After the Wall: Finding Meaning Amidst the Falling Debris by Jill Petzall, is reprinted from the from the fall 1991 ANGLES, a quarterly publication for women working in film and video:

The German summer heat of June 19th hardly seems conducive to recalling the chilling atmosphere of Nov. 9. There were three to remember. The first, back in 1919, was the formation of the German Weimar Republic. The next (the most chilling one by far) was the date of Crystal Night in 1938, when the Nazi government fully legitimized its persecution of the German Jewish population. Then ironically, festively, in 1989, the third Nov. 9 seemed to take the world by surprise. The Berlin Wall coming down, and celebrations, not the Nazis, claimed the streets throughout Germany.

But there I was, on June 19, 1990, standing on one of those German streets in Berlin, feeling the specter of Nov. 9. The Berlin Wall was still falling down. Happy debris lay at my feet in the solemn neighborhood. I was one of maybe 15 tourists gawking at the tall slabs of wall swinging on cranes, being hoisted (heavenward) and then lowered onto flatbed trucks. I kept feeling the excitement of looking into history.

But as the huge cement planks swung on metal ropes, guided and coaxed like elephants in a crowd, I saw only giant gravestones hovering above me. And I had brought my camera.

I am a video producer, director, writer, but never before had I professionally run the camera. Used to directing Betacam, my hi-8 MM camera felt more like a toy than serious equipment. But there were these memories before me. These impressions of what had happened while I was safe in the United States - all those countless victims dangling from history's incidental thread.

So I suspended my own intellect. I shot the images that felt important, although importance was not measured by history books nor by the other photographers, left eyes closed, around me. I shot color, movement, rustle and blur. I shot falter, and tensions, and determination and clash. I shot feet and their footprints, their struggle, and distance.

For the next few days, I wouldn't talk to myself. As I went about Germany shooting many disconnected images, I wouldn't enter into that filmmaker's well-known internal conversation about "Why are you capturing this on tape? How will you use this in editing? What story does this picture tell?" I was silent. I refused to anticipate, for fear of losing touch with the present-tense impressions.

Once back in the United States, I began to talk video to myself again. But in the off-line edit room, I discovered I didn't know the language in which I'd shot. This ignorance had nothing to do with my ignorance of the German language.

I've been spending days and nights in edit rooms for nearly 10 years now. But before I enter that most private of spaces, I have always had a plan. I know a general outfine of my story, know the soundbites I want to try out in real-time, and I know generally what it is that I want my video to say.

But this time, after logging my tapes, I wasn't sure how or where to start. Nor did I realize what I wanted all this footage to finally mean. So I started piecing together images, no logic at work, just shapes and colors. Just the free-associations of a day dream. But on re-play, it didn't make sense.

Big deal that a large bright rectangle moved left from the frame, cut to a small dark rectangle coming in from the right. Big deal that the sounds of the rushing trains seemed to run through the Jewish graveyard which I'd shot.

I was still playing with syllables. Not even whole words to form into a grammar. All these video pieces and ambient noises were pre-language babble. So I continued to play. First trying one combination of shapes and symbols, then followed by another set of symbols and shapes. Soon I began to feel a language forming. After about 20 hours of off-line, I began to think I saw conceptual phrases in the visual combinations.

My tape was beginning to talk to me. It said, "this set of images means this..." or "...this combination of colors and sounds contradict one another." By 30 hours I had achieved some meaning. I watched my rough cut and realized what my 7 minute piece was about. It was about finding progress where you least expect it, in the patient rubble of everyday experience. All the cranes and structures and people were reaching upward, as if toward a heavenly force that knew them.

But what was most valuable was close to the earth: the gravestones, the paths one takes, the fallenness of the wall. Music by Arvo Part and a poem by the late GermanJewish poet Paul Celan helped my images to say this too. My search for meaning had culminated in the edit room, learning to learn from my own astonishment, learning to trust my own silence, and to make sense out of a world of intuitions, both mine and history's others.