Was kind of curious what that comment about a denoument referred to.
Since you asked 🙂
You’ll notice what movie is playing at the theater in the photo; this is germane to the plot.
I spent all of 1977 out of the country, floating around Europe and North Africa, before lighting in Berlin, and I had, pretty much by chance, completely isolated myself from popular American culture at the time.
Fast forward to an autumn afternoon in 1978: I am probably the last American on the planet who has no idea or inkling of the Star Wars phenomena. I had literally never heard of the movie. I have the afternoon completely free: the kind of freedom that comes with an idea that it’s wrong not to use it productively. I’d been struggling with my conversational and colloquial German lately, and decided it would be a good idea to go to a German-language film to improve my skills in that area.
I was wandering around the city when I remembered seeing a theater near the Europa centre, so I grabbed a U-bahn from Oskar Helene-Heim to Wittenburgplatz and walked up the street to the theater.
I saw the posters: Krieg der Sterne. . War in the stars, I thought. This sounds like a 1950’s science fiction serial, and the picture of the silver robot looks kinda neat and sort of mindless fun. I paid my Dm4,50 and took a seat.
Now the Berlin Royal was like an IMAX before ther were IMAX’s: a huge screen that curved waaaaay up above you; they showed 70mm prints there. I remember thinking that this theater was kind of overkill for a science-fiction potboiler. I looked around, and I was literally almost the only person in the theater. (On a weekday matinee, so it made sense in retrospect)
The movie started, I jumped at the huge KRIEG DER STERNE logo, and then busied myself trying to read the scroll in German so that I’ll have a sense of the move. As the scroll receded, I thought Gee, I’ve never seen an effect quite like that before. Little did I know.
The screen panned down to the planet, and then the rebel ship comes blasting out of the top of the screen chased by laser fire. Wow, that’s pretty damn neat, I think. I wonder what’s chasing–
HOLY FUCK! I think I said it out loud- that Star Destroyer entering from the top of that 70mm screen was an overpowering, menacing, oppressive presence. I literally could not breathe and was in cold sweats. My fight-or-flight reflex went to full Red-Alert, and I felt a strong urge to whizz myself right then and there.
I think my brain went into a reset loop for the next minute or so. The next thing I remember was Darth Vader’s entrance. You think he sounded ominous all filtered and raspy like that? Try it in German.
The thing to remember about Star Wars, if you haven’t seen it in a while, is that quite a lot of the dialog is radio chatter and robots, etc for the first maybe 20 minutes or so. Lucasfilm also spent a lot of money to get the foreign dubs right, so they were very good, as well. German being my second language, I wasn’t as attuned to lip movements as I might have been, which contributed to the illusion as well.
I was sitting there in the theater, stunned, and drained, and it wasn’t even a half-hour into the movie yet. Where the fuck are all the people? I wondered. This is maybe the best movie ever made, and no one’s watching it?? I looked around at the empty theater. Is it because it’s not a big Hollywood picture? I was still under the impression that I was watching a German movie. (And how did the Germans get this far ahead of us in movies, anyway?)
Slowly, I twigged to the idea that this was, in fact, a dubbed film, and the credits confirmed it- it was a Hollywood movie all right. I felt somehow cheated- for those few minutes at the beginning of the move, I felt like Magellan, on a voyage of discovery, literally unable to wait and go tell my friends about what I’d found.
Before this episode, movies to me were just television writ larger, to be seen at the multiplex at the mall. I had had no real experience with movies like other folks had, it turned out, and my self deception led me to all the wrong conclusions.
So that’s the story of me and the Royal Theater in Berlin. Hope you enjoyed it.
