are now also a part of cinema history.