Election Section

“Border guards and search lights and escape attempts and death in the middle of Berlin,” said a Berliner, remembering the days of the Berlin Wall in “After the Fall.”  

“I don’t think there’s any way to reproduce that except on a Hollywood film set, and that’s something entirely different.” 

“After the Fall,” a new documentary by Joris Ivans about the psychological wall that still exists as a phantom of the wall. The unnamed citizen touches on a key factor of documentaries, a genre of filmmaking that has always existed in the shadow of its more popular cousin, the narrative movie. 

Beginning today the Fine Arts Cinema presents CIRCA NOW, a four-week series of new and classic documentaries which offer stories as dramatic as Hollywood features, but dramatic in a way that’s entirely different. 

Through the gorgeous nighttime cinematography of Erik Black, “After the Fall” shows Berlin’s incredible building boom under construction. Since the wall fell an estimated 50,000 new buildings are going up.  

The overwhelming visual evidence of the formerly divided city to catch up with the rest of the Western world is offset by the city’s residents who have concerns about the wholesale eradication of the wall that had once been a immovable presence. 

The palpable sense of history weighing heavily in the space that used to be Potsdammer Platz brings it’s own drama to “After the Fall,” the same dramatic presence Wim Wenders took advantage of in his fiction film “Wings of Desire” in 1987. The screening of “After the Fall” on April 12-14 will be accompanied by the 1927 silent film “Berlin, Symphony of a Great City” with live music by accordion master Maorgani. 

On American soil, the social phenomenon of the suburb has been exploited in countless narrative films (“Slacker,” “Judy Berlin,” “SubURbia”). In “Wonderland” (screening April 22 – 24) a documentary about Levittown, N.Y., John O’Hagan uses wide-angle lenses to place the homeowners of America’s first pre-planned city among as much wood paneling and cookie-cutter architecture the screen will hold. 

Built to satisfy the homeowning needs of soldiers returning from WWII, Levittown has produced the wonderfully weird and the weirdly weird. Comic artist Bill Griffith (“Zippy the Pinhead”) and rock ’n‘ roller Eddie Money (“Two Tickets to Paradise”) hail from L-town. But filmmaker O’Hagan (not himself a Levittown alumnus) prefers the lesser-known but no less luminary senior residents who fixate on commemorative plates, knick-knack ghosts, all-wood furnishing, and the habits of other Levittown residents. 

O’Hagan said in 1996 when his film premiered at the San Francisco International Film Festival that he began every interview with the same questions and was getting the same boring answers.  

“But after about five minutes of talking people really started talking about the things in their daily lives that kept them going.” 

“I think this film could be made in Beverly Hills and you’d find the same eccentricities and fetishes, fantasies and collections. Everyone has these things about their character that are interesting.” 

Berkeley-based filmmaker Alan Snitow, who made “Secrets of Silicon Valley” (screening through April 11) with his partner Deborah Kaufman, also seeks out small details in people’s lives – their habits, possessions, language – to find cinematic drama. The documentary about the underclass and unacknowledged blue-collar workforce behind the economic explosion of Silicon Valley’s high-tech computer companies starts with the language of exuberant hype computer company executives knit around themselves.  

Snitow said this is one of the reasons he makes documentaries. “You can take what is in the media, what is given, and you can slowly unravel it until you see how much fantasy, mythology, cultural icons – all of those little phrases that cover enormous meanings, whole people’s lives, people’s work, situations that you don’t want to deal with, questions of class that the entire society is in denial of.” 

“But you have to unravel these things in order to be able to get down to that level to be able to see things differently.” 

Filmmaker Jon Else was once sitting in a production of “La Traviata,” the Giuseppe Verdi opera, when he began to see things differently. An admitted opera hater, he focused his attention on the stagehands changing sets between scenes. His realization of the inherent drama in backstage craftsmanship eventually became “Sing Faster: the Stagehand’s Ring Cycle.”  

The enormous thematic sweep of Richard Wagner’s17-hour opera of vengeful gods has long been a target for filmmakers looking to deflate pomposity, such as Chuck Jones in his Bugs Bunny masterpiece “What’s Opera, Doc?” and Francis Ford Coppola use of “Flight of the Valkeries” for comedic effect in “Apocalypse Now.”  

Here, Else shows the stagehands playing poker backstage while recalling the story of the opera as if it were Jerry Bruckheimer action-suspense film (á la “Gone in 60 Seconds”). 

“Sing Faster” screens April 25 – 27, paired with “Step Across the Border,” a documentary about avant-garde musician Fred Frith. 

Peter Crimmins is the producer of “Film Close-Ups” on KALX radio in Berkeley.