Berlin Calling at the Barbican

Following the 25^th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Barbican Centre will be screening a series of films that depict West Berlin’s eclectic and controversial artistic output.
During the Cold War, West Berlin was a centre for cultural experimentation. Its status as a frontier town, caught between the capitalist west and the communist east, instilled in its inhabitants a sense of ambivalence and placelessness, fuelling a surge in radical, experimental art.
The Berlin Calling season at the Barbican will, then, be showing five seminal films made at the peak of this contentious period, from the 1970s to the 80s.
Christiane F takes us into the city's underworld, an urban dystopia of hard drugs, prostitution and clubbing. This film, released in 1981, was a sight of things to come, teetering as it did on the brink between hopeless deprivation and Bacchanalian excess. The film will be screening on January 29th and is essential viewing to gain a powerful insight into the events and movements that fuelled Germany’s iconic subculture.
If you'd prefer something slightly more colourful, however, then the 1983 film City of Lost Souls is worth catching, at a screening on January 15th. This film, a historical document cum transvestite musical spectacular, gives an insight into the world of 1980s Queer Berlin. This particular screening comes highly recommended, preceded as it is by a talk from Juliet Jacques, historian of transvestite culture.
Other films to be screened include the stylish and witty Ticket of No Return of 1979, 1984 cyberpunk oddity Decoder and 1987 fairy-tale Wings of Desire (now sold out). The Berlin Calling season, running from the 8^th – 29^th January is a wonderful opportunity to gain an insight into the diverse cultural worlds that were born in the divided German capital during the Cold War.