Filmed one year before the Fall of the Berlin Wall, British director Cynthia Beatt’s beautiful Cycling the Frame stages a rare cinematic bike tour of West Berlin’s perimeter led by none other than a young Tilda Swinton. Equal parts political critique and summertime celebration — conveyed in poetic voice-over and painterly compositions, respectively — this beguiling short teases out geopolitical tensions with a daring sense of whimsy. 

Swinton—who is simply credited as “The Cyclist”—pedals her way around the entirety of West Berlin’s 160 km (approximately 100 miles) border in Beatt’s film, describing what she observes in astute philosophical remarks as she visits a number of sites chosen by the director, including famous landmarks such as the Brandenburg Gate and more nondescript lakes and grassy fields. But no matter how gorgeous these idyllic nooks she finds on her bike ride are, the unavoidable presence of the Wall haunts every shot—sometimes it towers over the landscape, sometimes its shadow trails Swinton on her bike, and sometimes it hides behind overgrown ivy.

“The desire to follow the Wall was there before I had the idea to make the film. I made the whole tour and understood for the first time what the Wall really was, what it meant. I comprehended that we lived on an island within the German Democratic Republic, to physically circumvent the island was a revelation.” CYNTHIA BEATT

This sense of enclosure, which pervades Cycling the Frame, also magnifies the free-spiritedness of its titular cyclist. For Beatt, a bike means “you’re free” and the self-designed pilgrimage at the heart of her film represents an act of protest against the symbol of suppression that looms throughout it. Twenty-one years later—with the Wall demolished—Beatt and Swinton re-traced their bike ride in The Invisible Frame (2009); where there was once an imposing wall now existed lively new neighborhoods—signs of a once latent, now blooming cosmopolitan character that Berlin has become synonymous with since its reunification. 

Cynthia Beatt is a Berlin-based British filmmaker who grew up between Jamaica and the Fiji Islands. She studied at the Bath Academy of Art in England before working for 24 Frames in London and eventually settling down in Berlin. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, she worked with Arsenal and the International Forum of New Cinema to program retrospectives of Roberto Rossellini, Fritz Lang, Jean Rouch, Max Ophüls, and several other major filmmakers. 

In August, we’re taking a more relaxed pace; our films will screen for two weeks. Text written by Nicolas Pedrero-Setzer. Courtesy of Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg.