Berlin is a city with a complex history, and one that has made it a location of interest for writers and directors across a variety of film movements for close to a century.  This article gives you the lowdown on some of our favourite depictions where the city is just as much a star as any actor.

Germany as a whole boasted a booming film industry throughout the silent era, and in 1927 one film in particular focused solely on the allure of the capital. Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a Great City is a 65-minute foray into a day in late 1920s Berlin using solely documentary footage.  The film was produced just as the Weimar Republic had greatly expanded Berlin, incorporating many smaller towns into the capital.  Add to this the Berlin’s claim as one of the major industrial European cities at the time, it is no wonder that Ruttmann found it an appropriate subject to linger upon.  A mesmerising portrayal of the workings of the city, the film begins with a train heading for Berlin, and unfolds into several images of deserted streets, mannequins in the windows of eerily empty shops, and newsagents setting up their stands – a rare glimpse of a city not yet awake.   This is followed by a segment dedicated to tracking Berliners on their way to work, giving some idea of the city‘s vast population.  Industrial machinery is then focused upon for quite some time, building a sense of Berlin as a throbbing industrial city.  Interspersed are images of transport and technology, cut together to give an overall impression of the mechanisms that make up the fabric of the city.  As images of Berlin on film go, you really can’t get more accurate and honest than this.

Of all the atrocities of the Second World War, the damage done to the German film industry is, let’s face it, very much at the bottom of the list.  But the effect this had on the depiction of Berlin on film is nonetheless interesting.  Ultimately, control was taken away from the once prolific German filmmakers and placed into the hands of outsiders.  After years of propaganda films, post-war German cinemas were flooded with US movies making up for lost time at the box office.  It is only rare films such as Roberto Rossellini’s Germany Year Zero (1948) that truly focus on Berlin as any kind of backdrop.  The city was, of course, heavily bombed during the early 1940s, a fact that the opening titles of the film demonstrate immediately as the credits roll over images of a ruined Berlin.  Rossellini is a founding father of the Italian Neo-realist movement and as such seeks to show the truth in all of his work.  The images of the destroyed city shown in the film are real, and the story of a family’s struggle and ultimate failure to survive is all the more poignant for it.

In 1962 a group of German filmmakers completed the Oberhausen Manifesto.  Akin to similar movements such as the French New Wave and Italian Neorealism, the manifesto speaks of a “new film language”. This paved the way for the New German Cinema, which enabled a new group of directors to change the way in which Germany and, in particular, Berlin were depicted on film.  One of the more influential figures was Rainer Werner Fassbinder, whose The Marriage of Maria Braun, (1979) is often ranked among the greatest German films of all time.  Fassbinder tells the tale of a broken-hearted war widow who sleeps her way to the top of society and must live with the consequences.  The film‘s West Berlin origin and its melodramatic subject matter of a woman’s plight in post-war occupied Berlin mean that it is of interest on two levels.  While depicting Berlin in the late 1940s as a chaotic city in which one must remain ruthless in order to survive, the film also comments on the capitalism apparent in contemporary West Berlin and the similar chaos of the East/West divide.  Focusing less on the city as a landscape and more on the struggle of living in it, Maria Braun provides an excellent insight into what it has meant to be a Berliner.

Much like every city, Berlin has had its issues with drugs.  This is a feature of many a German film of the 70s and 80s, but it is Christiane F. – Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo (We Children from Barnhof Zoo (1981)) which has become the most notorious.  Perhaps because it is based on a true story, perhaps because its subjects are so young – our protagonist is only 13 at the start of the film – and certainly due to the exclusive use of David Bowie on the soundtrack, this is a film which still resonates today.  Fifteen years before Trainspotting and twenty five before Skins, director Uri Edel presents us with an urban landscape drained of colour and strewn with high-rise flats, dark corners, and drug addled teens.  Set in West Berlin during the 1970s, the film is based on interviews with and a subsequent book about Christiane Felscherinow who, during her teenage years in West Berlin, was both a heroin addict and a prostitute.  Gritty stuff indeed, the film speaks of a desolate city with a heartbreaking lack of prospects for its youth.

In 1987 Wim Wenders provided his perspective on Berlin.  Wings of Desire is set in West Berlin and follows two angels as they listen to the thoughts of the city‘s residents.  As one would perhaps expect from a film employing angels as its main characters, Wenders uses a wealth of wide panning shots of Berlin from above, which act almost as love letters from the director to the city.  The camera moves fluidly between streets and buildings, from one apartment to the next, as we hear the inner thoughts of each person we bump into.  The film breaks away from the realism of its predecessors in terms of narrative, but the images used stay true to the city and the ability to delve into the minds of the characters provides an unique depiction of the “mood“ of West Berlin in the late 1980s.

In 2003, Wolfgang Becker’s Goodbye, Lenin! caused something of a stir on an international level, and brought German filmmaking to the forefront once again.  Alex, wonderfully played by Daniel Bruhl, must hide from his mother (recently awoken from a coma) the fact that the Berlin Wall has fallen and capitalism is now having its way with her beloved East Berlin.   The premise of the film is neatly summed up by these opening words: “My name is Alexander Kerner.  I am an East German citizen and I have a problem.  The Wall is gone…” At once tragic and hilarious, the film gives some sense of the surreal nature of the changes that took place from 1989 onwards.  Peter Conrad has noted the bizarre reality of this newly unified city: “Planet Hollywood has landed beside the baroque churches of the Gendarmenmarkt, complete with palm trees and inflatable super-heroes.  Capitalism certainly won the ideological war, but it is hard to accord any moral victory to handbags, sneakers and tropical cocktails”.   This “new” Berlin must certainly have taken some getting used to by its citizens, who had been so used to living in a fractured city.  Goodbye, Lenin! captures this sense of confusion perfectly.  It is perhaps a sign of just how lengthy the readjustment process has been that only in 2003 did Germany produce a film poking fun, albeit light-heartedly, at its capital’s fraught history.

While tracing a city’s history will inevitably raise similar social and political issues, doing so using the films it has been a subject of helps to distinguish it from other places.  Only something so wholly reliant on the visual can incorporate a city’s true iconography into discussion, marking it as a story concerning Berlin in particular, rather than any old city.  We can read all we like about the industrialisation of Berlin in the 1920s or the city’s drugs crisis in the 1970s, but it is the films these events have inspired that often give us the clearest picture of life at the time.