Cinema Can Do Potsdamer Platz

Florian Wüst’s film-based lecture “Mitte der Zukunft” dives into the history of Potsdamer Platz in the 80s and 90s until the opening of the Filmhaus in the Sony Center in summer 2000: Arsenal, the Deutsche Kinemathek and the DFFB didn’t move into a cinema and museum building as set out in the original plans of the Filmhaus Esplanade, but rather into an office building whose main attraction was three glass elevators. The symbolic seam and no man’s land of the divided world was transformed into the biggest building site in Europe just a few years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and then into a seemingly new Mitte, an already-finished center plonked into front of Berliners. Based on pictures, film excepts and short films, including the first series of A-CLIPS from 1997, the successive layers of privatization and commercialization are revealed, the setting in which Arsenal ran a cinema for over 25 years - not because of Potsdamer Platz but in spite of it. (fw)