"Verena Rudolph, an actress and graduate of the Berlin Film Academy (dffb), also traffics in displacement. Her 45-minute work, Lucy (1984), like her more recent Francesca (1986), spans the borders of feature and documentary, artifice and artifact. The central conceit is a fabricated existence, the life of Rudolph's aunt who left a Southern German village in 1934 for America, never to be heard from again. The director, some fifty years later, travels to New York in search of traces. The individuals she encounters in Manhattan, mainly Blacks in Harlem and four old women, become the players in her film. They participate in the telling of Lucy's story, supply anecdotes, observations, insights, parts of an imagined destiny, bits and pieces of a fictional presence who becomes the collective production of these voices. The overall shape of this fantasy of an emigrant's fate in the New World as entertainer, gambler, and mischievous eccentric, remains the creation of Rudolph, a young filmmaker (she was born in 1951) working in Berlin. Like Alfred Behrens (PFA 4/87) and Clemens Klopfenstein (PFA 2/86), she has made a film about the collision of different times and cultures, a work in which the world takes on the countenance of a vast urban expanse. Shots from taxis in Harlem, glimpses of night-time neon accompanied by the downbeat music of John Coltrane, black-and-white images of worn-out interiors and run-down edifices: Lucy bears all the earmarks of the New Berlin aesthetics. It is a portrait of a woman and a city, but more than that the expression of a modern sensibility drawn to life in transit and eager to catch fleeting existence on the wing." Eric Rentschler