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The Discovery of the East
On the Documentary Films of Viola Stephan
By Bert Rebhandl
The fall of the Berlin Wall and of the Iron Curtain between Eastern and Western Europe constitutes one of the most important turning points in recent history. Between 1989 and 1992, a rivalry between two systems came to an end which, after the Second World War and the defeat of National Socialism in Germany, had led to a divided Europe, emerging from the shared victory of the Western Allies and the communist Soviet Union. For a moment, in 1990, history seemed to stand wide open. The political scientist Francis Fukuyama even spoke—in a formulation often taken too literally—of an “end of history.” In Germany, it was among others the historian and intellectual Karl Schlögel who coined the slogan: Go East. The Second Discovery of the East is the title of his book from 1995, which contained reportages and reflections on the part of Europe that had for many years remained largely closed off, and which in Berlin already began at the famous Alexanderplatz.
Viola Stephan’s films from this decade constitute a particularly productive corpus from this period of upheaval. She had already travelled to the Soviet Union for the first time in 1969, when she was still a student, and was well acquainted with the communist countries. Thanks to her knowledge of the Russian language, she was not, like so many reporters at the time, dependent on translations, but understood the many nuances herself when she travelled to the East in 1991 to make her first film for the cinema, after she had shot films for television in Russia throughout the 1980s. For the film Journey from Petersburg to Moscow, she chose a classic of the Enlightenment as her point of departure: a book of the same title by Alexander Radishchev from 1790, which earned its author exile to Siberia because he had shown concern for the common people under the rule of Tsarina Catherine II (also known as Catherine the Great). “You have to film the silence of the land,” Viola Stephan is given at the beginning as a guiding principle for her journey, a quotation from Radishchev’s book that ultimately cannot always be taken literally but can certainly serve as a leitmotif in a more figurative sense.
In the spring of 1991, Stephan travelled along the road from Petersburg (then Leningrad) to Moscow in search of traces of Soviet everyday life at a moment when it was reaching a peak of precariousness. Complaints about empty shops and low incomes can be heard again and again; at the same time, religion was regaining importance again, a monastery was being revived, and from its tower one could see in the background the chimneys of local heavy industry. In this film, Stephan functions as a reporter who collects scenes and voices while herself remaining in the background; yet one is constantly aware of her presence behind the camera, since she enters into contact with people—she remains off-screen, but clearly directs. Journey from Petersburg to Moscow conveys impressions of a vast, and also brutal, transformation that is only just beginning. Particularly emblematic is the dance marathon that Stephan encounters along the way—a young woman who once saw the American film They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1969) now organizes a prize dance herself. That the collapsing Soviet Union here also becomes comparable to America during the Great Depression is a significant secondary aspect, of the kind that often appears in Viola Stephan’s films.
A year later, she began her major research on the East once again from the beginning, namely in Berlin, where she shot War’s End (1992). The title is deliberately ambiguous, because in a certain sense the Second World War only truly comes to an end with the withdrawal of Soviet troops from the former GDR, since the war had led to Germany’s division. And in Silesia (1994), too, the times are intertwined: the formerly German territory, which had long since become Polish and had spent several decades under state-communist rule, is now “open” again—in the sense in which Italian Neorealism, in Rossellini’s films, had declared Rome and later Berlin to be open cities. After 1990, Viola Stephan searched for motifs of these often-difficult experiences associated with the disappearance of familiar restrictions in a now “free” world.
Her work belongs to a broader movement exploring post-communist worlds. In 1993, Chantal Akerman chose a more distanced, structuring approach with D’Est, while Volker Koepp (who in 1999 had his first major success with Herr Zwilling und Frau Zuckermann) sought closeness to people and let them speak directly into the camera. Viola Stephan moves between these two poles; it is noticeable that she sometimes seems almost to play with her own position and that of the observing camera—in Borovitchi (1996), there is nearly a traffic accident, which, however, does not appear dramatic but rather like a deliberately accepted collision between image and reality. The town in western Russia serves Stephan in the mid-1990s as a place where she can record an intermediate stage of the transformation: new elites are emerging, work processes are often still archaic, and a monument to German prisoners of war recalls the Great War, which to this day represents a central national mythology in the Russian Federation.
She concludes her major Eastern Europe cycle very pointedly in 1999 with the film Damenwahl, which has a striking subtitle: Scenes from the Occident. The international title Scenes from the Civilized West suggests that the term—people long spoke of the Occident—is a difficult one. With the portraits of several female friends, however, she also very explicitly attempts an affirmation of the word Abendland. For these women are all examples of a fulfilled autonomy: they live as they have chosen, they raise their children largely on their own, and when, exceptionally, a man (a famous painter) delivers a grand speech, Viola Stephan ironically turns off his sound.
In Damenwahl, the title is taken quite literally: ladies make the choice of what their lives should look like. They have freedom and can afford to act autonomously—and thus fulfill the aspirations of the European Enlightenment. This would also mark an end of history. And even if Viola Stephan knows that her exemplary friends represent only a hint of a future desirable society, she is nevertheless confident enough to relate this to a fundamental principle. In Eastern Europe today, many illiberal counter-movements can be observed that attempt to reintroduce discrimination against women and sexual and other minorities. Damenwahl, however, places its faith in freedom and prosperity, that is, in the goals of modern democracies.
Viola Stephan’s films show where the illiberal setbacks come from, but they also always keep the horizon open for the utopias that communism first made strong and then betrayed in the twentieth century. In retrospect, we understand the 1990s as a fateful decade. The hopes of 1989–1992 were in part dramatically disappointed, especially in Russia. Those who travel with Viola Stephan from Petersburg to Moscow or to Borovitchi will better understand why history took this course while also glimpsing new, non-ideological paths toward a better fu
When the Old Order Had Fallen Apart, and the New One Had Not Yet Taken Shape: Viola Stephan Discusses the Interim Project
By Aaron Cutler
Author’s note: I spoke with Viola Stephan about her film work for a little over half an hour on February 27th of this year (2026) on the occasion of the international premiere of the restored body of six documentary films that constitutes the Interim project, which is presented by the festival Play-Doc. The filmmaker discussed a variety of subjects with richness and detail in a way that made it clear to me that reproducing most of the material would be impossible. So, for reasons of length, I chose to present here only an edited version of her answer to my first question.
I would like to ask you about the choice of the word “interim”. What does this conjunction of films mean to you at this time, and why is the word “interim” appropriate for describing it?
Well, it’s only in retrospect that I combine the films into one unit.
In the 1980s I was living in New York, and I would film in the United States and the Soviet Union – basically one film in one place and then one film in the other. So I was always going back and forth between the two major powers, with a stopover in Berlin. Then I began to do most of my film work in Russia. For me the Soviet times, and particularly the Communist times in Poland and in Russia, were fascinating. My academic studies had been in Russian symbolism – this was back in the 1970s, so my studies were initially perceived as being bourgeois, but with certain people in the Soviet Union, when I would tell them who my favorite Russian authors were, I would immediately be accepted as trustworthy. I don’t have any Russian origin or heritage, but if you learn the language and show interest in the culture and history, then you can gain open doors.
The idea of working with a Russian crew to film Russian subjects was important, so that we wouldn’t look like a bunch of ignorant foreigners pouring into Russia to look at peoples’ mess and judge their misery. I had a lot of connections and trust on my side, which made the work possible, but at the same time, people didn’t quite figure out who we were, and that also proved to be sometimes advantageous. Audience members have always asked me, “How did you know the people in your films?” And what I like to say in response is, “I didn’t know the people. I just met them in the street, or in a bar or in any other public space.” The exception to this among the films is Ladies’ Choice – Scenes from the Civilized West (1999), because that was done with my very close friends. (By the way: I don’t think that I have a particularly female viewpoint, and I don’t want anyone to think that I’m arriving with this ticket.)
The decade of the 1990s, during which time I made the Interim films, was a very special decade in political terms. We are speaking about the period right after the fall of the Berlin Wall, or the end of Communism (however you want to frame it), when the so-called Eastern Bloc collapsed. And my generation remembers very well what happened around 2000 – life changed in so many ways, with the Internet for the whole wide world and in Russia with Putin being elected for the first time. We all thought that Russia would join Europe and be greeted as part of one big European culture, following ideas of the “Free West” and of Mikhail Gorbachev’s vision of what he called the “Common European Home”. Of course, I don’t want to put blame on anybody, but we know now that things didn’t turn out that way. But at the time, it seemed like a very free period during which everything was possible.
The kind of films that I shot during the Interim period are films that you can’t shoot anymore. Not only because they would be extremely difficult to finance – today this would take ages and endless pitching sessions – but also the ways in which our crew filmed are no longer possible for various reasons. Nowadays everybody has smartphones and in any interesting situation people pick up the phone to somehow record (or, even worse, to use the situation as a selfie backdrop). So these people are somehow no longer part of the situation, but rather becoming observers themselves.
After the 1990s, I didn’t shoot on film anymore – I really went into shooting on video and with digital technology, which is a completely different way of working from what celluloid proposes. Now I realize that I was very fortunate to have worked with different technologies at the time of transition. When I made the Interim films, shooting a documentary on 35mm was a decision. It was an aesthetic choice, and it was quite an expensive one, which involved raising money from various sources. I found all sorts of ways to avoid too much television funding to keep that influence minimal, as I worked for television in the 1980s and didn’t want to work with their requirements anymore. (I haven’t owned a television for 20 years and couldn’t tell you what TV channels show now.) I was lucky to be able to finance films like these in the 1990s, and also that I was able to act as a producer, own the rights to the films, and eventually be in a position to authorize and make these new digitizations. I’m really grateful that we could get funding for these elaborate digitizations from the negatives and achieve results of amazing technical quality. The screening copies continue to have the look of film, which is exactly what I wanted, and I’m happy that we managed to get it.
The audience reactions to the digitizations have been very good, including among young people. I was afraid that members of the TikTok generation (with everybody lamenting their short attention spans) would never have the patience to watch long film shots, and I mean very long and slow shots – for instance, Borovitchi (1996) is 98 minutes long and it has 89 total cuts, which means that the average shot length in that film is more than a minute. But young people loved it, and I’m glad that they were able to engage with my way of depicting this whole decade particularly in the Eastern, post-communist hemisphere.
In the past, when I showed the films, I would always be criticized for not guiding viewers more and giving them some background with voiceover commentary. (I remember that, when I first began working with films for television, the German commissioning editor asked me where the narration was, and I didn’t even understand what he wanted and why I should explain what is visible.) Now I think it works out well that I didn’t comment or demonstrate an attitude towards the things that I shot and that I somehow stayed neutral before them. Of course, as a filmmaker, you always have an attitude towards what you’re showing; this attitude is what leads you to select your subjects and locations. But I feel that I shouldn’t comment directly on what you see in the films, I just juxtapose the episodes and characters. I don’t like the idea that you have to tell a linear story – I’m not opposed to a story per se, but it’s not my preferred method of communicating. I like to put things together and let people create their own image, and something interesting that emerges from this is that everybody sees a different film. Each person sees something completely different from what the others see. Sometimes I don’t even recognize what people have seen in my films. I understand that this might not be to everyone’s taste, and in fact, they’ve never been films that people could agree on.
But I want to go back to the idea of Interim. Things changed after the millennium not only because of the date itself, but also because a new mode of life set in. After 9/11 the War on Terror began, security measures everywhere increased…
In the 1990s, I thought that all the films that I was making were very different from each other. Now, though, I see that the films work together by collectively depicting the last decade of the century. The division between East and West today is worse than it was during the time of the Cold War – I don’t want to be judgmental in any way, but what I’m stating is a simple fact. In Germany you can feel this tremendously. There has never been such hatred of the East (and of Russians in particular), with even the West Germans disliking the East Germans because they vote for a different party. Our society is more divided today than it was when the Wall was up, with the so-called Iron Curtain. I think that “interim” refers to the end of a different and more open time, when the old order had fallen apart, and the new one had not yet taken shape.