Hollywood in Berlin : Movies: A Cold War retrospective tries to make sense of Germany’s past, but it’s Kevin Costner’s ‘Dances With Wolves’ that draws the crowds.

The Brandenburg Gate looms before us, its gray stone lit by New Year’s Eve fireworks. Juergen Boettcher’s camera lingers, then closes in on a segment of the dismantled Berlin Wall. The rough surface fills the screen, pale concrete chipped and fissured by history.

Suddenly, a square of light appears. And there, projected on the blemished wall itself, black-and-white documentary footage conjures up the ghosts of the past. In this film-within-a-film, men stack bricks at gunpoint; a woman dangles from a fourth floor window at the edge of freedom; a border soldier bounds over barbed wire. As grainy film unspools on gritty stone, we see the Brandenburg Gate again. But now it’s lit by the torches of a Nazi parade, and the smiling face watching it is Hitler’s.

This interplay of the concrete and the celluloid is a fitting metaphor for the 41st annual Berlin Film Festival, which screened Boettcher’s documentary, “The Wall,” last week.

It isn’t only that movie memories are evoked at every street corner by the festival’s Cold War retrospective of such films as “The Spy Who Came In From the Cold,” or “Man On a String,” a classic of camp in which Ernest Borgnine flees East Berlin in handcuffs and shoots it out with KGB agents in West Berlin’s Hotel Am Zoo.

It isn’t just the surrealism of seeing “I Was a Communist for the FBI” in a Stalinist-style movie palace on East Berlin’s Karl-Marx Allee. The 550-seat theater, marooned near the intersection of bleak boulevards built for May Day tank parades, was all but empty at the Saturday morning showing of the 1951 B-movie.

But an enchanted overflow crowd filled the theater Tuesday night, when a repeat screening of Kevin Costner’s “Dances With Wolves” brought the wide open plains of North Dakota to people who used to live behind a wall.

At this festival, held at a time when a Cold War retrospective has begun to seem premature and the hot war in the Gulf is simmering to a boil, illuminating juxtapositions of life and film can also be a matter of conversations between screenings, of confessions off the screen.

“Of course, you don’t get used to your friends being shot,” Valentina Freimane, a 69-year-old Riga film critic, said as she waited for a showing of “The Godfather Part III.” “We just buried our second cameraman. He was 32, and he left two small children.”

Freimane wasn’t talking about a movie; she was describing life in Latvia, one of the Baltic republics struggling for independence under the gun barrels of the Soviet army.

A few minutes earlier, actor Michael Gwisdek, who plays a target of the East German secret police in the movie “The Tango Player,” was recalling his conversations with Stasi agents. Both versions, that is--on screen and off.

The movie, one of the last productions of the East German DEFA studio, includes scenes where two Stasi agents pressure Dallow, played by Gwisdek, to return to the university as an informer. He has just served 21 months in prison for playing the musical accompaniment to a “subversive” song in a Leipzig student cabaret, though he was only an unknowing last-minute substitute at the piano. For months he angrily refuses to cooperate with the system. But when the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia triggers new political ousters at the university, he returns to take a vacated professorship, nodding politely to a Stasi agent in the hall.

“I never tortured myself as much as in this film,”’ confessed Gwisdek, who said he spent eight months in prison in the 1960s for helping a friend join his family in West Berlin. Later he had three encounters with Stasi agents. “One meets two or three times and speaks about how one doesn’t want to meet,” he recalled, dragging hard on his cigarette.

“They stay friendly, you try to stay friendly. They had complete power over people. Now nobody wants to say how they made their arrangements. I, too, have the problem of repressing the past.”

Against a background of such stories, the festival’s Cold War retrospective showings are full of ambivalent laughter. All the melodramatic paranoia of an era is captured, for instance, in the title of one 1949 movie, “I Married a Communist,” in which Laraine Day marries San Francisco waterfront executive Robert Ryan without knowing he’s in the clutches of the Reds. But there’s a contemporary bite to the joke. Last month tout- Berlin was discussing the real case of American Lynne Whitmore, who gave up her apartment and job as a graphic designer in Boston to move to Berlin with the charming deputy press attache of the U.S. Mission. Two months into the whirlwind romance, the attache, Steve Laufer, was exposed as a KGB agent.

“Now all we need is a movie called ‘I Married an Islamic Fundamentalist,’ ” joked Melissa Drier, an American writing for the festival’s official journal. Then she remembered such a movie is already in the theaters, only it’s titled “Not Without My Daughter.”

To Karsten Witte, a leading West German film critic, the most fascinating aspect of the retrospective is the interchangeability of Cold War movies from either side of the Iron Curtain.

“We sit there as historians,” Witte said, “but just permit yourself to think, what would have happened if they had imported each other’s films instead of banning them?”

Witte had just seen “The Russian Question,” a 1948 Soviet film set in a New York City newspaper where downtrodden, whiskey-swigging reporters write anti-Communist lies for a capitalist publisher. One honest journalist refuses to play along when ordered to write a book saying the Russians want war, after determining for himself that they really want peace. Many whiskeys later, he loses his job, his house and his meretricious wife. But, the narrator intones, he takes his rightful place in “the other America--the America of Lincoln and Roosevelt.”

Ambivalence about America still runs strong here. At the European film market, the bottom-line section of the festival where distributors from 37 countries hunt for next year’s hits, Eastern European film reps spoke of Hollywood’s overwhelming dominance with despair.

Judit Sugar, of the Hungarian distribution agency Cinemagyar, called the situation “drastic and tragic.” In Hungary, where inflation, recession and the influx of VCRs have cut moviegoing by 30%, 13 of the 14 top-grossing films last year were American. Even “My 20th Century,” a Hungarian film recently released internationally to rave reviews and full houses, sold only 20,000 tickets in Hungary, compared to 1 million for Hollywood’s “Look Who’s Talking,” Sugar said.

“American films are what people want to see,” shrugged film distributor Richard Pospieszynski from Poland, where the collapse of state subsidies has left 600 film directors unemployed.

That seems to hold true even at the festival, known as a showcase for esoterica and a magnet for European film buffs. Offerings this year range from French director Jacques Rivette’s 12-hour opus, “Out One,” to Pavel Koutsky’s 4-minute Czech animation, “100 years of Marxist-Leninism in Bohemia,” and from “An Angel at My Table,” Jane Campion’s achingly beautiful story of a New Zealand writer, to the black comedy, “I Hired a Contract Killer,” by Finland’s Aki Kaurismaki.

But even in the off-beat sections, the buzz is about American independent films, including Todd Haynes’ “Poison,” Stephen Frears’ “The Grifters” and Barbara Kopple’s searing documentary, “American Dream.” And in the main competition, American productions have consistently drawn the biggest crowds.

That’s no cause for embarrassment, said Valentina Freimane, the Latvian film critic, whose own life sounds like a movie about the terrors of the 20th Century: Her Jewish parents killed in the Riga ghetto; her first husband shot by the Nazi Gestapo; her second husband shipped to Siberia.

“I like cinema, not ideas of cinema,” she declared, praising “Dances With Wolves” as “a real movie,” and running, breathless, to watch the last days of Godfather Michael Corleone.