ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at Böttcher's Die Mauer: Demontage eines Alptraums (The Wall: Demolition of a Nightmare), about the fall of the Berlin Wall, with Barbara Kopple's American Dream, about a failed factory strike, comparing and contrasting how the two filmmakers experience and present life-altering, revolutionary change caused by an external force. The inclusion of conversation between the subject and the filmmaker was becoming even more prevalent in the 1970s, as well as having the filmmaker as narrator with relevant personal experience. By the 1980s, the audiences’ relationship to the filmmaker has evolved – they desire to know who is framing the film they are watching, no longer accepting that a film that has no literal voice, of a narrator speaking, has no “voice,” but instead understanding that every film is shaped by the maker. Here we find that Böttcher has evolved in mode along with global trends, and has participatory moments in a mostly poetic, observational film.
Kopple uses very clear protagonists and antagonists and other classical narrative structures in order to construct a narrative. This is a strong contrast to Böttcher, who serves more as a guide, showing the viewers that life is made up of the personalities that stand out, and stresses the importance of the connections that we can draw from these textured, separate events and people. Also documenting a reform, but as an artist, Böttcher is looking for the visual and thematic threads that we can follow, in an imperfect journey.
