Berlin: palimpsests of a great city

Owen Evans

Landscape Research, 2022, vol. 47, issue 7, 840-850

Abstract: Can there be another European city that has undergone so many dramatic transformations over the past hundred years as Berlin? The city has seen so much of history, created, and been the subject of, so many stories, and thus comprises so many versions of itself. The present article explores how Berlin films contain multiple historical and textual palimpsests, focussing on Walther Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a Great City as the urtext of all subsequent Berlin films. Particular attention will then be paid to Berlin Symphony, Thomas Schadt’s riposte to Ruttmann’s film seventy-five years on, and the more recent Symphony of Now, directed by Johannes Schaff and which, in effect, responds to both. This article argues that these films, in complementary ways, uncover the cultural, historical and architectural palimpsests inscribed within the fabric of the city in their response to Ruttmann’s urtext.

Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/01426397.2022.2081316 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:clarxx:v:47:y:2022:i:7:p:840-850

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/clar20

DOI: 10.1080/01426397.2022.2081316

Access Statistics for this article

Landscape Research is currently edited by Dr Anna Jorgensen

More articles in Landscape Research from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().