October sees Watershed celebrate Berlin On Film with a new weekly series

October sees Watershed celebrate Berlin On Film with a new weekly series

Posted on: 27 Sep 2023

Running every Sunday (and one special weekend) throughout October, Out Of The Rubble: Berlin On Film focuses on cinema from the post First World War period until the fall of the Berlin Wall.

 

Part of Bristol Ideas’ 2023 Festival of the Future City, Out Of The Rubble: Berlin On Film will run from Sunday 1 until Sunday 29 October 2023.

 

This series focuses on a country coming out of the ‘rubble’ of Berlin throughout the twentieth century – from the post First World War exhaustion to the wall’s final days – and includes some of the history’s most iconic films. Series screenings include F.W. Murnau’s silent masterpiece The Last Laugh, the Peter Falk starring Wings of Desire and more.

 

Find out more and book tickets from the Watershed’s website.

 

 

Berlin was a troubled city for much of the 20th century. Following the end of the First World War and the declaration of the Weimar Republic, it was a city of vibrant, cosmopolitan, left wing culture, however, it was also home to riots and political turmoil. It was then the capital of Nazi Germany before being destroyed in the Second World War.

 

Post war, Germany and Berlin were split in two, a divide that was cemented by the Berlin Wall until 1989 when the Velvet Revolution led to the fall of Communism, the beginning of reunification and, eventually, the restoration of the city as Germany’s capital.

 

 

The series will kick off with The Last Laugh (1924) at 2 PM on Sunday 1 October. A landmark silent film, F.W. Murnau’s masterpiece is one of the Weimar Republic’s most notable artistic works, depicting the anguish of the working class through the character of an ageing doorman relieved of his duties.

 

German, Year Zero (1948) follows at 2 PM on Sunday 8 October. The final part of Roberto Rossellini’s war film trilogy, it depicts Allied occupied Germany using mainly local, non-professional actors, using Berlin locations to highlight the grim reality of the near total destruction post war.

 

 

2 PM on Sunday 15 October will see a screening of Wings of Desire (1987). A haunting love letter to Berlin, this masterpiece transcends the city’s concrete barriers. An impassive angel watches over Berlin on a winter morning, he wants nothing more than to be human – a film that is both sorrowful and joyful in equal measure.

 

Asphalt (1929) will be screened at 2 PM on Sunday 22 October. Directed by Joe May, this is one of the last great German Expressionist films of the silent era, a complex cinematic love story set amongst the traffic strewn Berlin of the 1920s. It is a sensual exploration of life in the Berlin underworld.

 

 

The series will conclude on the weekend of Saturday 28 October with a two-day long screening Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980). Based on Alfred Döblin’s modernist novel from 1929, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s fifteen-hour long epic is one of the great films of the twentieth century.

 

Follow ex-convict Franz Biberkopf as he attempts to reintegrate as an ‘honest soul’ despite the pull of the criminal underworld, all set amid the backdrop of a cold and desperate Berlin. The film will be show its entirety in chunks across the two days.

 

 

Part of Bristol Ideas’ 2023 Festival of the Future City, Out Of The Rubble: Berlin On Film will run from Sunday 1 until Sunday 29 October 2023. To book tickets for these screenings, head to the Watershed website.

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Article by:

Stanley Gray

Stan is a born and bred Bristolian, recently graduated from studying English Literature in Sheffield. His passions are music and literature and he spends the majority of his time in venues all over the city, immersing himself in Bristol’s alternative music scene. A lifelong Bristol City fan, Stan’s Saturdays are spent watching his team both home and away.