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Program on Arsenal 3

From September 15 until 31, we will be dedicating the arsenal 3 program (www.arsenal-3-berlin.de) to the symposium, with Harun Farocki's WDR-commissioned film ZUR ANSICHT: PETER WEISS (On Display: Peter Weiss, FRG 1979) and ZUR ANSICHT: PETER WEISS. DREHARBEITEN IN STOCKHOLM (On Display: Peter Weiss. Shooting in Stockholm), unused material from the same film from the Harun Farocki Institut archives, ORDNUNG (FRG 1980) by Sohrab Shahid Saless that was produced with ZDF, and as a preview to the "Weltspiegel" biography of the NDR journalist Navina Sundaram due to be released in 2021, a 1982 Panorama program „Ehe mit Ausländern: Panorama vom 13.4.1982“ (Marriage With Foreigners). All films are available in the original language version only.

“Zur Ansicht: Peter Weiss” and “Zur Ansicht: Peter Weiss. Dreharbeiten in Stockholm”

Harun Farocki shot his very first film, a short piece entitled Zwei Wege (Two Paths, 1966), for the Berliner Fenster program of the SFB. Over the following four decades. between Nicht löschbares Feuer (Inextinguishable Fire, 1969) and Sauerbruch Hutton Architekten (2013), several of Farocki’s films came to be with significant participation from public broadcasting. Commissioning Editors like Werner Dütsch, Ebbo Demant, and Inge Classen encouraged and fostered the filmmaker’s work.
During Farocki’s lifetime, in collaboration with the Deutsche Kinemathek – Museum für Film und Fernsehen and the Arsenal – Institute for Film und Video Art, research had already begun on the television films, which were in a wide variety of lengths. For the large Berlin retrospective in 2017/18, the project of making Farocki’s work permanently secure and accessible was concluded. This was made possible by close cooperation between Farocki’s production company, the Goethe-Insitut, and the participating television stations, and is the subject of discussion at the symposium “Recht auf Öffentlichkeit” (“Right to Public Access”).

The virtual cinema Arsenal 3 will stream ZUR ANSICHT: PETER WEISS (On Display: Peter Weiss) from 1979. The detailed conversation with Peter Weiss about “The Aesthetics of Resistance,” the second volume of which had just been published, was commissioned by the department “Literature and Language” (Christhart Burgmann and Annelen Kranefuss) at WDR and broadcast on October 19, 1979. In February of 1980 the film was seen in the “Informationsprogramm TV” of the International Forum of New Cinema. In the accompanying program text, Farocki writes: “Weiss has performed an unbelievable amount of research, studied the lives of people serving as models down to the tiniest detail, and attaches great importance to visiting the scenes of the action. The film gives an impression of his work.”
We can get an idea of Farocki’s own working methods from an hour of unused interview material, found in Farocki’s film estate, which has been overseen by the Harun Farocki Institut along with Antje Ehmann since 2015. It was digitized in 2016 on the occasion of Peter Weiss’s 100th birthday. We are presenting the material as it was found: as parts of the working print in black and white, rough, partly without sound, with clapper boards, dropouts, and other traces of the editing work.

„Ordnung“

A man in a black turtleneck appears on the street, looking up the row of houses. He forms a funnel around his mouth with both hands, amplifying his voice as he lets out a long, drawn-out “get up”. Herbert carries out this wake-up call ritual every Sunday. While the employed are recuperating from the strains of their work week, he wants to activate them. Although on weekdays he can barely be activated himself. While his wife is working, he lives immersed in everyday monotony, the days passing him by without the structure of employment.
Saless sketches out Herbert’s dull life in West Germany, like a modern elegy to depression. A life without emotion, in which the marital relationship is called to duty, but not lived out. Sexuality is an act that is performed, but not felt; cigarettes are stimulants that kill, but are not enjoyed; human relationships are only possible as a consumer. Identification is never individual, but based on a homogeneous society, whose rules and duties must be followed, while they can no longer be perceived by the senses. The film sketches out a fear of other people and thus of alternative kinds of behavior. Not only does Saless indulge in metaphor in ORDNUNG, he also lets the image itself become the word, relentlessly depicting a history of repression in West Germany.

ORDNUNG premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 1980 in the section Quinzaine des Réalisateurs. It is the first of six films that Sales made with ZDF. In the newspaper Frankfurter Rundschau Thomas Thieringer describes which phenomena made their way into ORDNUNG: “Saless wants to show a society ‘that has long been forgotten, a society that no longer actually exists, despite its apparent existence, (…) people that capitulate from the beginning, because that’s what has been stipulated for them.’ He is not accusing anybody, the only thing that would be important and questionable, he thinks, is ‘what effects will one day emanate from [his characters; author’s note]. For nothing is meaningless, and nothing ends irrevocably.’” The end of his creative period in Germany, however, was meant to end the public discussion of his films and for a long time to limit the visibility of his works, which are scattered in various television institutions.

Ehe mit Ausländern: Panorama vom 13.4.1982
Bericht von Navina Sundaram

“Ehe mit Ausländern” (Marriage with Foreigners) is part of a Panorama program from 1982. The ring of anonymous telephone calls penetrates the private rooms of the Almanasreh family, forming the background for the stories and reports on the everyday racism faced by binational families in Germany. From the perspective of women who are married to Iraqi, Portuguese, and Nigerian men, an image emerges of a society that understands love and transcultural bonds as a betrayal of an imaginary national society. Anonymous letters, open insults, and loosened wheel nuts are as much a part of their family life as are the struggles for rights and recognition.

A document of the time, the Panorama broadcast is part of the online archive “Welt Spiegel: Innenansichten einer Außerseiterin oder Außenansichten einer Innenseiterin” (“World Mirror: Inside Views of an Outsider or Outside Views of An Insider”), which is going online in June 2021. This archive collects films, reports, moderations, and correspondence by the NRD editor, moderator, and foreign correspondent Navina Sundaram, who worked for German television for more than 40 years. Extracted from previously closed holdings at the ARD as well as Sundaram’s private archive, this new archive can be seen as a curated view of West German television history. Navina Sundaram is the focal point of this archive, intertwining journalistic positions from her time, migration and media history, the Cold War, class questions, and feminism.