This film hovers between fiction and documentary with the director Helke Sander playing a created part but setting the action in Berlin locations and with actual practitioners as well as actors.

Edda Chiemnyjewski is 34, a divorced mother who works as a press photographer and takes care of her clingy, school-age daughter. [Dorothea – Andrea Malkowsky] – (Retrospective Brochure).

Edda is working in a collective preparing a funded project for posters of the city. We see her with other photographers and with agents of the city. As well she has her work as a press photographer. We see her pitching to a newspaper editor. And we see her in her flat where she has a makeshift lab for processing.

[This] essayistic narrative film is an ironic and clever depiction from a feminist perspective of the universal dilemma of a working woman whose fragmented life leads her to feel like anything but what in East German jargon was called “an all-round developed person”.

The latter point is emphasised as the collective have a particular project set on the wall that ‘protects’ the East from the West of the city.

Sander is excellent as the photographer-cum-mother. The other characters are not that developed but they combine to create a sense of authenticity as does the fine location filming. The minutiae of photographic work and domestic work is one of the ways that the film catches the interest and creates the sense of watching people go about their actual lives.

The narration takes us in and out of Edda’s home life and her work round the city. The latter enjoys frequent tracking shots that both offer a sense of the faces of the city and the perambulations of the photographers. The fine black and white cinematography was by Katia Forbert. Whilst the editing by Esther Dayan and Ursula Höf takes in both the physical context and layout and the important detail of action. The collective projected rendering of the East, whilst unsuccessful, reminds us of the divisions; stark in this period of the early seventies.


The episodic nature of the narration is reinforced  quotations in titles. Most frequently these are from the works of Christa Wolf. Wolf was an important East German writer and activist. She was a member of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany. The use of her ‘voice’ aligns both with the feminist critique and the presence in the film of the East and ‘the wall’. Some critics have suggested a metaphoric parallel between the divided city and the divided sexes.

Sander studied film at Deutsche Film-und Fernsehakademie in Berlin (Berlin Film and Television Academy). This title was her first full-length film. She has continued to make films right up to the present. As well as a film-maker Sander is noted as an educator and activist. Helke Sander was present to introduce the film. We were given some of her background. And she explained the significance of the film’s title. She emphasised the import in the film of the divided city, yet ‘neither East nor West’.

We enjoyed the film in a black and white 35mm print. I was completely absorbed by the 98 minutes of the title. There was the sense of the city, of the life of a particular character and situation, and the intriguing detail of her practical work. This was, for me, one of the really impressive productions in the programme.