Courtesy of The Invisible Frame (2009). Filmgalerie 451
In 1988, before Tilda Swinton was a household name, the young actress hopped on her bike to trace the 160 km Western radius of the Berlin Wall with friend and filmmaker Cynthia Beatt for Cycling the Frame. The quiet indie film juxtaposes the two countries by showing a carefree and even playful West Berlin against the nearly 12-ft high concrete barrier, policed by armed guards. Unknowingly, the two captured history as the divide between the cities would fall a year later.
In 2009, more than twenty years later, the pair reunited and retraced the line for The Invisible Frame, this time weaving through both sides of the fallen wall as if allegorically sewing the two sections together. Together, the two films create a poetic passage through time, offering a compelling portrait of two eras. Teetering the edge between whimsicality and contemplation, Tilda Swinton’s prophetic musings throughout both films are integrated as inner monologues. Reciting poetry from the likes of Yeats and Robert Louis Stevenson, Swinton whizzes through fields and historical neighbourhoods, lakes and concrete monstrosities, dichotomies that seem to symbolise the oppositional landscapes of a divided city.
Depending on how you want to look at it, one is either subjected to or gifted by the bizarre whiterings of Swinton’s peculiar inner thoughts for the 90 minutes of the two films combined. Whether scripted deliberately or as a spontaneous result of the mental and physical stimulation of travelling by bike, Swinton’s performance is infused with a playful irony that borders on the surreal. Cycling the Frame captures her peering under the graffiti-sprinkled West wall into the East, before provocatively photographing an East German guard and waving the developing polaroid in his direction. In The Invisible Frame she is taken over by another cyclist who looks back and gives an appreciative whistle, to which she responds by bursting out laughing. Her approachable nature mars with the performative element of her role as she cycles through the layers of history and memory encapsulated in the city of Berlin. Revealing the underlying current of consciousness and contemplation in Beatt’s deceptively light filming, Swinton dangles her legs over the River Spree and ruminates on the prehistoric, almost Byzantine connotations with which we associate the fall of the wall, an event that made history just twenty years prior.
Courtesy of The Invisible Frame (2009). Filmgalerie 451
In conjunction with this issue, SLEEK wants to raise awareness about the cultural divisions that still exist today. We have designed two limited edition sweaters, bearing the slogan “All Walls Fall”, available to purchase now.