ABSTRACT
By analyzing, interpreting, and contextualizing three Super 8 films produced by Medienwerkstatt Berlin, a group of autodidactic activist filmmakers in the 1970s, this chapter explores the relationship among independent filmmaking, the urban environmental movement, and urban development in West Berlin. The films document one of West Germany’s key citizen initiatives of the burgeoning environmental movement against the construction of a new coal power plant and its destruction of forest; the plight of urban trees more generally; and the Alternative Environmental Festival held in the city in summer 1978. The films and their esthetic were meant to elucidate, agitate, and draw attention to the negative effects of capitalist urban development, technocratic planning, the seemingly limitless growth of commerce and consumption, and to show up alternatives for urban living. While the ferment of West Germany’s 1970s new environmental and social movements provided the cinematographers with opportunities to practice collective and participatory filmmaking and experiment with the Super 8 medium, their films in turn supported various environmentalist citizen initiatives. For the filmmakers the medium (and practice) was also the message. As part of a small-scale radical media activism the films contributed to creating an alternative public sphere, or “counterpublic.” They helped foster environmental stewardship leading to the protection, planting, and creation of the urban forest and green spaces in West Berlin, and they helped to produce conditions prone to participatory urban planning and design, the rehabilitation of derelict old tenements, and the provision of public housing.
