Zanna Markillie

This film is a site based project of Berlin. I spent two days filming significant historical sites in the city and edited back in the UK. This piece has a performative aspect as I place myself in the film, there's an intimacy created by doing this and my experience of Berlin is felt through the film.

 

I got very interested in the colour red whilst there and bringing the feminine to what felt like a hyper masculine city. Red symbolises many things to different people/cultures - it is a loaded colour. Both the Nazis and the Soviet Union utilised this colour in their symbology. However, to me the flowing red scarf represented the feminine, the bloodshed that has happened in Berlin, the life-blood of creativity and resilience,  and the blood-line - the generational inheritance that remains. It is a colour that, to me, resembles LIFE, PASSION, BLOOD and HUMANITY. I take on the perspective of the archetypal Feminine by wearing the red scarf.

 

Whilst researching Berlin I was particularly touched by the ‘Rubble Women’ who, after the war ended, came together to clear the rubble of their devastated city and rebuild it with their bare hands. These women, who stayed in Berlin as it was being bombed and annihilated , were left behind after the war was over, most having lost husbands and sons, their homes and livelihood. There is no memorial to them. I wanted to bring attention to these women and to the feminine aspect.

 

 I felt very moved whilst filming, as though I was honouring the history of Berlin but also bringing life (blood) and renewal to these specific sites. I wanted  to highlight the need to grieve in order to heal and the endurance and capacity for holding of the Feminine.  I was influenced by the writings of Martin Prechtel, who grew up in a Pueblo Indian reservation in New Mexico. He belongs to a tribe who have the same word for praise and grief, they believe that your capacity to grief affects directly your access to praise.

 

 The sites visited: the woods by Brandenburg Gate, the Reichstag, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, the Berlin wall and the Church of Reconciliation on the Death Strip.