Daniel Brenner (Kurt Naumann) is an architect in his late thirties. Beyond designing a few standardized bus shelters, transformer substations and supermarkets, he cannot exercise his creativity and this persistently gnaws away at his self esteem. He mostly sits idly in his live-in kitchen, sketching still-life drawings. Suddenly he gets the chance of a lifetime. He is hired as chief architect on a project to design the social centre of a hastily built residential area. As he is allowed to recruit his own team for the project, he loses himself in the excitement of a fresh start for his career. But as soon as he begins scouting out his former fellow students, the first hurdles appear. One has become a shepherd, the other a waiter and a third has defected to the West. In the end, though, he manages to bring a group of six trusted colleagues to Berlin for his team. They develop ambitious plans, want to do everything differently. But it soon becomes clear that it will be impossible to realize most of their bold ideas. At first they make small compromises, but finally the whole endeavour seems in danger of collapsing. Brenner, who has just taken on the role of the rebel, finds himself increasingly in the role of a middleman again. He soon becomes part of the very system he wanted to fundamentally change.

Peter Kahane’s film THE ARCHITECTS provides a rare example of the correspondence between fiction and contemporary history. The director and his screenwriter had planned the project in the mid-1980s but were only able to realize it later when the GDR was beginning to crumble. Kahane was born in 1949 and belongs to the “lost generation” of GDR filmmakers who only began to make creative headway in the final stages of DEFA’s existence, if at all. A backlog of personnel, low output of films and censorship of content resulted in an entire group of promising talent sliding into a holding pattern with no foreseeable end. Along with Jörg Foth, Herwig Kipping, Karl Heinz Lotz, Petra Tschörtner, Tony Loeser, Dietmar Hochmuth, Jan Bereska and others, Peter Kahane was among the directors who had the potential to boost innovation at DEFA but who ultimately never got the chance. Almost eerily, Kahane’s film reproduces this constellation, but the action centres on architects instead of DEFA filmmakers. An extremely obvious simile: both filmmaking and architecture depend on long preparatory stages and corresponding patience, require considerable investment in personnel and materials, and exist at the intersection where artistic aspirations and practical value meet. By depicting Brenner as a failure, Kahane also evokes his own failure in a system which has proven itself stronger than him. After their initial euphoria, Brenner and his team watch their vision of changing the world around them disappear, piece by piece. Instead, they are the ones who change and adapt to the situation, even allowing it to corrupt them. The film finds an effective metaphor for this self-reinforcing process: in his blind enthusiasm for the construction project Brenner proves incapable of paying any attention at all to his private life. He is oblivious to the increasing bitterness of his wife, who has already mentally traversed every phase of disillusionment and is desperate for radical change in her life. He eventually loses her to a Swiss man. The scenes in the divorce court and of Brenner saying goodbye to his wife and daughter as they leave for West Berlin from Friedrichstrasse train station, the “Palace of Tears”, are among the most powerful of the whole film. At the time of shooting, reality had raced so far ahead of the film that it became increasingly difficult for the crew to capture authentic images of the former GDR because everyday, another piece of it would disappear.

Production Period

1989/1990

Production Year

1990

color

color

Aspect Ratio

1:1,66

Duration

Feature-Length Film (61+ Min.)

Type

Feature Film

Genre

Drama

Topic

Relationship / Family, Architecture / Urban Space, Work, Fall of the Wall / Reunification, Friendship, GDR, Film History

Available Media

DVD

Original Version

German (de)

DVD

Subtitles

English (en), French (fr), Spanish (es), Portuguese (Brazil) (pt), Italian (it), Russian (ru), Chinese (zh), Japanese (ja), Arabic (ar), German (de), Turkish (tr)

Note on the Format

Parallelwelt:Film - Ein Einblick in die DEFA