Berlin
Thomas H. Green
Berlin’s Paul Van Dyk has remained in or around the top ten of DJ Magazine’s defining annual poll of the top 100 DJs in the world for at least a decade, occasionally making the number one spot. Unlike all others in the current top 20, however, he’s the only one with a pedigree going back to contemporary club music’s roots. As Visions of Shiva at the dawn on the Nineties Van Dyk can claim to be one of the inventors of trance music, the style that, alongside recent dubstep developments, is at the root of massive American interest in what they laughably term “EDM” (electronic dance music). Later Read more ...
ronald.bergan
It was Lenin who realised early in the Russian Revolution that “of all the arts, film is for us the most important” and Hitler and Goebbels perceived the immense propaganda potential of the Olympics through the medium of film. The 1936 Olympic Games took place in Berlin a few months after Hitler’s armies occupied the Rhineland. Hitler spared no expense in making it the best organised and most efficiently equipped in the history of the Olympics.After Triumph of the Will (1935), the documentary of the 1934 Nuremberg Rally, the director Leni Riefenstahl became established as Germany’s foremost “ Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Lightness. Tenderness. Grace. These are not words you normally associate with Barenboim's pianism - not these days. But they were exactly the thoughts running through my head while listening to his performance of Mozart's C minor piano concerto last night at the Royal Festival Hall. Subtly marshalling his Staatskapelle Berlin from the keyboard, Barenboim was a wholly transformed figure from the ingratiating, lollipop-distributing showman I'd seen at the Tate Modern last year. It wasn't immediately certain that we weren't going to get Barenboim the splashy ringmaster again. The first Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The Red Army Faction was Germany's key revolutionary force for a decade from the late 1960s onwards, and its story, especially the characters of Ulrike Meinhof and Andreas Baader, has proved highly attractive to the country's filmmakers. Uli Edel’s 2008 The Baader Meinhof Complex told the key political story in lengthy detail through to its end in 1977 when four of its key members (in the official version) committed suicide in prison. One of them was Gudrun Ensslin, who became radicalized after she became a lover of Andreas Baader.In his first feature documentarist Andres Veiel tells a Read more ...
james.woodall
In a major festival upset last night, the Taviani brothers Paolo and Vittorio won the 2012 Berlinale’s best-film award, the Golden Bear. Their film, Cesare deve morire (Caesar Must Die), defies categories. Set in Rome’s Rebibbia maximum security jail, this extraordinary hour and a quarter charts the making by inmates of a production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.The sheer daring and troubling intimacy the directors bring to the dozen-plus prisoners’ engagement with drama clearly knocked sideways the Berlin jury, headed by Mike Leigh. There was much else to choose from, including Barbara Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Melancholia and The King’s Speech were the big winners at the European Film Awards in Berlin last night. Last year, Roman Polanski accepted The Ghost’s numerous awards in Tallinn by Skype, self-exiled by his deeds (and the fear of being clapped in irons by the US if he travelled). It was Lars von Trier’s words which kept him away as Melancholia won Best Film. The furore at Cannes when, musing on his recently discovered German ancestry (having previously thought himself Jewish), he joked with trademark provocation that he was a “Nazi” has made the Dane take a vow of public silence, sending his Read more ...
David Nice
Ken Russell is, it seems, alive and well and directing Germans in Shakespeare. Actually, no, it's outgrown theatrical terrorist Thomas Ostermeier, but it might as well be our Ken to judge from the fitfully imaginative but repetitive images and the misappropriation of possibly fine actors. It seems old hat to us, but perhaps in two respects Londoners may strike Berliners as conservative. We still like our Hamlet in sequence - cut, usually, but with the expected beginning, middle and end. And we're still inclined to talk about Michael Sheen's Hamlet, or Rory Kinnear's, or Simon Russell Beale's Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It sounds Vietnamese. A wordless vocal floats above bowed strings. Chiming strings drift in, shimmering. Piano notes twinkle. Musical fog, it rolls in and is then suddenly gone. “In the Valley” opens Music for Confluence. It’s a perfect evocation of geography and environment.The sense of his music being informed by the spatial is reflected by Broderick’s path. Born in Maine, he’s spent time in Oregon and then, in 2007, joined Danish moodists Efterklang, whom he worked with live and in the studio until last year. He settled in Denmark and also recorded solo on labels based in Sweden, Denmark, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
You’ve got to love the “I Can Only Give You Everything” riff. Admiral Black do and base their “Got Love if You Want It” around an inverted version on their debut album. Cheese-wire fuzz guitar pulses, Bo Diddley drums bash and a wheezy organ, well, wheezes. From the borrowed title alone, it’s obvious where Admiral Back are coming from: classic Sixties-leaning rock. It's not all scuzz and psych though in the house of Black. “Madman’s Blues” drifts by in a haze and “Crystallised” begs for lighters in the air and a swaying audience.Not to be confused with the Chicago rock/metal outfit Admiral of Read more ...
Joe Muggs
If there's one electronic sub-genre that is not worth approaching blind it's “tech-house”. Since the late Nineties, it has tended to be the most functional and generic of club soundtracks, a steady, decadent plod, all clean lines and predictable shifts: nothing to frighten the horses or interrupt the steady progress of weekend hedonism. In short, boring. However, there are practitioners who have raised its slowly evolving repetitions to an art form that has life outside the club: the Kompakt label, Chilean maverick Ricardo Villalobos, and Brightonian in Berlin Matt “Radio Slave” Edwards.This Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Never knowingly under-mythologised, U2 have chosen to mark the 20th anniversary of their album Achtung Baby with this sizeable documentary about the making of the record and the traumatic soul-searching that went into it. It dovetails neatly with the forthcoming reissue of the album itself, which will be available as a mere single CD, as well as in a vinyl box set and an "Über Deluxe" edition crammed with CDs, DVDs, luxurious art prints etc.To direct their movie, U2 went to Davis Guggenheim, a film and TV veteran who has (among other things) won an Oscar for directing Al Gore's climate Read more ...
theartsdesk
It’s not the first time we have showcased the work of Will Robson-Scott. Nearly two years ago we published a set of images from Crack & Shine, a portfolio which documented the nocturnal habits of a set of London street artists. Crack & Shine International takes the story beyond the UK to watch artists at work in other centres of street art culture - New York, Los Angeles, Paris, Berlin and Amsterdam. A photographer who specialises in shooting street artists at work, Robson-Scott incurs many of the same risks as his subjects. Unlike them, his work is in no danger of being erased or Read more ...