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A mixture of documentary and loosely scripted drama, the black and white film, People on Sunday was a surprise hit when it was released in February 1930 in Berlin. Described in the titles as Film Studio 1929’s ‘first experiment…a film without actors’, the main action in People on Sunday revolves around a day trip to […]
If you have lived in or even visited Berlin, the chances are that you’re very familiar with the S- and U-Bahn but did you know that the German capital also once had an M-Bahn? The Berlin M-Bahn (short for Magnet-Bahn) was a Maglev, or magnetic levitation) train system, which is described in detail in this […]
There are several people and events that get cited as contributing to the fall of the Berlin wall and the Bruce Springsteen East Berlin Concert in 1988 comes up often. The Boss was at the height of his fame, a rock ’n’ roll demigod, who embodied an all-American spirit due to the associations with his […]
The Open University’s short film Bauhaus: Design in a Nutshell sums up the Bauhaus movement in an easy to follow 2 minute video. The school, which was founded in Weimar in 1919 by Berlin-born architect Walter Gropius, revolutionised art and design in the twentieth century. As it says in the the video’s description on YouTube: […]
If you asked music fans to name the studio where their favourite songs and albums were recorded you would most likely be met by a wall of blank looks, except perhaps if that music was recorded at Hansa Studios in Berlin. Hansa Studios: By The Wall 1976-90 is a documentary that tells the story of […]
A tweet from NATO marking the 70th anniversary of the start of the Berlin Airlift led me to the recently recovered documentary Background to Berlin. The film is part of the “Atlantic Review series” developed between 1959 and 1968 by the NATO Information Service. This film tells the story of the city of Berlin from […]
Gaming Beyond the Iron Curtain: East Germany is a short documentary about the personal computer and arcade video game industry in the GDR during the Cold War. As the narrator, Super Bunnyhop, summarises at the end of the video: If you ever need an example of the complicated intersection between politics and entertainment, look no […]
Berlin – Symphony of a Great City, released in 1927, is a classic of the golden age of silent film and a compelling document of life in Berlin in the interwar years. The film is presented as a day in the life of Berlin but Walter Ruttmann edited together footage recorded over the course of […]
Berliner Trance is a 1993 documentary that charts the rising popularity of trance music and the MFS record label from its origins in post-wall Berlin. Trance music is a kind of dance music which thousands of young people across Germany and throughout Europe are quite passionate about. It’s a musical movement which is gaining strength. […]
In the UK, ‘leaves on the tracks’ is a much-ridiculed excuse for late running trains but in Berlin in Autumn 2016 an U-Bahn carriage filled with leaves caused disruption on the city’s U2 line; the seasonal prank was an art intervention by local graffiti and street art collective TOY Crew called Leaf the Train. The […]
