Pont de Varsòvia

Portabella’s political instincts (or insights, information?) are certainly remarkable. Few and far apart are those who in 1989 would have been able to make a film about the fragile state of Europe, the anxieties of a subcontinent on the brink of political turmoil – and name it after an architectural site found close to the Berlin Wall, whose ‘fall’ would commence a new era in world politics (the fall-out of which gets discussed in General Report II. The New Abduction of Europe (2016)).
Not that the film talked about that too directly. It’s all in the form: a narrative that resembles a puzzle whose parts don’t necessarily (have to) add up, an aesthetic that’s at the same time artsy and artful, glacially beautiful and enigmatically forbidding, seductive and repulsive. The starting point? A party – or is it maybe the urban legend of the diver found in a tree-top?

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