Film offers new insight into fall of Berlin Wall

By Madeline Chambers

BERLIN (Reuters) - The contrast between the electric mood that built up in the days before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the sense of disorientation immediately after the demise of communist East Germany is exposed in a new film.

"Material," shown at the Berlin film festival, explores the effects of the collapse of the Cold War's most potent symbol, twenty years ago this November.

Director Thomas Heise presents a montage of previously unseen footage, including a mass rally at Alexanderplatz and speeches by East German leader Egon Krenz defending the Soviet policy of "perestroika" just days before the barrier fell.

In almost three hours of material shot between the late 1980s and 2008, the sometimes disjointed sequences lack context and most people on screen are unnamed.

But they capture the drama of the times.

"I've been going along with decisions that were a riddle to me," says one uniformed man to a rowdy crowd, who goes on to ask what could happen if there is no change -- civil war?

The film may not be easy viewing, but it was well received by viewers who clapped and cheered at the end of its screening.

"I wanted to get away from the original meaning and make it non-specific. If you don't know who the individuals are or what the circumstances are, you look at it with fewer preconceptions and then you can think in a different way," said the director.

PEOPLE IN A VOID

Heise, who shows none of the ecstatic scenes on the evening of November 9, 1989 when Germans breached the Wall, says history does not move in a linear way but that it lands "in a pile."

"All the footage has all been going through my head over the years and this is how it came out," he said after the showing.

On the morning of November 10, the camera pans deserted parts of snowy Berlin from a moving tram. With a sense of bewilderment, people say they don't really know what to do and they expect tanks will arrive soon.

Individuals are depicted in a void, responding to the sudden disappearance of the only system they knew.

A scene in parliament shows a lawmaker explaining his collaboration with the loathed East German security police, the Stasi. Another, set in a Brandenburg prison, has confused guards and inmates trying to assess the past and look to the future.

(Editing by Andrew Roche)