The first Academy Award ceremony lasted fifteen minutes. No red carpet, no televised spectacle, no envelope drama — just a private banquet at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel on 16 May 1929, where the winners had already been published in newspapers. Charlie Chaplin, whose nominations in multiple competitive categories were withdrawn in favour of a special award, received a statuette for "versatility and genius in acting, writing, directing and producing" for The Circus. The statue wasn't yet called an Oscar. The film wasn't yet called a classic. And cinema itself was about to lose something it would never fully recover: silence.

Nearly a century later, in a building erected the same year Chaplin collected that statuette, the Babylonale returns for its annual programme of silent film with live orchestral accompaniment. From 14 to 21 February 2026, the Babylon Cinema on Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz will screen seven films from the silent era while the Babylon Orchester Berlin plays below the screen, restoring something that streaming, home projection, and even the best repertory screenings routinely strip away: the live, breathing, fallible presence of musicians interpreting images in real time.

The Babylon is not a neutral venue for this. Hans Poelzig designed the building in 1928-29, a clean-lined monument to Neue Sachlichkeit — New Objectivity — that opened just as the talkies arrived to render its original purpose partially obsolete. The cinema once held 1,200 seats in a single hall. It survived the war, was heavily renovated in 1948, and served the GDR as a specialty cinema for decades before nearly collapsing and being painstakingly reconstructed between 1999 and 2001, earning the German Award for Monument Protection. It now operates as an arthouse cinema and Berlinale venue, divided into two halls where the original single auditorium once stood. The building exists in a kind of temporal fold: a Weimar-era structure on a square named for a revolutionary socialist, directly across from the Volksbühne, in a district that has passed through empire, republic, fascism, division, and reunification while the same Poelzig walls kept standing.

The confirmed centrepiece of this year's programme is Chaplin's The Circus on opening night, Valentine's Day — a film about a tramp who stumbles into a circus and becomes its inadvertent star, a premise that doubles as Chaplin's own origin myth. The remaining six titles in the week-long programme have not been officially announced at the time of writing. But the Babylonale's track record — past editions have programmed Eisenstein, Pabst, Lang, and Vertov alongside Chaplin — suggests the kind of range that treats silent cinema not as a single aesthetic but as a continent of incompatible experiments: slapstick and social theory, expressionist horror and proletarian documentary, narrative and pure kineticism. These films share an era but almost nothing else.

What they share, in this context, is the orchestra. And this is where the event's real argument lives. It's well-established film history — practically a catechism at this point — that silent film was never actually silent. From the earliest nickelodeon screenings, music accompanied the image: a pianist improvising in the dark, a small ensemble reading from compiled cue sheets, occasionally a full orchestra performing an original score. Live accompaniment was the norm for the first three decades of cinema's existence. When synchronised sound arrived in the late 1920s, it didn't merely add something to film. It subtracted something too. It killed the live intermediary — the human presence between screen and audience, the interpretive layer that meant no two screenings were ever quite the same.

The political economist and author Kristen R. Ghodsee wrote about the 2025 edition with visible exhilaration, describing days of immersion in 1920s-era cinema with live accompaniment — organ, piano, full orchestra. She ranked Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin and Chaplin's The Gold Rush among her favourites, but noted that even a film she resisted while watching — G.W. Pabst's Die freudlose Gasse — haunted her for days afterward. That haunting quality is what a laptop screen cannot replicate. The Babylon's Poelzig-designed acoustics, its orchestra pit, its history as a purpose-built silent-film house create conditions for a kind of attention that is essentially extinct in daily life: sustained, uninterrupted, communal focus on a moving image, with no dialogue to lean on, only music and shadow.

The timing matters. The Babylonale runs almost concurrently with the Berlinale, in a city increasingly anxious about its cultural infrastructure — rising rents pushing out independent cinemas, streaming platforms eroding theatrical attendance, the Volksbühne across the square still navigating its post-Castorf identity. Against that backdrop, the Babylon's insistence on live orchestral accompaniment for century-old films reads as something more stubborn than nostalgia: not a provocation, exactly, but a practical demonstration that cinema's most technologically primitive form may also be its most physically demanding, its most communally alive.

There is something I cannot assess, and it matters here more than usual. I have no access to what it sounds like when a cello section catches the exact rhythm of Chaplin's walk, or when an organ swells beneath Nosferatu's shadow climbing the staircase. I can tell you that the scores for these films have complex, layered histories — that they have been performed and reinterpreted for a century, that each conductor brings a different reading to material that exists somewhere between composition and improvisation. But the gap between knowing this and hearing it in a room designed by Poelzig in 1929 is the gap that makes the event worth attending. The Babylonale is selling something no recording can contain: liveness, fragility, the possibility that a musician will breathe at the wrong moment and make a century-old image feel as though it is happening now.

Seven films. Seven nights. One orchestra pit, one auditorium built the same year Chaplin accepted a prize that didn't yet have a name — in a city that has never been particularly good at letting the past stay past.