Fury is a Feeling Too

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, 1985

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. – Berlinale, 2021

While Beatt's film may be read as a Sebaldian reconstruction, in which architecture is summoned to evoke a deep sociopolitical past and its ghosts — the Benjaminian Angel of History — there is also a keen sense of a much more contemporaneous Berlin of the 1980s, before the Berlin Wall fell, and its citizens could start to look to the future. — Ela Bittencourt, mubi.com, 2021