2430 – Capital B series about Berlin (Arte 2024)

Capital B – Who Owns Berlin is probably the best documentary about a city any city out there, in a league all of its own with Los Angeles Plays Itself.

What happened to one of the biggest cities in continental Europe? A city that had incredible opportunities, cheap basically free spaces for grabs, and immense swaths that were opened up after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Berlin was probably the biggest story in subcultural history. This documentary by Arte Channel in 5 parts explains it all step by step. Yet saying this we cannot forget that after the Wall, there were winners and losers of the reunification, and sadly the losers (in economic terms, in job and academic positions, and cultural management positions) – were the people of former East Germany or DDR who today are being swiped off their feet by populist rhetoric and vote for the extreme right-wing AfD demagogues (altough there have been huge protests against AfD recently against right-wing extremism and for democracy).

Important to mention here that the institution (Treuhand), the pop-up trust company seated in Berlin that regulated and controlled the restructuring from a planned to a market economy did this almost overnight, without much accountability or democratic supervision. Its task was certainly immense to privatize 8,000 formerly nationally-owned enterprises. Modernizing thousands of enterprises and closing down thousands of others, from gigantic combines comprising a staff of umpteen thousand up to small family enterprises – and it ended with complete humiliation for East Germans, even if some say there were some benefits.

I think the story in Berlin is even starker, for most Berliners, and for most that have been living to see the explosion in subcultural spaces, clubs, and underground venues – it all came with a huge cost, they all were just acting like a magnet for the real estate mafia. Real estate – and space (to use Jameson’s suggestive quote from below) one might say is at the center of today’s capitalism. It was involved in the sub-prime crisis in the US that spread throughout the whole world, and certainly in land grabs around the world as well as ‘zoning’ of special economic zones, duty-free areas, and offshore tax-free heavens.

To narrow it down to a city – Berlin, the German capital allows us to see this process of capital accumulation, rent extraction, and speculative markets. It is a very sad documentary, particularly harrowing for all those who went through 30 years of gentrification and speculative luxury housing investments. Sadly the 5 part documentary is only available in French and German, there are no English subs, but I sincerely think someone who cares about the history of this city should do it, especially considering how many EN-speaking inhabitants live in this city.

There is interviews with key figures of the underground but also mayors, investors, politicians etc. The documentary offers a unique range of voices and key figures who were deeply and personally involved in shaping this city and transforming it into what it has become today. This is also the story of techno music and its entry into German electronic music. It is about the translation of a metronomic abstract heavy beat arriving in Berlin from Detroit Motor City via the UK and Belgium and one of the first musical styles to unite both East and West. Techno pioneers from East and West Berlin started setting the night on fire. It is really important to see how the members of the initially small rave culture tribe started scouting for a location, and how they ended up finding TRESOR by chance, that incredible space initially situated on Leipziger Straße and cleaning it and there is incredible VHS footage of that moment in 1991. Subculture had its summer of anarchy, an incredible mix of utopia and frenetic living, but the power elites of the city started asserting their pressure – and it all ended with fierce police raids, street battles, and forced evacuations.

The Fall

One should understand that this is a battle to the teeth, in the middle of the 1990s the West Berlin old-money elites got their interests served by mayor Eberhard Diepge – and started exercising their stranglehold over the city. Klaus-Rüdiger Landowsky one of the most powerful figures in Germany and together with Diepge want to transform Berlin from an industrial hub into a financial capital of the world on par with London and Frankfurt. It all ends with the biggest banking scandal in Germany and the arrival of a new younger mayor ready to use the power vacuum: Klaus Wowereit. Districts such as Kreuzberg and Wedding with a big migrant population are being transformed into virtual ghetto’s without opportunities, high unemployment rates and lack of funding. Savas Yurderi aka Kool Sava becames one of the most well-known rappers in Germany and he’s speaking with the voice of that place.

Poor but Sexy (was the mayor Klaus Wowereit motto for the city)

The City as Prey

This is the final decade where clubs get closed, everyone is kicked out and most of the underground places get shut down. It is the march of uberization, digitial nomadism and finacial speculation.

2429 – The chasm between rich and poor – Homeless in the wealthy West | DW Documentary 2024

Living in Berlin on and off during the last 30 years has made me acutely aware of the increasing number of homeless in Germany’s capital during the last 3-year span, basically since the price shock has overlapped with other shocks.

What is the cause for this? Well, it is very simple, and it went on unimpeded for decades, it basically meant a war on the poor and ended up transforming cities into unaffordable places and countries with infrastructures that were not buit for the 21st century capitalism.

A look at the figures shows just how dire the situation on the German housing market really is: There is a shortage of over 800,000 apartments in Germany, a figure that is growing. More than 9.5 million people, mostly single parents and their children, live in cramped conditions, according to the Federal Statistical Office. (source DW)

Berlin now looks more and more like SF, and maybe that is a sign of how much inequality is affecting Germany (its index lies close to the US) combined with a lack of affordable housing. The invisibility of poverty in Germany is also part of why it is hardly being addressed, but many have pointed out the strain put on the lower half of the population or what is termed “seller’s driven inflation”, practically driven by rising consumer prices in parallel with energy prices. Certain vulnerable categories are particularly affected by homelessness: women, migrants, LGBTQ+ etc. Australia has now around 500.000 women over 50 or around 50 years old who according to the documentary are on the brink of homelessness. I urge everyone to watch this documentary to get acquainted with the lives of persons who are no different than we are and who’s lives have been affected almost overnight and without any preparation.

This ‘sellers’ inflation’ happens when the corporate sector manages to pass on a major cost shock to consumers by increasing prices to protect or enhance its profit margins. Of course, not all firms have won equally. The bottom line is that sellers’ inflation results in an increase in total profits. This simple truth led Adam Smith to warn, 250 years ago, that profits can drive price pressures. (Isabelle Weber)

“The gap between rich and poor continues to widen in many developed nations. The result: more and more people are finding themselves homeless, with women making up the fastest-growing affected group. They live in their cars or camper vans, sleep on friends’ couches or end up in short-term accommodation: Homelessness in industrialized nations is a growing problem, and increasingly affects the middle class, as well as the poor. While the wealthy can also lose everything, the middle classes are the ones coming under more and more pressure from the ever-present threat of joblessness. It’s a problem also affecting migrants and indigenous communities. Increasingly difficult socio-economic conditions in rich countries are leading to a sharp rise in poverty. The documentary profiles some of those affected in Australia: women who’ve not lost their optimism and humor despite their personal hardship.” (Youtube)

2418 – Time of Darkness and Silence (1982) by Nina Gladitz (Holocaust documentary with EN sub)

8th of April Romani Day

The 8th of April is the International Romani Day, “a day in which to celebrate Romani culture and raise awareness of the issues facing Romani people” – as Wiki says. But then so should be any other day, why just one day? At the same time, the liberal idea under capitalism that everybody has to be ‘integrated’ and accepted – turned out to be just lip service, without much substance. Romanian (but also Bulgarian, altough I do not pretend to speak in the name of other neighboring countries but wr should know more of this history) history is also deeply implicated in the subjugation and enslavement of Romani people and even naming the Romani as “țigan” (basically similar to the racial slur “nigger” in the States) is still being used and thrown around, but educational articles start changing that.

‘You were born of the French Street’

It is even hard – even in my family, coming from an east-bloc intelligentsia background (father sculptor, mother soprano), the word “gypsy” had its usual racist connotations, but it was used more in the sense of ‘underdeveloped’ or rather a slightly colonialist ‘uncivilized’ which of course completely ignored the ways Romani were supposed to be still nomads that need to become sedentary. But the pressure to ‘urbanize’, to build and produce socialism was particularly harsh on women and minorities. In my family the phrase “You were born on the ‘French Street'” (Te-ai născut pe Franceza) was a euphemism for the Romani street in the village of my mother’s side grandpa (a worker welder). They were constantly joking and accusing each other of being born there which was supposedly a way to put you down the social ladder. The interesting thing is the way the French were supposedly synonymous with ‘high culture’ in Romania (in the Interwar period as well as during Communism). So calling the Romani village street ‘French’ was supposed to be an outrage, was meant to be initially off-putting, but also, underneath, to admit that mixed couples were happening and that everyone could have Romani ancestors. A was an admission that a clear dividing line did not exist, and also a play or satire on high/low culture ideals (or this is how I understand it).

They were slaves in Romania for hundreds of years, longer than slaves existed in the US. In Bulgaria, the situation was somewhat similar from what I understand and Romani escaped to the Ottoman Empire before where they could be free.

Keep thinking of this document, where 27 Roma families, that is 117 human beings in total, adults and children, were sold between two wealthy individuals in mid-19th century Moldavia, for the price of about a head of cattle each.

Each one's name recorded.

Translation below 👇 https://t.co/7Iw4AN0aNx

— Arnold Platon (@Arnold_Platon) April 8, 2024

Here is a very important documentary that I truly recommend and that has been long unavailable or only reluctantly so it seems (in Germany). It is not only a movie about the plight of the Romani victims of the Holocaust (together with Jewish, queer/lesbian, as well as Communists and Anarchists), but also an indictment of the autonomy of the arts and the doctrine that artists are ‘Gods’, existing above politics, above accountability, above historical events, basically outside of history. This pernicious view is popular in Germany and elsewhere, while things changed, it is still part of an official cult of artistic ‘geniuses’ and cultural elites that tries to keep “Kultur” untarnished by its miserable associations, and one that continues to whitewash and justify many abuses. There’s a direct line that leads from the authenticity and separation of fhe artist from everything else and fascism. While artists have been hunger artists, or even thrown out of the polis (Plato), or declared degenerated and pathologized (Max Nordau), there’s something very wrong with upholding the unicity of the artist – that in the end acts like mercenary at the disposal of different regimes and powerful protectors.

It is the story of the Romani survivors of concentration camps in Nazi Germany and how Tante “Leni” Riefenstahl, well known Nazi propagandist filmmaker director, producer, screenwriter, editor, and photographer used them as extras in one of her wartime movies (Tiefland) before they were sent to the extermination camps. Don’t mean to be disprespectful to the survivors, but I could not help myself thinking ‘Tante’ Leni making Dune instead of Villeneuve, and using Romani extras as Fremen (maybe this does not forbode well for the next Dune installment).

2411 – They Shot the Piano Player (2023)

They Shot the Piano Player (Spanish: Dispararon al pianista) is a 2023 adult animated docudrama film directed by Fernando Trueba and Javier Mariscal. Centred around the real-life disappearance and presumed murder of Brazilian pianist Francisco Tenório Júnior in 1976, the film stars Jeff Goldblum as an American music journalist investigating Tenório’s case.

The film’s soundtrack includes music by João Gilberto, Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Vinicius de Moraes and Paulo Moura, with some of the musicians also appearing in the voice cast as themselves testifying about Tenório’s importance and influence as part of Goldblum’s investigation. (wiki)

imdb

2403 – The Century of the SELF (2002 BBC documentary by Adam Curtis)

timespace coordinates: the long 20th century

To say that this epochal documentary with all its flaws, its non-sequiturs, and under-theorizing has marked our generation is an understatement. Some things are left unsaid in retrospect (it is almost 10 years or more since I have watched this series), particularly one should situate this in the context of modernity and the transfer of peoples of ideas that went on between Europe and the US, none of which went one way only. Again this is a very Eurocentric history (for a different perspective on techno-modernity check here), so it has definite and clear limits as it is mostly about the Euroatlantic world and Central Europe. The Century of the Self is also the triumph over the European Old World bourgeois civilization of the US consumer culture zeitgeist aptly described by Victoria de Grazia in her magisterial study Irresistible Empire.

Source: Charnysh 2022 quoted by Adam Tooze (not Curtis!)

But then, on the other hand, you have had the immense impact of these foreigners with bad Middle European or Eastern European accents forced to flee, outernational émigrés escaping anti semitism arriving in troves from the continent. Besides the German Frankfurter Schule critical theory – you also had another cultivated emigree diaspora from the former Habsburg Empire that brought to the East Coast with them the vivaciousness and sophistication of Viennese 1900 cultural life and went on to define advertising, marketing, and even how Western liberalism identity started defining itself during the Cold War against the Communist bloc. Another history that barely gets mentioned is how the Western democracies have been using for example – “rational choice theory” (and here the names of William Riker, Kenneth Arrow, and James Buchanan stand out) – to try and immunize the ‘Free World’ and its values by constructing a ‘scientific’ approach to social science research against the Marxist critics of Western democracies. Some ideas found a better reception across the ocean,

Psychoanalysis is just one such example to follow in the wake of the fall of the Habsburg Empire. One could pinpoint others, starting with the Genevese school of neoliberal economics. Another one, followed in detail by Adam Curtis is the trajectory of Freud and his nephew Edward Bernays (developer and early pioneer of PR) and Anna Freud in the United States. We should be wary of a pharmakon way of explaining everything or giving too much attention to ‘interiority’ and inner mental states, but since Foucault, detailing such genealogies and discoursive fields helps us understand how we came to be where we are. This documentary is also influenced by The Century of the Self is still a very compelling history of how the SELF became so central not only to advertising but also to identity politics and individual freedom of liberal capitalism also to the anthropotechnics – ways in which Western counterculture has tried to free the human subject or a hidden identity through mindfulness, techniques of meditation, human potential, yoga retreats, actualization what is known as New Age – especially as developed by the Esalen Institute since the 1960s California. It is also the perfect documentary about control after “decentralization”, or what follows in the wake of the uneven transition from the disciplinary society to what Deleuze has termed the society of control in his seminal essay from 1990 (some even say that this was his most important testament). The century of the self has become even more evident in the 21st century – the time when protocols or algorithmic capitalism is really ruling the day and when AI-driven scams, influencers, and deep fakes abound. The century of the self should be also put into dialectical relation with its inverse – the “personality cults” and authoritarian styles of the former East it was meant to overcome, and such a retreat into interiority and VR, when faced with the horrors of Vietnam War, and the government of the US supporting dictators abroad or signaling a failure of nation-building abroad or a certain developmental model. Silicon Valley is itself a piece in this puzzle, an innovation hub based on a startup model supported by Venture Capital funding to ensure US technological hegemony by sponsoring former dropouts of the counter-cultural revolutions of 1968, raised on psychotropics and weaned on petro-dollars.

2379 – Big Oil v the World (documentary mini-series 2022)

From the BBC official page:

“The story of what the fossil fuel industry knew about climate change more than four decades ago.

Scientists who worked for the biggest oil company in the world, Exxon, reveal the warnings they sounded in the 1970s and early 1980s about how fossil fuels would cause climate change – with potentially catastrophic effects. Drawing on thousands of newly discovered documents, the film goes on to chart in revelatory and forensic detail how the oil industry went on to mount a campaign to sow doubt about the science of climate change, the consequences of which we are living through today.

2022 is set to be a year of unprecedented climate chaos across the planet. As the world’s leading climate scientists on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issue new warnings about climate change and the soaring cost of fuel highlights the world’s ongoing dependence on fossil fuels, this series details exactly how we got here.”

In our capitalist world, it is clear that the ‘green transition’ has had its skeptics, but it is hard to minimize the role of extractive fossil industries in supporting such skeptics or employing them in spreading lies, mistrust, or zooming in on the ‘uncertainty’ aspect. Once scientific predictions were at hand – it is almost as if there was a concerted effort to build up a counter-narrative of denialism spending countless billions to deny the runaway greenhouse effect.

‘Climate denialism’ would not exist today in this form if it had not been intentionally and systematically sponsored with big money by the oil industry majors. Such miseducation and complacency about fossil fuels are the direct results of investments in combatting scientific results and climatologist’s consensus over this matter.

Once such denialism became untenable, oil majors started promising newer, so-called ‘greener’ ways to phase out like gas (like fracking – which because of the methane leaks has been bringing us ever near to the edge of no return). It is not a bunch of cooks or just a few petrostate autocrats but decades-long campaigns of disinformation, subterfuge, and propaganda by the most powerful energy companies on earth – “oil majors” (till the recent rise of national state oil companies =NOCs and so-called independents like diversified international conglomerates responsible for upstream activities such as Mitsubishi Corp).

Why do people sport “Save Diesel” stickers on their cars? Well for one, these are not your petroleum Mad Max fools. Their belief and dependence on fossil fuels was heavily subsidized till recently. Everyone, from the farmers to the truck drivers has become addicted to such cheaply provided fuels (cheaply if you included the worldwide imperial network of 800 strong US military bases and supporting authoritarian regimes abroad) and this documentary shows how these changes were indefinitely postponed, and how the green movement was constantly watered-down or how we got fucked over big time. Information about climate modeling and scientific research was always available, obtained at the behest of the companies themselves but has been constantly downplayed by “oil majors” (Big Oil). It’s also one of the biggest stories of US environmental policy failure that probably brought us to were we are in a world of rising temperature, rising sea levels, extreme weather and countless other ripple down effects.

This BBC documentary will dispel any doubt about how disastrous and effective financing such disinformation campaign was. Extractivism is not just technical capacity and drilling or pumping out, it involves acquiescence on a large scale and governmental compliance with fossil fuel special interests. It is imho a top documentary in clarifying the step-by-step (forensic almost) historical way of how we got to the current climate emergency (possibly the biggest challenge that has faced humanity in its recent past). It is also a documentary that interviews the journalists, engineers, plus the “merchants of doubt” that have been employed over the years by the Oil industry to devise new methods of extraction, or have spread disinformation and manufactured consent and kept the biggest polluters polluting. To their credit -many, though not all deeply regret their involvement. Who are the footmen of oil industries? Although many of its political protagonists (and many if not almost all are men) express their ignorance, naivete, or lack of information at the time (or having been given false or biased information) – this is completely at odds with the fact that they have been instrumental to US’s Empire and its infinite thirst for fossil fuel energy supplies. Fossil fuel was and is still the blood of the empire. This story of how imperial histories have shaped such carbon ideologies is also not explored (a continuum btw British and American empire, one on coal and partially petroleum and the other on petroleum and now gas).

Another aspect (not discussed in this BBC mini-series) is that in the West (notably Europe and US) we still consider the energy industry as consisting of the “oil major” – with big corporations like Exxon being at the center of this investigation. But that is an outdated picture – since today such companies – 7 global oil majors – “hold less than 13% of global oil and gas production and reserves.”(a point made by Adam Tooze quoting the recent International Energy Agency’s latest report on the global oil and gas industry in the energy transition). As such today 7 global oil majors “hold less than 13% of global oil and gas production and reserves. National oil Companies (NOCs) account for more than half of global production and close to 60% of the world’s oil and gas reserves.”

[Photograph: Supran, et al., 2023, “Assessing ExxonMobil’s global warming projections” from the late 70s early 80s]

2373 – Gurdjieff in Armenia (documentary 2023)

The film was made by Jean-Claude Lubtchansky, a close associate of Madame de Salzmann (who worked with Gurdjieff for nearly 30 years) with the support of the Gurdjieff Institute in France and there is a French version here: (unavailable)

This documentary was posted a few months ago and it is really quite fortunate to have access to it. It follows the life of Gurdjieff much more systematically and in detail than I have been able to do in my review of Meetings with Remarkable Men. It is full of old photos and even recordings of Gurdjieff himself and some scenes with recordings of his movements/dances. It is full of quotes and extracts from his books. If you are interested in finding out more about one of the most interesting, rapscallion philosophers/characters of the 20th century please check out this documentary.

Gurdjieff’s teaching is fully described in the book called “In Search of the Miraculous” which can be read at http://www.gurdjieff.am

(The pantry in Gurdjieff’s Paris apartment. Photo courtesy of the Gurdjieff Foundation of New York) As related in the movie such a place was also a place of meetings and counseling. Like a friend said: show your pantry to tell you who you are.