“Visionary Archive“ is divided into five thematic, interconnected projects, all of which investigate what contemporary, transcultural, curatorial and artistic work with archives and archival research could look like. The “B-Schemes – An Archive Project and Film Program on Film Productions for Black Viewers in 1970s and 1980s South Africa“ project is dedicated to carrying out detailed archive research on a corpus of South African films that has still not received the research attention it deserves, with the goal of carrying out a critical reappraisal of these films and giving them new visibility. The project is directed by Darryl Els in collaboration with Marie-Hélène Gutberlet. The result of this research alongside a selection of films from the B-Schemes pool will be presented as part of the closing event in Berlin in May 2015. From October 24 until 26 three of the films from the B-Schemes will be screened at The Bioscope Independent Cinema, a cinema space in Johannesburg co-founded and directed by Darryl Els.

In October, the fourth edition of It all depends takes place as part of the Visionary Archive project. Pier Paolo Pasolini’s APPUNTI PER UN'ORESTIADE AFRICANA (Notes Towards an African Orestes, Italy 1969) will be screened on October 1. Narrated in the style of a cinematic notebook, Pasolini’s interest in adapting the ancient tragedy for the screen using African actors is mixed with a stubbornly colonial look at realities in Tanzania, Uganda and Ethiopia. The structure of the cinematic notebook and the cultural ideological charge it carries demand that Pasolini’s film be placed in context with two further films. In her video work NOTES ON PASOLINI'S FORM OF A CITY (Germany 2013), Sandra Schäfer examines Pasolini’s projections of Africa before the backdrop of his critique of modernity. We are showing the film on October 3 together with Haile Gerima’s radical social satire MIRT SOST SHI AMIT (Harvest, 3,000 Years, Ethiopia 1975), shot in Ethiopia at the end of Haile Selassie’s rule.

The films in this program presented by Sylvie Boisseau and Frank Westermeyer on October 20, generate invisible images by means of language, playing in the process with well-known representational forms, such as the confession or the Latin American telenovela. By intensifying or exaggerating convention, they challenge our belief in the visible. In UNE SALE HISTOIRE (France 1977), Jean Eustache films two identical confessions by a passionate voyeur one after the other with the words exactly the same in each case. Phil Collins switches the actors in every single scene of his telenovela SOY MI MADRE without the narrative flow ever being interrupted. For the OPTIONISTEN, the presentation of his limitless possibilities is already enough.