BERLIN
City of the Imagination
Text by SUSAN INGRAM AND KATRINA SARK
CINEMAâS INVENTION at the end of the nineteenth century came at a good time for Berlin. The cityâs rollercoaster ride through the twentieth and now on into the twenty-first could thus be captured on celluloid, video, and, more recently, digitally. In this volume we see the city transform from an upstart industrial metropolis, capital of a warmongering imperial nation, to an economically ravaged one with the collapse and chaos that followed the loss of World War I. This in turn led to its crazy, glitzy Weimar heyday during the 1920s; the rise of Hitler and the Third Reich; the pummelling the city received at the end of World War II by Allied bombers that left it decimated and divided among the French, British, American and Soviet occupying forces, a division which took concrete form from 13 August 1961 to 9 November 1989. With the fall of the Wall, Berlin regained its status as capital and has been a construction site ever since, one increasingly present globally in no small part due to its booming film industry and glamorous international film festival.
Despite being a city whose only constant has been rapid, disorienting change â a city, as Karl Schefflerâs 1910 bon mot has it, âcondemned forever to become and never to beâ â Berlin from the perspective of its cinematic history seems to be a remarkably stable place. Sites and even characters return decades later, bearing the memories of their earlier appearances. The youthful suicide in Rosselliniâs 1948 Germania, anno zero/Germany Year Zero is an homage to the one in the socially critical Kuhle Wampe (SlĂĄtan Dudow, 1932) that results in âone worker fewerâ, and makes viewers appreciate all the more the resolve of the young girl in Ostkreuz (Michael Klier, 1991); the clown Emil Janning is reduced to playing in Der blaue Engel/The Blue Angel (Josef von Sternberg, 1930) reappears in a spyâs disguise at the beginning of Octopussy (John Glen, 1983), the only James Bond film shot in Berlin; the Neukölln swimming pool, which proves decisive to the spy-protagonist in his quest for neo-Nazis in The Quiller Memorandum (Michael Anderson, 1966), returns appropriately outfitted with a swastika in Valkyrie (Bryan Singer, 2008); the pedestrian bridge over the Ringbahn that Sunny crosses in Solo Sunny (Konrad Wolf and Wolfgang Kohlhaase, 1980) is the same one the son jogs over in Sommer vorm Balkon/Summer in Berlin (Andreas Dresen, 2005). Places like Alexanderplatz and Potsdamer Platz, the Brandenburger Tor and the Reichstag, the Olympic Stadium and Zoo Station recur from one decade to the next, sometimes the better, sometimes the worse for wear but nevertheless anchoring and lending historical texture to Berlinâs urban fabric.
Funeral in Berlin (1966)
Kobal / Above © 2010 Celluloid Dreams, Constantin Film Produktion, Rat Pack Filmproduktion
The durability of cinematic Berlin could well have something to do with the cityâs mediality. Spaces long since destroyed endure in older films and are reconstructed and re-signified in newer ones and by new technologies. With each technological innovation we re-imagine our relationship with the city and its spaces. The Skladanowskysâ camera was the first to do this, while iPhone apps and GPSs are the most recent, making the history of Berlin film implicitly also a history of technology. Thanks to online services like Google maps and Flickr, it has become easy to find out, for example, how close the Glienicke BrĂŒcke, the bridge which the young woman throws the money from in Unter den BrĂŒcken/Under the Bridges (Helmut KĂ€utner, 1944), is to the JagdschloĂ Glienicke, the hunting lodge where the remake of MĂ€dchen in Uniform/Girls in Uniform (GĂ©za von RadvĂĄnyi, 1958) was filmed. Such a search also reveals their proximity to Studio Babelsberg.
We are the Night (2010)
Cinematic Berlin is a place of great liquidity, both literal and figurative. Water is a subtle presence, whether in swimming pools, lakes (from the Tegeler See in the north to the GroĂer Wannsee in the southwest and the GroĂer MĂŒggelsee in the southeast), the Landwehrkanal and the Spree. Keeping oneâs head above water provides a great deal of narrative impetus.
Cinematic Berlin is a place of great liquidity, both literal and figurative. Water is a subtle presence, in swimming pools, lakes, the Landwehrkanal and the Spree.
What does cinematic Berlin look like? Initially, it was a place of great (com)motion with a focus on the hustle and bustle of the street. Hitlerâs attempt to metamorphose it into monumentality was spectacularly unsuccessful, with the Olympic Stadium his only real success. Reconstruction during the post-war period established a certain canon of buildings between the train station at Zoologischer Garten and the elegant shopping allĂ©e of KurfĂŒrstendamm as representative of the city, most prominently the bomb-damaged tower of the GedĂ€chtniskirche and the Europa Centre with its rotating Mercedes star. Then, of course, there was the Wall. Since reunification, film-makers have tended to either seek out locations off the beaten tourist track, such as the supermarket in Lola Rennt/Run Lola Run (Tom Tykwer, 1998), the balcony in Sommer vorm Balkon/Summer in Berlin (Andreas Dresen, 2005), the Teufelsberg spy station in Wir sind die Nacht/We are the Night (Dennis Gansel, 2010) and the abandoned amusement park in Hanna (Joe Wright, 2011), or they have gone for sites of historical ignobility like the headquarters of the Wehrmacht officers (the so-called Benderblock) in Valkyrie (Bryan Singer, 2008) and the Stasi headquarters in Das Leben der Anderen/The Lives of Others (Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, 2006).
Despite the governmentâs best efforts to establish the Brandenburger Tor as the cityâs post-Wende representative centre, no doubt in the hope of capitalizing on its connotations of freedom as the backdrop of both JFKâs âIch bin ein Berlinerâ and Reaganâs âMr Gorbachev, tear down this wallâ speeches, the Gate has thus far proven unable to compete with the post-socialist TV Tower at Alexanderplatz, which was arguably the cityâs most popular symbol at the outset of the 2010s.
A BROADER SCOPE
Text by NORA GORTCHEVA
SPOTLIGHT
Wilhelmine Cinema in Berlin
SPANNING THE PERIOD from the âbeginningsâ of cin...