For our institution’s 50th anniversary, we were with the help of the Capital Cultural Fund able to acquire new prints of six films in our collection. To bring the series of presentations of these new acquisitions to a close, we are showing Alexander Dovzhenko’s programmatic name-giving revolution film ARSENAL (USSR 1929) in a newly restored print from the film archive in Kiev on 3.1. The film title references the Kiev munitions store where the January 1918 Ukrainian revolution reached a head. Dovzhenko places the depiction of the uprising at the end of a complex kaleidoscope of events, an audaciously edited, richly symbolic description of the horrors of the First World War, those suffered by the population and the heroic struggle of the young Communist movement. The film will receive a live piano accompaniment by acclaimed composer and pianist Eunice Martins, who will be playing her own new composition for ARSENAL.

We are delighted that we were able to add the following films from the 2013 Forum and Forum Expanded program to our distribution range: AL-KHOROUG LEL-NAHAR / COMING FORTH BY DAY (Hala Lotfy, Egypt, UAE 2012), HÉLIO OITICICA (Cesar Oiticia Filho, Brasil 2012, 94 min), I USED TO BE DARKER (Matt Porterfield, USA 2013, 90 min), LEVIATHAN (Lucien Castaing-Taylor/ Véréna Paravel, USA/France/UK 2012, 87 min), SIENIAWKA (Marcin Malaszczak, Germany, Poland 2013, 126 min), STEMPLE PASS (James Benning, USA 2012, 121 min), LUNCH WITH GERTRUDE STEIN (Isabelle Prim, France 2012, 45 min), ONCE EVERY DAY (Richard Foreman, USA 2012, 64 min), ROTATION (Ginan Seidl/ Clara Wieck, Germany 2012, 8 min), NOT BLACKING OUT JUST TURNING THE LIGHTS OFF (James Richards, UK 2012, 17 min) und BÜHNE (Daniel Kötter, Germany 2012, 8 min).

Howard Hawks (1896–1977) is one of classical Hollywood cinema's great directors. He is regarded as the consummate Hollywood professional, creating narratively and directorially accomplished entertainment full of fast-paced thrills, humor and tension. His oeuvre spans the period from 1926 to 1970 and takes in nearly all the genres of the time: comedies, westerns, musicals as well as war, adventure and gangster films. Our comprehensive retrospective continues until the end of January, presenting presents famous classics alongside some less well-known discoveries.

The 2014 program is now available online. Detailed information and screening dates of all Forum and Forum Expanded films and events can be found via the program menu point.

Želimir Žilnik (*1942) is a resident of Novi Sad in Serbia and has been working as a director of shorts, documentaries, features, essay films, and television productions since the end of the 60s. Always radically independent, he has created an oeuvre that reflects in precise, critical terms upon the various societies and their political, cultural, and economic conditions that form the setting of his films - Socialist Yugoslavia, West Germany in the 70s, the movements toward the break-up of Yugoslavia following Tito's death, the wars of the 90s, the transformation processes that paved the way to a market economy, and the new borders now being drawn in Europe. We are very happy to welcome Želimir Žilnik to Arsenal from January 11-13 and will be showing 20 of his films until the end of the month.

Since cinema began, part of the fascination of the moving image has stemmed from the way in which the bodies of the people acting on the screen are represented: it’s no coincidence that the first ever film footage shows contented workers, men exercising or boisterous children. It wasn't long until Méliès extended these short documentary scenes by adding cinematic (corporeal) experiments of a fantastical or dramatic nature: images of elegant dancers that disappear as if by magic, images of headless skeletons on the prowl or heads that inflate like balloons and explode. With these two poles as a starting point, the staging of bodies (and body parts) in film went on to become a fundamental means of cinematic expression whose diverse manifestations have had a substantial effect on how we think about human physiology. This month's Magical History Tour presents notable images of the body from 80 years of film history, showing the special physical presence exuded by bodies of longing, objects of projection, foreign or collective bodies, the re-animated and corporeal hybrids.