In search of the locations for Andrzej Żuławski’s Possession

Filmed in an icy Berlin when it was still divided, the classic 1981 psychodrama Possession found Ukrainian-born Polish director Andrzej Żuławski tapping into the tension and menace within the city’s streets. 

The unfolding marital drama sees Mark (Sam Neill), an intelligence officer back in from the cold after an assignment, discovering that his wife Anna (Isabelle Adjani) wants a divorce. Puzzled by this sudden decision, Mark attempts to find out the truth of the matter and discover who Anna is leaving him for. However, as he hires private detectives to follow her and get closer to the reality behind her increasingly bizarre behaviour, something more than a mere affair is found to be driving a wedge between them: something dark, eldritch and distinctly inhuman.

The Berlin of Żuławski’s film is cold and bleak. The director chooses a number of locations that are haunted by the presence of the Berlin Wall. An atmosphere of paranoia and dread permeates throughout. Whether in the gothic, cobbled streets of the city’s older districts or the frosty impersonality of the new post-war developments being built at the time, few urban portraits on screen feel as grimly morbid.

Here are five key locations from Possession as they stand today.

After a montage of Berlin, especially areas cut through by the Wall, the opening credits sequence ends by focusing on Anna and Mark’s apartment building. This is the film’s second most prominent building, which will be returned to throughout the drama and depicted in detail. We first see it when Anna is walking through the interior garden of the complex to meet Mark arriving in a taxi.

Anna exits the complex from the opening in the building that is seen on Bernauer Straße.

Cinematographer Bruno Nuytten then films the building from Bernauer Straße as Mark picks up his luggage. The street is almost exactly as it was.

Following this shot, we see the couple outside the building again, this time looking down another road running parallel to the building. This has since been pedestrianised.

The symmetry of the building’s architecture is something that the director takes advantage of a number of times with some typically uniform wide-angle shots. This shot of the building’s entrance is a good example.

After an important meeting, we see Mark leave his colleagues. The building is an unusual brutalist structure that covers a whole corner of Hohenzollerndamm in the Wilmersdorf district of the city.

Mark stops to adjust his suitcase, using one of the building’s brutalist pillars to balance his case against.

The camera then follows Mark, allowing for a view of the strange curvature of the building itself.

He then makes his way towards a red building in the background, which stands out beside the rest of the area’s grey concrete. This is the Fehrbelliner Platz U-Bahn station.

Later in the film, Mark meets his colleagues again on a bridge. The bridge is the Lohmühlenbrücke connecting the areas of Treptow and Neukölln over the shipping canal. Again, the location was likely chosen for the distinctive boarder marker of the Wall.

Mark meets the Man with Pink Socks (Maximilian Rüthlein), with whom he stands on a viewing platform seen in the earlier shot, giving a better view of the wall. The area around the bridge had a bigger cinematic role a few years later in Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire (1987).

Possession’s most famous scene is Anna’s gruesome breakdown as she becomes possessed while travelling the U-Bahn. The station where this occurs is Platz der Luftbrücke. Besides a missing escalator, it looks unchanged today.

Anna exits the main platform and wanders through the pedestrian tunnel. This is where she begins to scream, allowing for one of the standout scenes of Adjani’s career.

Anna ends up writhing around on the floor until eventually a gory mess is left intermingled with the shopping. This is a little way further down the tunnel and is again unchanged.

Anna eventually moves out to be with her apparent lover. A private detective (Carl Duering) is hired to follow her so Mark can find out about her secret second life. Anna is first seen heading towards the creature’s flat when running along the cobbles of Luckauer Straße in the Kreuzberg district.

The detective tracks Anna to a gothic mansion block intersecting Luckauer Straße and Sebastianstraße. He leans on the Berlin Wall, which once curved along the street. Cobbles on the road mark where the wall once stood

The detective plays for time as he waits for Anna, taking advantage of a burger van and the nearby phone box. Both have gone though, and it seems likely that the phone box was a prop.

Finally, Żuławski provides a variety of shots showing the building standing in the streets, using wide-angle shots to create a cold uniformity. Thankfully, its ominous architecture and busy design have lasted, though it has less of a grim atmosphere today.

IMDb

Possession is out on 4K UHD and Blu-ray from Second Sight on 15 December.