Mediated Cities- Reframing Berlin Architecture, Memory-Making and Film Locations

Reframing Berlin investigates the concept of urban memory through the transformation and/or consistency of the built environment. These architectural changes, defined as urban strategies, range from demolition (forgetting) to memorialisation (remembering) and are shown through case studies using film locations in Berlin. 64 b/w illus.

A study of the ways Berlin has been depicted in cinema and the ways its architectural transformations inform our understanding of the city and its memories.

Concerned with the connection between the built environment and the passage of time, Reframing Berlin uses film locations in the city to reveal the influence that urban transformation has on memory-making. Covering the city’s history since the beginning of cinema, the book proposes the term urban strategies to understand the range of consequential actions taken by politicians, developers, and other powerful figures to shape the nature and future of buildings, streets, and districts. Organizing these strategies from demolition to memorialization, the authors study the ways these actions forget or recall aspects of place. Using cinematic representations of Berlin as an audiovisual archive, the study details how the city has adjusted to its traumatic twentieth-century history through architectural transformations. Two dissimilar case studies frame each strategy, indicating that an approach that works for one building may not be sufficient for another.

Reframing Berlin is about how architecture and the built environment can reveal the memory of a city, an urban memory, through its transformation and consistency over time by means of ‘urban strategies’, which have developed throughout history as cities have adjusted to numerous political, religious, economic and societal changes. These strategies are organised on a ‘memory spectrum’, which range from demolition to memorialisation.

It reveals the complicated relationship between urban strategies and their influence on memory-making in the context of Berlin since 1895, with the help of film locations. It utilises cinematic representations of locations as an audio-visual archive to provide a deeper analysis of the issues brought up by strategies and case studies in relation to memory-making.

Foreword by Kathleen James-Chakraborty

A new volume in the Mediated Cities series from Intellect