I may live in the 21st century on the south coast of England, but here on my desk it often looks like I am somewhere else entirely. Weimar-era Berlin, to be precise. It is the epicentre of some truly great silent filmmaking, such as the works I often share on this blog, it is the setting and source for the first film book I wrote (Pandora’s Box, as you asked), and it is here that we find the origins of much of the Golden Age of Hollywood cinema that I write about elsewhere.

It also sometimes looks this way when I am reading the news, but that, perhaps, is another matter.