Educational Media Reviews Online

The American Sector attempts to document the location and setting of all the pieces of the Berlin Wall in the United States. Following the reunification of East and West Germany, the Berlin Wall was dismantled. The resulting pieces were acquired by entities worldwide, often to display them in various ways. Many pieces ended up in the United States in various settings.

The film does a good job documenting the locations of the known pieces of the Berlin Wall in the United States and how they are displayed. The film documents pieces in nineteen states plus Washington, D.C. As expected, many of the pieces ended up in museums and government sites. However, pieces also ended up in libraries, parks, colleges, military settings, private land, and fraternal groups and societies. The American Sector films each wall fragment in its displayed location and usually says something about how it is displayed. The fragments are pretty large and require construction equipment to set up and move, thus limiting the locations the wall pieces can be displayed. The film does a decent job discussing the logistics involved in acquiring and setting up a wall fragment.

On the negative side, the film does not usually state why the group responsible for acquiring the piece wanted it and what the site is attempting to accomplish by installing the wall fragment. In most cases, the film shows all sides of the wall fragment, and it is clear that graffiti usually covers one side. The graffiti varies in quality from crude to quite sophisticated. The film notes that graffiti added to the fragments by current viewers is a ubiquitous problem for most sites displaying wall fragments.

The American Sector is Recommended with Reservation for several reasons. Although it does an excellent job of documenting the location and setting of the known pieces of the Berlin Wall in the United States, the film provides too little context. There is almost no rationale for why any of the sites chose to display a portion of the wall where and how they did. There is no good way to locate the portion of the film discussing any particular section and no order to the locations of the wall fragments. The film is too long for most academic settings and too monotonous for a sixty-nine-minute casual viewing.

This film is most useful in the academic setting where individual displays can be discussed and critiqued.

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