RICHARD KOSTELANETZ
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testimony was drawn from real Berliners, speaking about the cemetery
and the world represented there, we felt it would be false to overdub
their voices. Since the film already contained an abundance of reading
matter in the gravestones, it would also be offensive to fill the screen
with yet more words in subtitling. To follow the original German with
versions in English, French, Swedish, Spanish and Hebrew, fresh testi–
mony was recorded from Berliners speaking all those languages. From
such testimonies a new soundtrack for each of six films, titled respectively:
Ein Verlorenes Berlin, A Berlin Lost, Berlin Perdu, Eft Forlorat Berlin, EI
Berlin Perdido,
and
Berlin Sche-Einena Jother,
was composed. Therefore,
even though the Spanish film, say, has verbal content and voices quite
different from the others, it is no less authentic than the original German.
(There is nothing quite like this in the history of documentary
filmmaking. Claude Lanzmann's
Shoah,
by contrast, has within a single
context several languages that are subtitled.)
The main difficulty now is that only sophisticated polyglot audi–
ences can begin
to
appreciate having six different narrations without
subtitles. (The glib conclusion, that since the film is about a cemetery in
Berlin, it must be about the Holocaust, rather than a symbol of pre–
World War Two life had
to
be overcome.) No wonder the ethics of
authenticity have so little presence in contemporary documentary film–
making. The last time I tried to talk about these issues with a full-time
documentarian, a real pro, he wanted to change the subject to fundrais–
mg.
