Cycle index

Berlin

dir. Guy Maddin / Canada 2008 / 1’

subtitles: no dialogs

retrospective: Guy Maddin A Trip to the Orphanage, Archangel, Berlin, Brand Upon the Brain!, Careful, Collage Party, Cowards Bend the Knee, Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary, Footsteps, Glorious, Hospital Fragments, It's a Wonderful Life, It’s My Mother’s Birthday Today, My Dad Is 100 Years Old, My Winnipeg, Nude Caboose, Odilon Redon or The Eye Like a Strange Baloon Mounts Towards Infinity, Odin's Shield Maiden, Send Me to the ‘Lectric Chair, Sissy-Boy-Slap-Party, Sombra dolorosa, Spanky: To the Pier and Back, Tales from the Gimli Hospital, The Dead Father, The Heart of the World, The Saddest Music in the World, Twilight of the Ice Nymphs, Workbooks Section index

Film description

A short film commissioned by a gallery in the Canadian town called Kitchener (Berlin until 1916). The renaming was the first action taken to improve the town's image during WWI. The second action was to hire a filmmaker, Charlie Roos, to record exercises and passage of the 118^th battalion of the Canadian army. Maddin re-edited the several rigid scenes of Roos's film which managed to survive and he made something between a newsreel and a trailer. (km)