Böse zu sein ist auch ein Beweis von Gefühl

Director: Cynthia Beatt    → show biography   ← hide biography

Biography: Cynthia Beatt grew up in Jamaica and the Fiji Islands. She studied at Bath Academy of Art and then moved into film. After working with 24 Frames in London, she travelled for a year through the Middle East, Iran, Afghanistan, India, and then moved to Berlin. In the 1970s and 80s she worked with the Arsenal and the InternationalForum of New Cinema, programmed major retrospectives of Roberto Rossellini, Fritz Lang, Jean Rouch, Powell and Pressburger, Max Opühls. She began directing films in 1979. Films: 1980: Beschreibung einer Insel / Study of an Island (200 min.). 1983: Böse zu sein ist auch ein Beweis von Gefühl / Fury is a Feeling Too (26 min., Forum 1984). 1986: Dakui Gau Trio, Namosi. 1988: Cycling the Frame (27 min.). 1991: The Party – Nature Morte (89 min., Forum 1992). 2009: The Invisible Frame (60 min.). 2014: A House in Berlin (96 min.).

Country: West Germany

Year: 1983

Synopsis: DCP now available - “A sort of cranky, witty, intellectually astute rendition of a Frommer’s Guide replete with architectural treats and warnings about the unwieldy temperaments of the natives.” (Barbara Kruger, Art Forum) Cynthia Beatt raises questions and provokes reflection on a range of issues to do with language and culture, politics and history. Her film is a personal and cathartic confrontation with being a foreigner in Berlin, burdened by the weight of its history, during the 1970s and ‘80s. Filmed in the area around Potsdamer Platz, the torn-up area right next to the Wall where post-war buildings grew out of the bomb craters, the film paints the picture of the loss of an architectural text whose destruction also meant the disappearance of a cultural context. Shrapnel-pitted facades alternate with rooms where social altercations about Germans scarred by their history are staged. The somber elegiac music of Maurice Weddington underscores the discordant character of this unsentimental, accusing film.

Language: German

Tags: Experimental film