Leonard Bernstein Documentarian Brings "Bernstein's Wall" to Upstate, One Night Only

On Christmas Day 1989, about seven weeks after the Berlin Wall came down, Leonard Bernstein stood on a podium in East Berlin and conducted Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, with the text altered to celebrate a reunited Germany. Filmmaker Douglas Tirola came across footage of that concert while researching a different project, and was pulled into a deep dive through a trove or writings and recordings that illuminated Bernstein's life. The result is the documentary Bernstein's Wall. Tirola brings the film to Upstate Films' Starr Cinema in Rhinebeck on Tuesday, October 27, for a one-night screening followed by a Q&A.

"I saw that, and that put me on a journey of looking at other things about Leonard Bernstein," Tirola has said. The film opened in July at Triplex Cinema in Great Barrington and the Moviehouse in Millerton. Tirola also directed Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead, the 2015 documentary about National Lampoon.

The film has no new interviews and no talking heads. Tirola built it from archival material, including TV interviews, audio tapes, home movies and letters, letting Bernstein essentially narrates his own story. "If we couldn't find him on TV, film, or in an audio interview or speech, we couldn't include it," Tirola says. In the film's press notes, he writes that "the film feels as if Bernstein just walked into a bar after a performance, sat next to you, and shared his story and most intimate thoughts." He describes the search for footage as "like going to a giant tag sale, looking for the rare gems."

The gems include Bernstein's civil rights and anti-Vietnam War activism, his 1965 march with Martin Luther King Jr. and his fundraising for AIDS research in the 1980s. The film also takes up his sexuality through his letters, including those to his mentor Aaron Copland and his wife, Felicia Montealegre. 

The region has its own Bernstein history. He was admitted to Serge Koussevitzky's conducting class at Tanglewood in the summer of 1940, at age 22, and Koussevitzky named him his assistant in 1942. He taught and performed there nearly every summer until 1990, when he conducted his last Tanglewood concert, Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, two months before he died.

Tirola says the Bernstein of the film speaks to current events. "A lot of the issues that we're dealing with now are things that he was talking about," he says. He hopes viewers leave with a particular message: "I'd love people to come away saying, 'The arts can make a difference. The arts can change someone's life.'"