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Berlin: Symphony of a Great City

Before Thursday, please try to watch as much of this film as you can.  It’s a really early film production of Berlin that captures the urbanization process at its inception. There are a TON of analogies in it that we will cover throughout course: The railroad, the relationship between rural urban (initial scene of the train cutting across the landscape), the relationship between every day time with industrial or work time (capitalism, structuring and dominating our sense of time- i.e. our sense of everything). Most importantly, notice the artificiality of their constructed world. Its an industrial city, where every aspect is developed, designed, created, commodified. they are completely cut off from nature or the “natural” world and forced to rely on the industrial production of their worlds. Later through Marx, we’ll see how and why city people are the most cut off from their essential selves because we are cut off from nature he argues. See if you can see that in the film since its decontextualized from your own industrialized worlds.

Published inCapitalismIndustrializationUrbanization

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