Are special effects — or their digital counterpart, visual effects — a marginal field in cinematographic art, things pulled from bags of tricks belonging to tinkerers, firework-makers and computer freaks? Or do they mark the zenith of artistic-creative imagination? Do they generate illusions that continuously strive for perfection, the most artificial constructions in a world already artificial in itself: cinema? A look back to the beginnings of cinema makes it clear that the history of film is also the history of the technological manipulation of images. Almost ninety years after Méliès' first "magical" films and after numerous innovations in the field of special effects, this branch of cinema has also experienced a digital revolution. The possibilities offered by so-called computer generated images (or CGIs for short) appear boundless when it comes to translating imagination and fantasy into moving pictures. Yet computers and their "analogue" predecessors not only generate past or future worlds and their inhabitants, but also complex visualizations of emotional, perceptive and mental worlds, which forms the focus of this month's Magical History Tour.

DIE GETRÄUMTEN (THE DREAMED ONES) by Ruth Beckermann, which premiered in this year's Forum programme and showed at many international film festivals since, is being released in selected German cinemas this week.

In the film two young actors, Anja Plaschg and Laurence Rupp, recite the correspondence between Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan, which reveals their tragic love story over 20 years. The textual drama is channeled through the actors' voices, even as they sometimes leave their roles to discuss what the words do to them.

This lecture series by Sabine Nessel (Seminar for Film Studies at the FU Berlin) asks about the relevance of archives for film historical research and sets out into the archive itself to this end. What is the difference between film historiography and film archaeology? What powers are set free when university film studies meet a film institution’s collection? Specific films from the Arsenal archive will be presented, with the concepts of film studies, archive, and difference serving as a guide.

The lecture series starts on October 25 with the animal horror classic JAWS (Steven Spielberg, USA 1974), the primal anthropological fear of being eaten is played out effectively before a beach backdrop. The film will be shown as a 35-mm print in the (legendary) German dubbed version. The lecture series runs until February 2017 and is open to anyone interested.

Holot is a detention center in the Israeli desert. It houses asylum-seekers from Eritrea and Sudan who can’t be sent back to their own countries, but who have no prospects in Israel either due to the country’s policies. Avi Mograbi and Chen Alon initiated a theater workshop with them, a process which Mograbi documented in his latest film BEIN GDEROT (BETWEEN FENCES), which premiered in this year's Forum programme.

On October 23, Avi Mograbi will present the film together with outtakes and other extra material at silent green.