Notes on the making and unmaking of the film Frauen in Berlin (Women in Berlin, GDR 1982) by Chetna Vora

First published in: Film Undone – Elements of a Latent Cinema, edited by Philip Widman (Archive Books, 2024)

The following text is an attempt to summarize what I have been able to learn and understand about Frauen in Berlin (Women in Berlin), which was to be Chetna Vora’s graduation work at the Hochschule für Film und Fernsehen “Konrad Wolf” (Academy for Film and Television “Konrad Wolf”)¹ in Potsdam-Babelsberg in 1982. Most of my knowledge about the events and relations surrounding this film comes from personal conversations with Lars Barthel, who was a student in Babelsberg as well and became Chetna Vora’s life partner until her untimely death in 1987, Anita Vandenherz, who was a friend of Chetna’s and a close co-worker in the making of Frauen in Berlin, and Neelesha Barthel, the daughter of Lars and Chetna, a Babelsberg graduate and successful filmmaker herself. I was also able to once speak to the film’s cinematographer Thomas Plenert, but many questions I would still have liked to ask him were left unanswered when Thomas unexpectedly passed away in July 2023.

I am deeply thankful for the openness and trust these people have granted me. Their recollections and interpretations of the events differ at times. I have tried to construct from their testimonies a coherent account to the extent to which I felt this was legitimate, while still considering the differences and contradictions necessary and probably important parts of the whole story. Until today, I have seen very few written documents directly relating to Frauen in Berlin and I mention them all in this text. One of them was a particularly vital source of information for me, an unpublished transcript of a conversation between Tamara Trampe and Christiane Mückenberger that took place in 1993 and was dedicated to recollect what had happened to Frauen in Berlin. My own attempt at this task, thirty years later, will still not provide a final and comprehensive picture. What follows is written “to the best of my knowledge and in all conscience”.

Chetna Vora came to the German Democratic Republic, probably in 1975, with a student grant from the Marxist-Communist Party of India, of which her father, Batuk Vora, had been a popular representative in the Gujarat regional government since the 1950s. She was part of the GDR’s “Ausländerstudium” (foreign student) program, which meant that she spent an obligatory one-year learning German at the Herder institute in Leipzig. Her original assignment was to study book printing. After an internship at a book printer in Weimar, she went to Berlin for a second internship at the “Neues Deutschland” newspaper. In Berlin, however, she started to pursue her dream to become a film actress. According to Lars Barthel, she had heard one could study acting at the Film and Television Academy in Potsdam-Babelsberg. When telling the school’s gatekeeper that she had come to enroll for acting classes, she was told that acting was not taught anymore at the school. What else is taught, she asked, then chose to apply for the film directing class and was accepted.

After making at least two short films in her first three years of study, in 1979 Chetna began making her so-called Hauptprüfungsfilm (main examination film), which students made to qualify for the production of their diploma film. Oyoyo² was shot in a student housing complex among foreign students at the University for Economics in Berlin-Karlshorst, and it is a refreshingly casual document of their dormitory life, their socializing routines, their songs, fears and hopes. While their conversations reflect the larger political constellations which had made them eligible for a university education in the GDR, they do not pay heed to the ideological certainties upheld in a typical state-produced documentary or television report from the GDR. By the same token, watching the film today also challenges the certainties upheld in the typical ways to reckon with “the former GDR”. Today’s viewers are taken by surprise because the film does not ask to be watched “with reservation”, as has become a routine attitude towards films made in the GDR. Oyoyo is an unencumbered and sympathetic portrait of a collectively lived exile and it was clearly meant to motivate debates at the time it was made. The fact that its power to do so has not waned is proof of Chetna Vora’s achievement, but also hints at the unresolved, latent challenge to collectively make sense of the complex legacies of “internationalism” in the GDR. The unruly power of this film, however, may lie in its very refusal to be subservient to such an endeavor.³

Frauen in Berlin (1981/82)

Chetna Vora’s next film project, Frauen in Berlin,⁴ was subjected to a disturbing act of institutional violence when after the first internal screening of a 140-minute rough cut the film school demanded it to be drastically shortened and, when Chetna refused, confiscated the working print and the rushes. Until recently, I felt entitled to continue by saying that the school had ultimately destroyed Frauen in Berlin. This I had found to be the general assumption among those I had the chance to speak to about the film. There is no doubt that the school’s intervention prevented Chetna Vora from finishing Frauen in Berlin, that the entire film material was confiscated and that it is “not (t)here” anymore; but there exists no proof that it had actually been destroyed. For the time being, this is all I feel safe to say.⁵

Doubts, or at least reasons for doubt, concerning the actual destruction of the film material for Frauen in Berlin were raised in a conversation I had in May 2023 with Anita Vandenherz, who is credited as the film’s assistant director. Speaking to her reminded of a simple researcher’s maxim that I had failed to acknowledge: the fact that something is not where I have looked for it does not mean that somebody has destroyed it.

For her graduation film, Chetna was to have long conversations with women living in East Berlin. The majority of these women were apparently contacted by Anita Vandenherz, who was contracted by the film school as assistant director and script writer for Frauen in Berlin. Having worked for DEFA⁶ as a free lancer since the early 1970s, she had often been the person to do pre-production research for documentary features. Thus, she had gained insights into different areas of society and access to various work-places and professional contexts. She also brought with her an interest in and experience with theater, so that ultimately several of the women interviewed for Frauen in Berlin were working in theater in various capacities. Anita told me that Chetna’s idea had not been to make a film about friends and people with whom she was close, but rather to talk to women she would get to know through the conversations.

The youngest conversation partner in the film is an 11 or 12-year old girl, the oldest is 83-year old Elsa Frölich, probably the only public figure among these women, a Communist resistance fighter during the Nazi period, who is interviewed in the presence of her daughter. With only two exceptions, all interviews were shot in the interviewees’ apartments. Sometimes the woman speaking is positioned in front of a window so that the camera gives us a glimpse of a cityscape or a backyard behind her. Two scenes were shot on a balcony. Anita remembers that – besides the women, sometimes their children and, rarely, their male life partners – they were usually three on the set: Chetna, Thomas Plenert, and herself. Sound was taken care of alternatingly by herself or Chetna.

The seizure

After Chetna had edited the film with Petra Heymann, she had to present it at an evaluation screening in the school. It was the first and probably the only time Frauen in Berlin was seen by an audience in the length and shape in which she had intended it to be seen. There exists an eyewitness account of this screening by Christiane Mückenberger, who was Chetna Vora’s film history teacher in Babelsberg. In 1993, she was interviewed by filmmaker Tamara Trampe in the context of a research project Trampe had started during the dismantling of GDR film institutions in the early 1990s. Trampe’s general intention was to collect memory protocols of women who had worked within the GDR film system, and the specific motivation for her conversation with Christiane Mückenberger was “to find out about the events surrounding Chetna Vora’s film Frauen in Berlin”.⁷

The students always chose who to invite to the previews of their films. Their lobby. [Chetna] asked me if I would come; she had to present her film. I said, of course [...], and she said: “It got a little longer than allowed.” I said: “My goodness, if it's good, they're going to accept it.” So I went into this room. I still remember where I was sitting. I remember it very clearly, and I was totally unsuspecting.

Before the screening started, the head of the directing department, Karl-Heinz Bohm, came in and said: “There's a student in here who doesn't have a pass for our university anymore.”8 That was the only contribution [Bohm] made. People were startled and someone stood up – it was Hans Wintgen, who was not popular with the university administration – and he said: “Yes that's right.” He was already in the exam class. “My pass has expired.”9 By then the mood was clear. Bohm knew there were people in there whom he didn't like, even hated. But the crucial thing was that this head of department didn't watch the film at all; he went out.

I saw a fascinating film. [...] How long ago was that – ten years now? The film made such an impression on me, because I had never seen such a picture – made by a foreign woman about our lives – in any professional film. It was a picture taken at eye level, not from above. It was so vivid, so comprehensive and yet so detailed. So intimate and yet such a wide scope.10

Lars Barthel and Anita Vandenherz also remember this screening. Their recollections differ as to where exactly it took place – on or off campus –, yet they both confirm that the film stunned everyone present, that Chetna received a lot of positive recognition from fellow students but that there were tensions in the room afterwards. What is safe to say is that the school administration demanded Chetna to shorten the film drastically and that Chetna refused. But she knew that she might not carry the day in this conflict with the school and that in order to save the film in the form that it had, she would have to steal it.

We knew the following fact: The pretext was that the film was too long. She was expected to make a half-hour film. But this was not an isolated case, there were many such cases. Under this pretext, the two lecturers, Manfred Hildebrandt [lecturer for camera] and Armin Hagen Liersch [head of the production department] looked at the film again with the stipulation: “Let's help Chetna make a viewable copy that we could perhaps also show on television.”

Chetna was ordered to show the film again to the two gentlemen. She had her big jute bag with her. The editor kept bringing the film reels, Chetna showed them and then let the reels disappear in her jute bag while something else was put in the film cans. And the editor stowed them away in her cabinet in an orderly Prussian manner, while Chetna had one roll after the other in her little bag and wandered off with it. How she thought she would cover it up, I don't know.

The legal situation was unclear. Actually, foreign students had the right to take their diploma films with them to show them in their own country. In her case, since the film had not been approved, the school could say that she was not allowed to do that. But she knew she had to rescue the film and she did it that way. It was just before Christmas, and she obviously didn't think that Hildebrand and Liersch would get right to it. Maybe she wanted to have a copy made. But the two of them could hardly wait and had the stuff pulled out between Christmas and New Year's – that's the story I heard – and were stunned when black film was shown to them.

[...] What was typical for the school: nobody contacted Chetna. It was immediately reported to the authorities. That's what outraged me so much, because these gentlemen, these hypocrites, acted as if they were pursuing a legal process, while this was an act of injustice of the first order.11

While the theft was discovered very fast and Chetna had to return the film reels to the school, she managed to copy her version of the film. Anita Vandenherz has a pretty clear memory of how this took place. It was probably her, Chetna, Lars Barthel and Thomas Plenert present. They projected the film to a white wall or sheet and filmed it with a VHS camera. While a 16mm projector was not so difficult to get, a VHS camera was a rare thing to behold in those days. Lars Barthel remembers that both machines were provided by a friend who had been a technician at the Volksbühne theater.¹²

The criminal investigation initiated against Chetna Vora for stealing “public property” was dropped when the prosecutor realized that the affair could damage the school’s reputation, once it would become public in a court case. Nobody was charged in the end, but the confiscated film material never showed up again. What remains of the film is the screen-to-tape copy safeguarded and later converted to a digital file by Lars Barthel. In this shape it was first publicly screened in May 2015 at Filmmuseum Potsdam in a program organized by Claus Löser. Since then the film was shown at the Zeughaus cinema in Berlin and at Remake Women’s Film Festival in Frankfurt in 2017, at documenta fifteen in August 2022, at the Hamburg Short Film Festival in June 2023 and at Kino Arsenal, Berlin, in the context of Film Undone in July 2023.¹³

One of the unresolved questions surrounding Frauen in Berlin is why the school took such a hostile stance against it. While nothing that is said in these 140 minutes is overtly rebellious, a lot of it touches on topics that were considered sensitive for GDR filmmakers, like hierarchies in the workplace, incompetence of superiors, sexual harassment, depression, and the notorious fact that real life failed to fulfill all the progressive promises the socialist state made to its female citizens. Many of the women in this film appear disillusioned about society’s ability to grant a happy and meaningful life to all of its members, yet none of them turns this into an explicit political statement. They speak from different perspectives, attitudes and experiences, and their personal accounts do not add up to an unequivocal conclusion.

Paradoxically, the lack of an ideological agenda may have caused suspicion towards the film. The fact that almost all the conversations take place inside these women’s apartments adds to a sense of integrity which makes the private sphere appear autonomous and sovereign. An observation Anne Barnert makes about Hans Wintgen’s films (see footnote 9), is equally pertinent for Frauen in Berlin: “In the course of the 1970s, the private sphere became a meticulously monitored sector of GDR society, suspiciously observed by the State and the Party.” To center a film around “the original sound expression” from which the protagonists can “create [their] own, self-determined speech image”, as Barnert describes it for Wintgen’s films (Barnert, 12–13), was a documentary approach in direct opposition against pretensions of control and authorship by an “observer”. Mutual trust vs. all-invading suspicion. Similarly, Chetna Vora’s non-arrogating interview practice would have been a fundamental provocation for anyone with eyes to see and ears to listen. “So intimate and yet such a wide scope.”

A 23-minute film titled Ansichten, Ansprüche: Frauen über sich selbst (Opinions, Expectations: Women About Themselves)

I do not know of any unequivocal documents or first-hand accounts of the reasons why superiors at the film school rejected Frauen in Berlin in the form in which Chetna Vora presented it. In his typewritten two-page review of Frauen in Berlin, titled “Regiediplom” (Diploma for Film Directing) and dated 26 March 1982, Ulrich Weiß concedes that he is “not aware of any other documentary from the GDR in which emancipation is given such a wide meaning (not reduced to material and social self-determination)”. He attests Chetna “exceptional artistic abilities” and grades the film “excellent”. At the bottom of the page Weiß adds, “I wish Chetna Vora good luck.”¹⁴

How do we make sense of the lacuna between this sympathetic document and the way Frauen in Berlin was subsequently treated by the film school?

In the absence of any written evidence for why the school acted as it did (and who was responsible for these actions), a 23-minute film titled Ansichten, Ansprüche: Frauen über sich selbst (Opinions, Expectations: Women about Themselves) may serve as a preliminary reference for some assumptions. The film exists as a 16mm positive print in the archive of today’s Film University in Babelsberg. It consists of excerpts from the original material of Frauen in Berlin, a source that is not credited; neither is Chetna Vora. In fact, no personal credit is given to anyone here. The piece opens with the new title and simply ends with: “Ausschnitte aus einer studentischen Arbeit der Hochschule für Film und Fernsehen” (Excerpts from a student work from the Academy for Film and Television), followed by a copyright for GDR television and the year, 1983.¹⁵

Anita Vandenherz told me that Ansichten must have been made at the GDR television studios in Adlershof. She remembers having been asked to assist the editors in the process of making a television version of Frauen in Berlin, which she refused out of respect for Chetna, who had already left the country. When we spoke about this chapter of the story, Anita questioned the assumption that the original film material of Frauen in Berlin had been destroyed. She had the impression that one intention behind the television version was to make “at least something” out of this material, whose qualities were no doubt valued by some of those in charge. Anita Vandenherz therefore suggests that until 1989 the material may have been stored at the television archives in Adlershof. What happened to the “left-overs” in the holdings of the GDR television studios after 1989? If Anita’s assumption is true, the vanishing point (and the question of responsibility) would shift to a moment after the collapse of the GDR.

While I had known of the existence of a “short” or “school version” of Frauen in Berlin, it was only when I finally watched it in Spring 2023 that I became aware of what this “version” actually was and that it shows distinct features and editorial choices that might give us a clue to what had been “wrong” with Frauen in Berlin, besides its length, in the eyes of some (yet again: whose?).

To begin with, there is something depreciating in the sound of the new title. “Ansichten” and “Ansprüche” aren’t straightforwardly negative terms, but in combination they produce a dismissive and patronizing ring – Ansichten leaning towards “sentiments” rather than “opinions”, Ansprüche suggesting “(excessive) demands” rather than merely “expectations”. The derogatory tendency is underlined by the second part: Frauen über sich selbst (women about themselves) again could have a neutral face-value, but rather wraps up the title to the patronizing assumption that “what we see in this film is women talking about nothing but themselves and their demands”. Seen as a response to the original title, “Women in Berlin”, suggesting a maximum of space both for what these women say and what one makes of it, the new title appears as a disciplinary gesture.

Only four of the original fourteen women interviewed appear in the 23-minute re-edit. While in Chetna’s version all the protagonists remain anonymous (except for Elsa Frölich who chooses to identify herself on camera), these four are now identified by chyrons giving first names and initials and occasional nutshell phrases like “a widow, mother of three grown-up children” or “re-married, a mother of four”. The extended accounts we are given by these four women in Frauen in Berlin bring home the insight that living alone and being independent has proven the better choice than living with men who are patronizing, irresponsible and emotionally insecure. In the “short version” their stories seem to underline the possibility (and desirability) of a harmonious heterosexual relationship combined with with a successful working life. Inter-titles have been added in order to bridge the immense holes now gaping in these women’s accounts. Thus, what could have remained an unseemly torso actually looks like a neatly manufactured short television feature ready for broadcast. The “short version” even has two scenes that are not in Chetna Vora’s edit – an incidental proof that whoever edited this piece in 1983 still had access to the original rushes and not only to the seized 16mm print of Chetna Vora’s cut.

A clear nod toward an ideologically desirable message of a typical GDR TV feature is the fact that this version makes one of the very rare “political” remarks in the original film the closing statement by taking it out of context. When one of the women – now “Renate H.” – sums up her reflections on “personal wishes” by saying that what she most aspires to is “to make myself useful for society”, we know from the original conversation that this statement comes at the end of a detailed account of a successful career achieved against frequent humiliation from male superiors. In light of this, the blunt “short cut” presented in the 23-minute edit must be seen as yet another disciplinary measure against a woman who in her life has relentlessly battled just such patronizing.

“Change of program”

Was Ansichten finally aired? I had already asked the Deutsches Rundfunkarchiv (German Broadcast Archive) in Babelsberg long ago if the film title Frauen in Berlin or the name Chetna Vora bring up any results in their database, but they hadn’t. The television look of the 23-minute edit and the new title motivated a new attempt to find out if it had actually been broadcast. While no record was found for Ansichten, Ansprüche: Frauen über sich selbst in the archival database either, a full text search by archivist Martina Seidel in all issues of the GDR’s weekly television magazine, FF Dabei, finally brought the discovery that Ansichten was indeed scheduled for broadcast on 13 September 1983, at 10.50 pm. The calendar for that day announced it as a “contribution from the Academy for Film and Television”. But then Seidel also found an internal protocol confirming a “change of program” for the 10.50 pm slot. The document indicates that Ansichten was replaced on short notice by another student film from the Babelsberg school – Thai and Than Huong is the portrait of a Vietnamese cardiologist working in the GDR and it can be watched at the German Broadcast Archive during regular office hours.

Films mentioned in the text:

Oyoyo | dir. Chetna Vora, camera: Lars Barthel, GDR, 1980

Johanna Just | dir. Hans Wintgen, camera: Peter Badel, GDR, 1980

Frauen in Berlin | dir. Chetna Vora, camera: Thomas Plenert, GDR, 1982

Ansichten, Ansprüche: Frauen über sich selbst | GDR, 1983

Thai und Than Huong | camera: Nguyen Van Nhiem, GDR, 1983

Gespräche in einer strahlentherapeutischen Klinik | dir. Hans Wintgen, camera: Jürgen Rudow, GDR, 1985

Der rote Milan | dir. Hans Wintgen, camera: Klaus Freymuth, GDR, 1991

Notes:

1In 2014 the institution changed its name to Film University Babelsberg KONRAD WOLF.

2Oyoyo, GDR 1980, 47 min, directed by Chetna Vora, camera by Lars Barthel. – The film exists in two versions, one is 47 minutes, the other 65 minutes long. A 16mm print of the shorter version is in the possession of the Film University Babelsberg; a 16mm print of the longer version was privately archived by Lars Barthel who in the meantime has deposited it in Babelsberg as well. In the 65-minute version some conversations carry on longer than in the shorter one, which accounts for the extra time, but Lars Barthel does not remember any conflict with the school that would suggest that the shorter edit was made without Chetna’s consent. The print of the longer version may have been the proof print which international students were allowed to keep.

3Since Oyoyo has somewhat “reappeared” in 2017 (see footnote 3), curators (including myself) have typically contextualized it in a “post-colonial” framework or in debates on Germany’s failure to recognize the merits of migration it is steadily profiting from. It may be time to take more serious the fact that Oyoyo creates an imaginary space much more than it is an attempt to document or pay justice to an existing one. Except for an establishing shot opening the film, all scenes are shot indoors. And besides a smirking observation on Germans’ compulsive love for punctuality and mention of the possibility to get a free dentist appointment, the only reference to the sociopolitical context outside the dormitory walls is the fact that the common language within this international student community is German. The challenge may be how to fully embrace how Oyoyo helps to extend our relational understanding of what we mean when we say “Germany”, while reckoning with and holding dear the fact that the film creates a diasporic vantage point from where such preoccupations appear petty.

4Frauen in Berlin, GDR 1982, 140 min, had at least two additional working titles: Paternoster (according to Anita Vandenherz), which is the colloquial German term for the doorless elevators that we see during two long static shots in the film; and Schattenbilder (Shadow Images) which, written in typescript and uppercase letters, actually opens the film on the surviving VHS-copy of the 140-minute cut. The title Frauen in Berlin does not appear in the film, but has become generally accepted as the title which Chetna Vora had ultimately decided on.

5At an early stage of our conversations, Lars Barthel had once pointed out to me the fact that there exists no “destruction protocol” for Frauen in Berlin. The destruction of a student film appears to have been an extreme but not entirely unheard of disciplinary measure at the school.

6DEFA = Deutsche Film AG, State Film Production of the GDR.

7These conversations Trampe had with several women of her own generation were never published. A copy of the transcript of the conversation with Christiane Mückenberger was given to me by Lars Barthel at the beginning of my own research around this film. In the only short conversation I had with Tamara Trampe, after a screening of Frauen in Berlin at the Zeughaus cinema in Berlin in 2017, she agreed that I could quote from it should this ever become useful. Tamara Trampe passed away in 2021.

8The school stood on the border to West-Berlin. To enter one needed a so-called border pass or a special permit.

9Hans Wintgen was a classmate of Chetna Vora’s. Lars Barthel remembers that Chetna had great appreciation for Wintgen, but never worked with him. Wintgen was a renegade, in school and later at DEFA, an uncompromising observer whose films were censored and have had virtually no public life. Like Chetna Vora, Hans Wintgen seems to have relied in his films on long and patient conversations and on the power and poetics of the spoken word. He made his last film in 1991 and was only recently rehabilitated by Anne Barnert’s commendable monography, Mit Behutsamkeit – Hans Wintgens Filmbeobachtungen der DDR (Berlin: Verbrecher Verlag, 2018). I thank Thomas Heise for calling my attention to Hans Wintgen and to Anne Barnert’s book.

10Christiane Mückenberger in conversation with Tamara Trampe, 1993. Unpublished and untitled typescript from private archive. Translation from German by the author.

11Christiane Mückenberger in conversation with Tamara Trampe, 1993 (same as above).

12This person was probably Klaus Freymuth who had worked at the Volksbühne in Berlin from 1976 to 1979 and then started an independent video studio producing advertisement and image films but also documenting the growing opposition movement in the GDR. In 1984, Freymuth was arrested for “illicit possession of film equipment” and his studio was dissolved. He continued supporting the opposition and through video dissemination became an important figure in popularizing the protest movement which subsequently led to the demise of the GDR. (https://www.havemann-gesellschaft.de/archiv-der-ddr-opposition/buergerbewegung-ab-1989/neues-forum/sammlung-klaus-freymuth/). While piecing this footnote together, I have also come across the information that Klaus Freymuth was the producer and co-writer of Hans Wintgen’s last film, Roter Milan (Red Kite, 1991), a half-hour interview featuring former secret police officer Heinz Kilz made for Deutscher Fernsehfunk, the former GDR state TV channel soon to be dissolved. It was aired on 12 June 1991, two months before Freymuth died in a car accident.

13I hosted most of these screenings; the screenings in Kassel, Hamburg and during Film Undone were co-hosted by filmmaker, author and curator Cornelia Klauss, herself an alumni of the Babelsberg film school in the 1980s.

14Ulrich Weiß, born in 1942, was a prolific DEFA film director and highly respected among younger filmmakers of Chetna’s and Lars’s generation for his consistent attempts to crack and overcome the ideological corset of Party-line film production. Weiß passed away in 2022. Not having spoken to him is one of many shortcomings of my research around this film. A copy of Ulrich Weiß’s review was given to me by Lars Barthel who does not remember clearly anymore how he got hold of it; possibly Weiß himself had given it to him.

15What I write about Ansichten is based on my notes and memories and on conversations with Cornelia Klauss, with whom I co-presented Frauen in Berlin at Film Undone and who took the opportunity to watch Ansichten shortly after I had. I have only watched it once on a flat-bed machine during a visit at the archive of Film University Babelsberg in March 2023. Since then, Katja Krause and Anke Wilkening, who are responsible for the University’s archive projects, have decided to apply for restoration funding for Frauen in Berlin and have restricted access to all archive materials related to this film until the practicalities of the restoration process can be tackled. This restriction also applies to the unique print of Ansichten which therefore couldn’t be screened in comparison to Frauen in Berlin during Film Undone, as initially intended. It remains to be seen what restoration will come to mean for Frauen in Berlin. One could argue – and I did – that screening the screen-to-tape version of the film together with the 23-minute Ansichten in a context like Film Undone may be considered a productive part of such a restoration process; but I also respect the decision to prioritize the physical protection of the rare material.