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World Film Locations Berlin
By Susan Ingram Intellect Ltd
Copyright © 2012 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84150-631-9
CHAPTER 1
BERLIN
City of the Imagination
Text by SUSAN INGRAM AND KATRINA SARK
CINEMA'S INVENTION at the end of the nineteenth century came at a good time for Berlin. The city's 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 – a city, as Karl Scheffler's 1910 bon mot has it, 'condemned forever to become and never to be' – 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 Rossellini's 1948 Germania, anno zero/Germany Year Zero is an homage to the one in the socially critical Kuhle Wampe (Slátan Dudow, 1932) that results in 'one worker fewer', 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 spy's 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 Berlin's urban fabric.
The durability of cinematic Berlin could well have something to do with the city's 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 Skladanowskys' 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 Brücke, the bridge which the young woman throws the money from in Unter den Brücken/Under the Bridges (Helmut Käutner, 1944), is to the Jagdschloß Glienicke, the hunting lodge where the remake of Mädchen in Uniform/Girls in Uniform (Géza von Radványi, 1958) was filmed. Such a search also reveals their proximity to Studio Babelsberg.
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 Großer Wannsee in the southwest and the Großer Müggelsee in the southeast), the Landwehrkanal and the Spree. Keeping one's head above water provides a great deal of narrative impetus.
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. Hitler's 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 allée of Kurfürstendamm as representative of the city, most prominently the bomb-damaged tower of the Gedächtniskirche 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 government's best efforts to establish the Brandenburger Tor as the city's post-Wende representative centre, no doubt in the hope of capitalizing on its connotations of freedom as the backdrop of both JFK's 'Ich bin ein Berliner' and Reagan's 'Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall' speeches, the Gate has thus far proven unable to compete with the post-socialist TV Tower at Alexanderplatz, which was arguably the city's most popular symbol at the outset of the 2010s.
CHAPTER 2
A BROADER SCOPE
Text by NORA GORTCHEVA
SPOTLIGHT
Wilhelmine Cinema in Berlin
SPANNING THE PERIOD from the 'beginnings' of cinema in 1895-96 to the first feature length films in the 1910s, Wilhelmine Cinema borrows its name from Kaiser Wilhelm II and is defined by his rule from the last decade of the nineteenth century to World War I. It merges technological ingenuity and entertainment, manifests wide stylistic, formal and genre variations, and provides a broad scope of exhibition practices. Invariably, the Wilhelmine period is put against what followed – Weimar cinema as the canonical period of early German film, and is often referred to as the pre-Caligari moment, as an insecure preparatory phase, or in the words of Paolo Cherchi Usai and Lorenzo Codelli as the terra incognita of early German cinema.
As the imperial capital, an explosive industrial metropolis and entertainment centre, Berlin contains the imprints of Wilhelmine film culture. The German capital was not the sole destination for cinema. Films travelled locally and were screened at a wide variety of venues outside of Berlin: fairgrounds, markets and variety shows. But it was Berlin that attracted big industry, concentrated population (close to two million at the turn of the twentieth century), and served as a stage for both imperial parades and for an expanding entertainment culture.
Berlin was the home of the film pioneers Skladanowsky, who developed the Bioscope projection apparatus. The Skladanowskys competed with the French Lumière brothers' Cinématographe but lacked the technical versatility, financial backing, and marketing foresight to reach the world popularity of their French counterparts. Initially exhibiting in the Café Feldschlößchen (which later became the popular Tivoli Cinema) in the Pankow neighbourhood in the north of Berlin, and on 1 November 1895 moving to the Wintergarten on Friedrichstraße in the city centre, the Skladanowskys exhibited moving pictures of a boxing kangaroo, folk dances from Italy and Russia, horse dressage, a juggler, a comedian, a boxing match, and finally, the showmen themselves bowing from the screen. The Skladanowskys also filmed Berlin's streets, capturing scenes from famous city locations: Alexanderplatz, Unter den Linden and Friedrichstraße.
If the Skladanowskys represented the ingenuity and excitement of the early film pioneers, it was the Berliner Oskar Messter who had both the technical expertise and business shrewdness to make cinema a permanent and lucrative occupation. Messter captured various Berlin sites: an ice ring at Berlin Zoo, Unter den Linden, and the train station at Warschauer Straße. Messter sustained his fascination with Berlin as a representative German capital and his company regularly offered newsreels, including phantom rides that captured the busy city traffic, city landmarks, the Berlin waterfront and parks. In addition to urban views, Messter was also interested in topical events and public figures. In 1897 he shot various imperial celebrations, leaving behind one of the first film records of Kaiser Wilhelm II. Messter remained committed to filming the monarch and the royal family, and through the years produced the popular 'Kaiserbilder' ('Kaiser pictures') series.
Messter's business in Berlin developed as an exemplary enterprise, combining the sale of film equipment, expanding production studios, and profitable distribution of diverse film genres – both newsreels (with the 'Messterwoche' or 'Messter week' series) and studio dramas, comedies, operettas and nationalistic propaganda. Messter experimented with images, adding coloured stock to the offerings on his film catalogue and developed the Biophon, a system which was similar to that of the French Gaumont and which allowed images to be exhibited in sync with original sound records. Between 1903 and 1908 Messter's 'Tonbilder' ('sound pictures') were screened regularly in Berlin theatres. Not the city images but the performances of established Berlin cabaret and operetta singers attracted wide public attention. Messter also capitalized on local talent and established one of Germany's first movie stars: Henny Porten.
In the 1910s Messter's interest in promoting stars and attracting established theatre names represented a broader trend. The phenomenon of the Autorenfilme (authors' films) emerged in the midst of fierce debates among cinema reformers and critics who struggled to come to terms with the medium's growing popularity as a social and cultural practice. The Autorenfilme drew on theatrical talent, either adapting or using new scripts by famous playwrights, ran in a feature length, and employed recognized theatre and cabaret actors.
Max Mack's Der Andere/The Other (1913) and Stellan Rye's Der Student von Prag/The Student from Prague (1913) represent defining features of the Autorenfilme, such as the appropriation of literary themes, psychological development of the characters, and predominant focus on studio settings. In contrast, another Autorenfilm, Mack's Wo ist Coletti?/Where is Coletti? (1913), placed the action in the Berlin streets and engaged both hired extras and passersby. Instead of exclusively relying on the theatrical credit of scriptwriter and actors, Where is Coletti? drew on the popular base of cinema – its absorbing fascination with speed, modern transportation and media sensations. The film also channelled the topical detective genre, which emerged in films such as Joseph's Delmont's Das Recht auf Dasein/The Right to be There (1913) and which strategically used the city as a versatile setting for spectacular urban chases.
Also emblematic of Wilhelmine cinema in Berlin is its diverse and dynamic exhibition culture. Between 1895 and 1913 films were shown at a wide variety of venues: international variety theatres (such as the Wintergarten), local theatres (such as the Ostend Theater in Friedrichshain), neighbourhood markets and beer gardens, the first stationary Kintopps cinemas (such as the Biograph Theater on Münzstraße close to Alexanderplatz), and finally in the first movie palaces (such as the Cines Nollendorfplatz in West Berlin), which foreshadowed the Golden Age of Weimar 'palaces of distraction'. Not only the actual film offerings but also the exhibition practices and architecture drew interest in the medium, defining cinema's path and institutionalized practice with a wide resonance in German society.
On the eve of World War I, Wilhelmine cinema blended technical ingenuity, business calculation, popular entertainment, nationalistic sentiment, artistic curiosity, and architectural monumentality in a mix which was conflictual, exciting and fruitful. Instead of a preparatory phase for the canonical Weimar period, Wilhelmine cinema should be seen as having its own unique culture, whose diversity and dynamism manifests most clearly in the history of early cinema in Berlin.
A RIDE THROUGH BERLIN/EINE FAHRT DURCH BERLIN (1910)
LOCATION
Friedrichstrasse and Leipzigerstrasse, 10117 Berlin
DRAWING ON AN EARLY FASCINATION with filming familiar city sights, A Ride through Berlin provides a brief tour of Berlin and captures views from the Friedrichstrasse, Leipzigerstrasse, the monument of Wilhelm I, the city palace, the Siegesallee and Siegessäule, and Old Berlin. Like other early film experiments by the Skladonowsky and Lumière Brothers, it represents an interest in the city as a site of business and leisure and as an imperial capital. A Ride through Berlin applies two distinct modes of urban observation. The first exploits cinema's capacity to document movement and simulate the perceptual experience of metropolitan life. A phantom ride across the Friedrichstrasse pictures Berlin as a mobile city – carriages, trams, buses and passersby are caught in a lively locomotion. Similarly, travelling shots from a boat scan the facades of Old Berlin, nearing a bridge animated by urban traffic. The second mode explores the capital as a representative royal seat and evokes an earlier photographic gesture of snapping still images from the surroundings. Pans and fixed long- and medium-shots of the Siegessäule, the monument of Wilhelm I, which was torn down together with the old city palace in 1950, and an extreme long shot of the palace impose a sense of sculptural immobility and stillness. In A Ride through Berlin the two modes blend, propelled by the technological mobility of cinematic vision and fixed in a meditation on imperial spectacle and pomp. ->Nora Gortcheva
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Excerpted from World Film Locations Berlin by Susan Ingram. Copyright © 2012 Intellect Ltd. Excerpted by permission of Intellect Ltd.
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