I have written about how my serendipitous discovery of the Berlin film museum. On my fourth day of exploration I finally made it there, after a couple of hours at an enormous bookshop, and it turned out to be my number one favorite spot of all the places I've visited in the city. I spent a good three hours there, and it still wasn't enough.
The tour started on the third floor, in a room that looked like something out of a science fiction movie, followed by an exhibition about early German cinema. There, I saw old cameras, posters of early movies and even the tiny sequential photographs that constituted a recording of a wrestling match. There was an emphasis on the importance of some of the actresses in those first films, such as Asta Nielsen and Fern Andra.
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| The first Oscar ever award to an actor. It was awarded to Emil Jannings, a German actor. In the early days of cinemas, actors of many different nationalities worked in films, because the language of silent movies was an international one. |
Then I moved on to a room dedicated to the The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari, and pretty soon, some familiar names made appearances, for instanc Ernst Lubitsch and Fritz Lang. Posters or the movies, photographs of the crew, letters and documents related to the production accompanied clips of the movies and props, such as the porter's uniform from Porter's Uniform for Emil Jannings and the clay models of death and the seven deadly sins from Metropolis.
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| A model of the set for Fritz Lang's sound film M. There were many models such as this in the museum, one of the coolest things there. I particularly liked the model for the film Asphalt, which featured a street scene, designed so the cars could go round and round on a loop around the set, giving the impression of busy city traffic. |
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| From Metropolis |
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| Metropolis |
There was much to learn about Cinema in the Weimar Republicand how cinema was used as a tool by the Nazis, but I didn't have enough time to explore those sessions of the museum. The same can be said about all there was to see about more modern expressions of German cinema. Although I did see the wings used by Bruno Ganz in Wings of Desire. That was pretty cool.
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| The wings from Wings of Desire. |
My favourite part of the museum though was the Marlene Dietrich session. The Deutsche Kinemathek owns her estate, which includes all of her outfits, and several of those were on display there, protected by glass, right next to screen showing clips of the movies in which she was wearing those exact clothes. It was amazing. There were photos of her friends in old Holywood (more familiar faces), letters, journal pages and even her make up chest, with the mirror she used back in the day
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| Couldn't resist using Marlene Dietrich's mirror for a little bit :) |
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| A letter, written to her by Eric Maria Remarque |
The Deutsche Kinemathek came to be the best hidden gem in Berlin. There were people there, but very few, making my visit particularly relaxing and enjoyable. I learned a lot, added a ton of movies to my TBW list, got some nice pictures and stopped by the bookshop on the groundfloor on my way out. I had the best time. And by the way, the app with the audio guide of the tour is free to download, can be used anywhere and has a lot of cool info about the different exhibitions
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