München - Geheimnisse einer Stadt (2000)

The film is a collage of contemporary documentary footage, archival material from Bavarian Broadcasting, and fictional scenes. Examples of documentary footage include images of the abandoned, overgrown Floriansmühlbad swimming pool, cut together with historical film footage, and the solar eclipse filmed from the Stachus. Examples of fictional stories (in the form of a photo-novel) include one about two men who, in the past, unbeknownst to each other, had the same girlfriend at the same time and who now break into her house together at night. Another tells of a young man and a young woman at a pop concert in 1975 who were meant for each other but, by chance, never saw one another. Also staged, but to be regarded as a historical document, are Josef Breitenbach’s photographs of Fräulein Greno and Dr. Riegler, taken in 1933. Breitenbach had claimed at the time that he had invited an unknown woman in from the street to his apartment and that she had agreed to be photographed nude. In fact, Fräulein Greno was Breitenbach’s girlfriend, and Dr. Riegler was a Simplicissimus editor and friend. In the other fictional sequences made for the film, too, the actors do not speak any dialogue; instead, narrators comment on and explain the action. Even the old blind “narrator,” who appears right at the beginning in a street scene and thereafter accompanies the film while standing at a window, has a narrator serving as his “inner voice.” The footage of the solar eclipse, shot on the first day, appears only at the end of the finished cut. City models play an important role, staged in elaborate tracking shots: these include brightly colored, quaint-looking replicas populated with figures, as well as the nineteenth-century model by Johann Baptist Seitz and Nazi plans for the redevelopment of Munich. One section is devoted to futuristic urban concepts from the 1970s. The short clip showing a chanting crowd with the BMW headquarters in view comes from the science-fiction film Rollerball, which was filmed on the Olympic grounds. The narrators are Rolf Boysen, Jeanette Hain, and Dominik Graf. miniatur|thumbtime=59|The solar eclipse in a view from Gmunden (Upper Austria) Before the first chapter begins, one of the narrators explains: “This is Munich, but it could be any other city large enough to show how each individual’s life story is entangled with the history of a place, how the personal and the anonymous intertwine and complement each other there, and how the thousands of stories also add up to something like a biography of this city. Whether one likes it or not, everyone carries their own inner city within them, and, as with a tree, a cross-section would reveal growth rings that would, so to speak, show how the city grows within us all—or, conversely, how we ourselves grow into the city.” After the images of the solar eclipse, the film concludes: “They say that during a solar eclipse all feelings stand still. Perhaps this is the moment when past and future merge, when all the longing, but also all the remembering, comes to rest for a moment, when the whole city is at peace with itself for a moment, and we with it. So be it.”