Review: “The American Sector” Probes Domestic Politics, One Slab of the Berlin Wall at a Time

The new documentary powerfully evokes the active presence of history in daily civic life.
A man stands in front of a concrete wall.
In “The American Sector,” the substantial, revealing, and critical discourse that Berlin Wall fragments inspire suggest why they turn up in the damnedest places.Source: Pacho Velez and Courtney Stephens

The new documentary “The American Sector,” which opens on Friday at Metrograph’s virtual cinema, yields extraordinary results through audacious methods—and from the readiness of its directors, Courtney Stephens and Pacho Velez, to challenge their own premises. The conceit of the film risks exhausting itself in its own ironies: Stephens and Velez seek out scores of fragments of the Berlin Wall on display throughout the United States and film them in the context of their often ludicrously incongruous settings. But the film quickly departs from this mission to focus on the filmmakers’ wide variety of unexpected encounters on location. The result is a film that powerfully evokes the active presence of history in daily civic life—and reveals the politics that inhere in its commemoration.

Velez has worked with the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard, an incubator for the radical depersonalization of documentary filmmaking, as on the film “Manakamana,” which he and Stephanie Spray co-directed, largely by way of a fixed camera on a cable car in Nepal. There, as in other films by Lab participants and alumni, the epiphanies that come from recording people and events with minimal intervention are balanced, and sometimes eclipsed, by the coy rigidity of the conceptual frameworks. According to the magazine Filmmaker, Velez, the film’s cinematographer, had initially planned to present the Wall’s slabs solely observationally, without interviews. But, in the course of filming, Stephens, who was recording sound, began to speak with people whom they met near the pieces of the Wall; those conversations (in which Velez then also took part) occupy the major part of the film’s running time and provide its crucial substance. The hybrid of conceptual purity and experiential openness is a salutary reminder that form and style are as important in documentary as in fiction, and serve much the same purpose in both formats: to transform ideas into action, to embody consciousness in real time.

The film’s first few shots show a slab from the Berlin Wall standing erect in a pristine Pennsylvania forest, like a Kubrickian monolith; another pair on view before an oblivious strolling traveller in a Dallas hotel; and yet another decorating the nightscape on a college campus, as people and vehicles pass indifferently by. Such images provide the movie’s baseline shock: the very fact that the Berlin Wall has become a source of scattered memorabilia in a wide and incoherent range of public and private settings. Less than three minutes in, Stephens and Velez meet Mary Fanous, an information officer at the Department of State, who gives the filmmakers a spiel regarding the special segment that’s on display there, which she describes as a paean to “diplomacy” and “freedom.” Far from merely offering sound bites of official banalities (another layer of easy irony), Stephens and Velez go on to elicit freer and more substantive remarks from many whose proximity to the Wall owes nothing to government duty (and from some government employees, too). “The American Sector” is a person-in-the-street (and at home, and in the office) documentary that collects an extraordinary range of political discourse. The slabs of the Wall become something more than common ground for onscreen discussions: they function as truth devices, extracting deep-rooted and deeply personal observations as if with a metaphysical force that also energizes the camera and microphone, transforming discourse about the enduring power of history into seemingly physical, weighty incarnations of it.

It’s amazing and bewildering enough to see a piece of the Berlin Wall serving as a backdrop for croquet games at a corporate retreat, or two slabs sticking up on the side of an interstate, for drivers to admire at seventy miles per hour. Yet the substantial, revealing, and critical discourse that the Wall fragments inspire suggests why they turn up in the damnedest places: why a Hollywood Hills man goes to extraordinary effort and expense to have a slab trucked onto his property; why Microsoft has a piece in its Redmond, Washington, headquarters; why there’s a chunk outside a restaurant in Suwanee, Georgia, and another in a gated community in Hope Point, Idaho. The filmmakers contact an unnamed C.I.A. employee by phone, in the hope of filming a fragment that’s at the agency’s Langley, Virginia, headquarters; she turns them down, explaining that filming is impossible in a place that’s filled with undercover agents. (The filmmakers drolly keep the screen black while she speaks.) But she also explains, in surprisingly candid and paradoxical detail, the significance of the Wall for the C.I.A. When it fell, “we sort of reënvisioned the future of intelligence,” she says, because, with the “enemy” defeated, it seemed uncertain whether the spy agency was even needed. (Spoiler alert: the C.I.A. survived.)

Many of the discussions in the film are centered on the divisions and inequities in American life and their present-day political context. A man outside a fragment at a California public library describes the Wall as a reminder of the family separations that were taking place at the time, under the Trump Administration. (The film premièred at the Berlin Film Festival in February, 2020.) In downtown Miami, one woman sees it as a “hurtful symbol,” signifying the gap between wealthy immigrants, whose presence is unquestioned, and poor ones, who “are one step away from being thrown out.” Two female students at the University of Virginia, one Black, the other white, say that a Wall slab there is a distraction, even a willful one, from the university’s own history—namely that, as the Black woman says, the buildings there were built by enslaved Black people. (Not all of the discussions are similarly enlightened; one woman, speaking near a courthouse in Stony Point, New York, sees the Wall as a symbol of God’s affirmation of individual nations and of “patriots” fighting a battle of “good against evil.”)

The movie’s most extensive, powerful, and historically specific sequence is filmed at the Berlin Wall Memorial at the Mason-Dixon Line in Cincinnati, Ohio. A Black man there tells the filmmakers that the site is “less than a quarter of a mile from a slave state,” adding that, “if you got to this side of the river, technically you were free—technically.” Citing his own family’s history—two relatives, he says, were lynched, in 1926—he characterizes the Wall as a reflection of Black American experience, meaning, he says, “that we’re not alone—we weren’t alone in being oppressed, nor have we been alone in resisting.” (In a sharp echo of the man’s reference to enslaved people’s flight to freedom, that discussion is followed by an archival video, from 1988, showing two men desperately swimming the river from East Berlin to West.)

Velez, the cinematographer, relies mostly on a static, tripod-planted camera, lending the film’s images a weighty and monumental tone to match the tonnage of the slabs, their sharp lines and hard textures, and, above all, the weight of history that they, and the film, bear. He shoots most of the discussions at a distance, sometimes a great distance; Stephens, who edited the film with Dounia Sichov, often keeps the participants offscreen, deploying their remarks as voice-overs that seemingly fill Velez’s spacious frames and, in the process, resonate throughout the movie’s American landscapes. These cannily aestheticized, fluidly heuristic strategies help the movie transcend its original impersonal conceptualism to convey the immediacy and the real-world power of political mythology—and attempt a corrective demythologizing in real time. “The American Sector” is an exemplary work of cinema as political action, and proof (if any were needed) that the activist element of a film is inseparable from its well-conceived form.

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