Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927)

[lester1/2jr]

You'll either like this or you won't.  I don't know how much of the editing and musical stuff was added later but as it is this was excellent.  It's an hour long and the editing is precise, with typical german obsessions with machinery ,hard work, etc.   Berlin seems alot like what Detroit would become during the auto boom.  a well oiled machine with happy hard working people at all levels of society though of course, things would take a turn for the worse quite soon. 


                      At almost exactly one hour in to this there is a guy who looks like a young Adolph Hitler enjoying a beer at a bar.  I doubt it is him, but it just reminds you of what was around the corner.  It actually looks alot like Downtown Crossing in Boston, of all places. The bonus feature is a relatively modernistic (schoenberg, etc)  classical piece with weird shapes sort of interpretting the music.  It's not the greatest story ever told but it is a good song and the images are funky in a very basic abstract sort of way.



here is the best part, the evening entertainment

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzZI9bQ0cxA
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possible hitler siting is at 7:28 (background)

[soylentgreen]

I can never get tired of footage of city-life from the 1920s...especially Berlin, as it falls right into my area of study.   
Ahhh..to have had a chance to visit one of the raucous bierkellers    or slip into some out-of-the-way "blaue Engel"  ....

Interesting, but perhaps not surprising, is the involvement of noted cameraman Karl Freund, cinematographer for Lang on METROPOLIS. Those of us weaned on too much classic tv will no doubt recognize his name(it's HUGE on the screen in a way credits never are anymore!) from the crawl at the end of I LOVE LUCY.

Lester, if this piques your interest in life in mid-to-late Weimar Berlin, you might want to check out Otto Friedrich's BEFORE THE DELUGE.  It's a fascinating glimpse into the Berlin of the 20s, easily the most modern and exciting of European cities at the time.  It's a pretty good read.

[peter johnson]

This looks terrific, really -- just the sort of 20's modernism that I find thrilling & full of promise --
While hardly comparable, I did go to "Raucken Bierkelleren" (Literally, "smoking beercellars") in Berlin in the '70's. 
It was a wild time behind The Wall -- Many people don't know that what was West Berlin proper actually encompassed a lot of countryside as well, including lakes and farms and woodlands.  There was a huge nude-beach area -- may still be there -- on the Grundwaldsee just at the end of the subway lines.  You could drink in public too, and nobody paid any attention to "Hashchish" either.  In the city, there were still a plethora of basement cabaret jazz clubs playing some of the most far-out stuff I've ever heard -- I'll never forget the drummer who used shoe-trees & shoe-extenders instead of drumsticks.  The prostitutes would chat with the mothers & children on the streets & everyone knew each other.  I walked down streets that had been missed by the Allied Urban Renewal Project, aka the bombings of WW2, and they still looked like the sets to "M". 
Certainly the atmosphere was amped up by the fact that if you walked far enough in any direction, you eventually came to The Wall itself, which was pretty damn intimidating:  Guard towers in the East were stuck to the sides of buildings like mud-dauber wasp nests.  Every guard tower you looked at had someone looking back at you with binoculars.  Add to this the sheer imposing presence of the Wall itself:  Two layers of 8ft concrete, with a raked kill zone in between, added to a third layer of wire specially designed to cut the fingers off of anyone who grabbed on and tried to climb.  Never mind the barbed wire, which was still there but superceded by the more modern additions.  Also in evidence were these innocuous-looking cone-shaped devices at random points in the wire and on the inner layers.  These were motion-sensitive blunderbuss-type automatic weapons that were designed to spray a flyswatter-circle of bullets should some unlucky soul activate them.
Being a hippie-type with the usual leftist/socialist politics that we all affected back then, while I certainly enjoyed the manic freedom and creativity of West Berlin, I was even more impressed by the sad lie that was East Berlin.  Helped make me the Libertarian I am today . . .
peter johnson/denny crane