What's ringing, scratching, rustling in the film? Since films were first shown in 1895, they have been accompanied by sounds and music. A sound track collects sounds, music and noise. Before ourselves experimenting with sounds and noise and coming up with ideas for a sound track for Marie Menken's DWIGHTIANA (USA 1959) that we will eventually perform live, we will find out what can be seen and heard in six shorts: A small boy dreams in VALSE TRISTE by Bruce Conner (USA 1979), SUSAN THROUGH CORN (Kathleen Laughlin, USA 1974) shows a woman walking through the cornfields and EARLY ABSTRACTIONS (Excerpt, Harry Smith, USA 1933–56) depicts shapes and movements of light. In Buster Keaton's THE BALLOONATIC (Excerpt, USA 1923), we are suddenly flying in a balloon and in Joyce Wieland's SAILBOAT (Canada 1968) we hear the sea.

March 13, Arsenal 2

DIE GETRÄUMTEN (THE DREAMED ONES) by Ruth Beckermann has received the Grand Diagonale Prize for Best Feature Film at the Diagonale - Festival of Austrian Film.

In the film, which received its world premiere as part of this year's Forum programme, two actors recite the correspondence between Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan, which reveals their tragic love story over the course of 20 years. The textual drama is channelled through the actors' voices, even as they sometimes leave their roles to discuss what the words do to them.

This month, arsenal distribution is releasing last year's Caligari award winner: BALIKBAYAN #1 – MEMORIES OF OVERDEVELOPMENT REDUX III by Kidlat Tahimik. In addition to the cinema release and the Caligari award tour through a number of German cities, the Arsenal presents a complete retrospective of Kidlat Tahimik's work with the director being present from March 1-12.

The Caligari jury described BALIKBAYAN #1 as "a dazzling comet of "Third Cinema" that, after almost 40 years of production time, had finally exploded into the present." In it, Kidlat Tahimik travels to the 16th century, slipping into the role of Enrique de Malacca, Ferdinand Magellan's slave, and suggesting that it is not the Portuguese explorer who first circumnavigated the globe but his servant, whose story was promptly forgotten. BALIKBAYAN #1 is also about the adventure of the filmmaker himself trying to make a film that he had already declared an "eternal work in progress" in 1982. The film closes yet another circle in Berlin. The Forum was first struck by "Silent Lightning" (the translation of the pseudonym Kidlat Tahimik) from the Philippines almost 40 years ago, when shwoing Tahimik's debut PERFUMED NIGHTMARE, which later on became a cult film of postcolonial cinema.

Some of Alfred Hitchcock's work remains relatively unknown: The 10 silent movies that he made between 1925 and 1929. Nine of them survive, but one, his second film "The Mountain Eagle", is considered lost. The British Film Institute has intricately restored the surviving 'Hitchcock 9', which are now available as 35 mm prints. We will present all of them accompanied live by Eunice Martins on piano.

The fact that Hitchcock began his career in silent movies was formative for him. He learnt how to tell a story visually, to give more power to the image than to dialogue, to use genuinely filmic means to depict emotions. His joy of experimenting and a stupendous imagination are already clearly visible in his early works. Even though they are of different genres - thrillers, comedies and melodramas - they astonishingly already feature many of the themes and obsessions that would become characteristic of Hitchcock: Apart from the ambiguity of guilt, these are moral ambivalence and the motif of innocents under suspicion, his ironic humor and the cool blonde as an object of desire.

Born in 1899 in London, Hitchcock was obsessed with theater and film from his childhood and he started his career in the film industry in his early 20s as an illustrator of inter-titles. He wrote screenplays for fun on the side and soon became an assistant director and responsible for sets. This was when he met the editor and script girl Alma Reville, whom he married in 1926 and who would become his most important co-worker. By the time THE LODGER (1926) was made, he had earned recognition as a huge directing talent, which was valued by critics and audiences alike.

The silent green Kulturquartier has housed our analogue film archive since November 2015. The site (525 m2) also boasts viewing stations with editing suites and monitors. The official opening will take place this coming April.

Many of the films have been acquired over 45 Forum years. Since the Berlinale section was created in 1971, prints have been bought and some have been subtitled. The original idea was to ensure that the films would also be available to the public after the festival. From today's perspective, it was an unintended masterstroke of conservation. Films from many countries survived at Arsenal. Many were forgotten; others were ahead of their time and their significance is only now being discovered. Our archive thus opens up a new, very special film landscape: Each film can be seen as an attempt at the aesthetics of cinema, and considered as social and political contemporary practice with a view to the future. This moment of utopia is perhaps the key to a lively archive.

To make clear the contemporary nature of the collection, the Forum and Forum Expanded sections of the Berlinale are compiling a "reference list" of titles that have a connection to this year's program: Earlier films by guests or films whose memory is directly or indirectly reflected in new films. The films on this list, which will be published on our homepage, can be viewed at stations in the silent green Kulturquartier under specialist supervision.