Watching the skies: Luca Buvoli and Holly Zausner share an interest in film, sculpture and airborne forms. Buvoli's most recent animated short explores the poetics and politics of flight. Zausner's 35mm film features rubber figures in slow motion above Berlin

For the rest of this roughly 8-minute film, we see Zausner on a variety of Berlin rooftops, performing duets with her colorful rubber sculptures, which is in fact what these strange floppy things are. The sites were selected not only for their visual properties but also for their historical associations. In addition to performing on Mies's modernist monument, which is located close to where the Berlin Wall stood, Zausner also appears on the roof of the Max Tauthaus, originally a department store designed by the famous modernist Max Taut and now a residential and commercial building whose tenants include filmmaker Wim Wenders; the roof of the Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (DAAD), a foundation that sponsors artists and writers to live and work in Berlin; and a rooftop from which one can see the famous Pergamon Museum. Two of the most striking shots, both toward the end of the film, show Zausner on the roof of the Altes Museum and the Zeughaus, surrounded by large Neo-Classical statuary. The Altes Museum (1822-30) was designed by Karl Friedrich Schinkel, whose work influenced Mies. The Zeughaus, originally an arsenal, served as a military museum under both the Prussians and the Nazis, and became a museum of German history for the Communists and, since 1990, for the reunited Germany as well. The final scenes were shot on the roof of the building that houses the offices of the Berliner Zeitung, a wide-circulation daily newspaper. Here, it was not the building itself that mattered so much as the view it offered of the Mitte, a neighborhood that was once Berlin's Jewish quarter and that has become, in recent years, the center of the city's thriving art scene.

As well as summoning up the history of Berlin, Zausner, an American who divides her time between Berlin and New York, evokes a range of emotions in the film. Sometimes she emphasizes the physical effort involved in hefting the larger sculptures. With their over 30 pounds of elongated deadweight, they are both literal and symbolic burdens, seeming in some shots like colorful cadavers that the artist engages in a kind of danse macabre. Other scenes are of a more exuberant nature, suggestive of a child joyfully tossing a ball or piece of clothing into the air. Because they are made of rubber, a substance nearly impossible to break no matter how ill used, these pliable figures also seem to signify human resiliency.

In one striking scene atop the Neue Nationalgalerie, Zausner conveys a sense of tenderness and compassion as she lifts up a large violet sculpture (the genitals signal that it's a male figure), cradles it in her arms and then slowly lets it go. The effect is of a cinematic, secular Pieta. While each shot in the film is composed with attention to color, light and shadow, this one is especially effective, with the whites and grays of the smooth stones on the large-gravel roof, the glistening violet rubber and the mottled yellow wall of a large modernistic building (the Scharoun Bibliothek) in the background. It's a composition worthy of Godard or Antonioni. At the end of this shot, which looks like it was filmed in early morning or late afternoon, Zausner's body casts a distinctly Giacomettian shadow.