week three

Week 3 as I remember it was just a normal week in Berlin, becoming more and more acclimated to our surroundings and neighborhood.

We had plenty of readings for this week, including the long reading for Thorsten’s class by Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett called “Exhibiting Jews”. This text went into great detail about the ways in which Jewish peoples and culture was portrayed at different Worlds’ Fairs in the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century. I felt a little bit like the article was a bit drawn out, but I just tend to favor texts in which the author manages to make his point in a short and concise manner. Thorsten seems like a really nice guy and I’m glad he is our teacher for this part of the class. I feel like he really cracks down on us as a class, however. Perhaps making sure we are always busy with some kind of coursework!
In his excursion last Friday, he took us around to Rosenstraße and what most closely resembles Berlin’s Jewish quarter, which is around the Hackescher Markt area of the city near Alexanderplatz. We finished off the rainy tour with a visit to the Neue Synagogue, which stood as more of a memorial to the once complete synagogue before the time of the Third Reich. I was surprised because I had expected it to be synagogue that was in use by people today.

In Eric’s class, we watched the film Kuhle Wampe oder Wem gehört die Welt?. I was excited to see this film because I had done one of the readings for class that week (which was about the film Kuhle Wampe) early so I already knew about the controversy that surrounded the release of that film. I also have never seen a Brecht film (or at least, I don’t think so) and was interested to see how the characters and situations were portrayed. For a film of this nature, I was impressed with the way in which the film was done and thought the subject matter was particularly interesting. I do not know very much about Germany in the period of the Weimar Republic, so I liked watching how people lived and worked (or tried to work) in the film.

My film group decided to film our short assignment this week, which is the “Point of View” from a beer bottle’s opening. Wednesday night we filmed the very end of the short film (the part when Ed falls and the bottle breaks all over the floor) because none of us really felt energetic enough to host a believable party scene that evening. We broke a beer bottle, and when Ed “fell” with the camera, Joel threw the pieces of bottle out into the camera’s view. The next evening, we were determined to film the party scene—now or never! We got out the music, empty beer bottles, and invited everyone to come on over and have a party with us. Since most of the film consists of Josh holding the camera like a bottle and walking around the party, I was really hoping that the other participants in our party scene wouldn’t really notice we were filming and continue to act natural to get the most authentic “party feeling” for the shot. This halfway worked out—most people acted pretty normal, and a few people who had just walked into the apartment (like Christopher) didn’t know we were filming and we got a few really authentic lines from him to use. (“Where’s the party??!?!?!”)

Next week, we are going to edit the film to completion to get ready to show to the class, because our due date for showing this film has been moved up to next Friday.