Second Breath (2005)

Second Breath presents a portrait of Berlin’s long and intractable history through Holly Zausner’s dramaturgy. Inspired by her time living and working in the city in the 1990s, Zausner created a series of three outsized figures made from rubber silicon and knitted material. This film features Zausner interacting with these figures in a sequence filmed at key landmarks in the city, including the Potsdamer Platz, Neue Nationalgalerie, Spree River, and the now-demolished Palast der Republik. In every scene, we see the heft of the figures counteracting her manoeuvres of them, turning the idea of the body as a metaphor for the weight of history from abstraction to physical reality.