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Ulrich and Erika Gregor are sitting on a stage with Ralph Eue. Behind them, a photo of Ulrich Gregor in his younger years is projected onto the screen.
© Claudia Peppel

Sun 18.09.
11:00

In the early 1970s, Ulrich Gregor saw video works by a Japanese artist in a New York gallery and decided to give the Arsenal audience in Berlin access. He asked like-minded collaborators to bring along television sets and placed them on stacks of boxes of 35mm films in the cinema. Then he synchronized them to enable a collective viewing session before the video projector became mainstream. From the very start, the film historian, critic, cinema and festival curator was also somebody who made things possible. He and his wife Erika and other cineastes founded the Freunde der deutschen Kinemathek in 1963, initially showing films at the Berlin Academy of Arts and other venues. In 1970, they opened the Arsenal cinema on Welserstraße, and the next year they rescued the Berlinale from a political crisis by founding the International Forum of New Cinema. Over the following decades, they paved the way for filmmakers from all over the world to enter the cinema and festival landscape, which for Ulrich Gregor had always been part of a larger social context that needed to be understood and changed.

On the occasion of his 90th birthday, to which we warmly invite everyone, Ulrich Gregor is presenting a selection of films, including CHE COSA SONO LE NUVOLE? (What Are the Clouds?) about which he has said: "The short film is one of Pier Paolo Pasolini's most beautiful but least known works. Made in 1968, it relates a drama in a puppet theatre. Incarnated by real actors, puppets perform a condensed version of Shakespeare's "Othello." On the one hand, the film is a tribute to Sicilian puppet theater, but also a meditation on the relationship between art and reality, CHE COSA ... has a humorous, but also reflective level. In a moment of contemplation Totò says: "We are in a dream within a dream". CHE COSA SONO LE NUVOLE? is at once farce, melodrama, satire, parable, and recitation, fusing these elements in an inimitable way. A brilliant work of art, a film to watch again and again, a true capolavoro." (Stefanie Schulte Strathaus)

All are warmly invited!

Funded by:

  • Logo Minister of State for Culture and the Media
  • Logo des Programms NeuStart Kultur