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THE WALLS OF BERLIN URBAN SURFACES : ART : FILM Stephen Barber Berlin's unique history of conflict, transmutation and violence has created an arena of extraordinary urban surfaces, from which the present-day city and its layered, wounded past are projected simultaneously. THE WALLS OF BERLIN explores the intimate connections between those surfaces and the works of art and film which have both incised Berlin's urban screens, and been inspired by them. Drawing on a vast range of material – from the first films of Berlin in the 1890s, to the city's impact on contemporary digital art – the book takes the form of a series of image-propelled journeys across the face of Berlin and through its urban histories, excavating the seminal ricochets between the city, art and film. It examines how Berlin's walls form apertures that mediate their preoccupations and manias, damage and scars, non-erasable inscriptions and outlandish markings, fractures and fissures, strata and outgrowths, veerings and oscillations across time, corporeal traces and residues, sexual obsessions, and revelatory urban vanishings. THE WALLS OF BERLIN is a rich cultural history of the city's memories and its acts of oblivion, probing many of its overlooked but most illuminating spaces – such as the Hansa recording-studios, the Buch asylum, ruined hotels and cinemas, Berlin's immense slaughterhouse sub-city, and many other sites inflected by art and film – alongside the visual, textual and sonic presences that inhabit them. This truly innovative and vital book about Berlin will be essential reading for all those engaged with the transformations of contemporary cities, for students of urban-history, architecture, art and film, and for readers and visitors enthralled by Berlin's astonishing surfaces. Solar Art Directives: Seminal Cities focuses on the visual-arts legacies of cities whose scarred or tumultuous histories also reveal the dynamics of contemporary culture. SOLAR ART DIRECTIVES: SEMINAL CITIES
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