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 […]
Sunday Documentary – Hansa Studios: By The Wall 1976-90
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 […]
Sunday Documentary: Background to Berlin
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 […]
Sunday Documentary: Gaming Beyond the Iron Curtain: East Germany
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 […]
Sunday Documentary: Berlin – Symphony of a Great City
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 […]
Sunday Documentary: Berliner Trance
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. […]
Sunday Documentary: Degenerate Art
Degenerate Art is a documentary by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art based on the exhibition Degenerate Art: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany that they put on at the Altes Museum in Berlin in 1992. As with the Nazi book burning of 1933, classifying particular works as degenerate art was part […]
Sunday Documentary: Nazi Book Burning
In the short documentary, Nazi Book Burning, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum presents the events of 1933 in Germany and discusses why regimes like the Nazis target culture and in particular books. Shortly after the Nazis’ rise to power, picking up on the government’s desire to ‘purify’ German culture and society, the National Socialist […]
Sunday Documentary: Stranger in a Strange Land – Nick Cave in Berlin
Produced by Bram van Splunteren for the Dutch TV channel VPRO, the documentary, Stranger in a Strange Land was filmed in 1987 while Nick Cave was living in West Berlin. The voice-over is in Dutch but the interviews with Cave, which form the backbone of the film, are conducted in English. As are those with […]
Sunday Documentary: The Red Elvis – The Story of Dean Reed
The documentary, The Red Elvis, tells the story of the American folk-rock singer Dean Reed, who emigrated to East Germany in 1973 and became a poster boy for the Communist regime. Born in Denver, Colorado, Reed was relatively unknown in America in contrast to his fame behind the Iron Curtain. In 1958 he signed to […]