Selected and introduced by Bassem Saad.

In the words of its protagonist, critic Annette Michelson, Journeys from Berlin/1971 is a “consumingly auto-analytical” work. Michelson plays a loquacious analysand sitting on a boat or at a desk, in varying degrees of Brechtian or slapstick scenography, facing an analyst who is played either by Rainer herself or by a young blonde child.

Rainer began working on the film during her 1976-1977 stay in West Berlin as part of the DAAD Fellowship, coinciding with the peak years of Baader–Meinhof Group activity. There are of course no straightforward accounts here, as Rainer composes a film work with a series of riddling impressions. The year 1971 in the title is the year of Rainer’s attempted suicide in New York. She has said that “A subtext of this film is that women constitute an oppressed class, to whom – as such and under proper conditions – certain options present themselves more readily than others as a response to those conditions of oppression. Suicide in the personal sphere, assassination in the political.”

Journeys from Berlin/1971 is a film which I continue to learn from. I frequently return to its published script, trace its lineages and influences, and often find myself taking Rainer’s projected scenes of Berlin as extended metaphors that come to bear on my own time in the city.