The Diva Is a Porn Star!(Berlin Film Festival)

Byline: Michael Meyer

Years ago, when I lived in Berlin, I looked forward to an annual rite of spring. Each May Day, skinheads in the gritty Kreuzberg district would arise to celebrate the workers' holiday. If the weather was warm and fine, they'd gather on the steps of crumbling apartment buildings, or sit in sidewalk cafes, leisurely drinking a midmorning coffee and eying the armored cars and riot police taking up positions around the neighborhood.

From time to time, as if limbering up for a sports competition, one or another would get up, stretch, then casually hurl a paving stone through a nearby shop window. This was the signal for the cops, like birds ruffled by a sudden noise, to put away their newspapers and strap on their helmets. By noon, stones would be raining down like hail as several hundred anarchists-for-the-day ran through the streets bellowing, "Pigs." Afternoon would progress to Molotov cocktails, water cannon and tear gas. A few cars would burn, and spectators such as myself thought it all great fun. The action would end promptly in the early evening, suspiciously close to the cocktail hour, when men with brooms emerged to clean up the mess.

I remembered all this, fondly, at the recent Berlin Film Festival. Europe's answer to the Oscars is anything but Hollywood. For one thing, an unspoken rule is that glossy American features seldom win prizes. Another is that anything goes, so long as it's within the rules. As various stars dismounted from their limos to walk the red carpet into the closing night's gala awards ceremony, a group of streakers leaped out to dance naked before the TV cameras. An anarchist outburst? Not exactly. Painted on their bodies were such slogans as no cuts for the arts! It seems the mayor, strapped for cash, was slashing Berlin's culture budget--and this newer generation of ...