To bring the Christmas period to a close, Ms Vaginal Davis is showing Michael Curtiz’s musical classic WHITE CHRISTMAS (USA 1954) on December 29: two war comrades (Bing Crosby und Danny Kaye), who have now become a successful Broadway duo, have to help their former general out of a jam. His hotel is chronically under-booked, with a Christmas show supposed to get business going again. Yet the unusually warm weather, lack of snow and romantic entanglements of the singing stars are just some of the hurdles to be cleared on the way to success. After the film: post-Christmas drinks with Ms Davis!

This time, the public screening of a film from the Arsenal archive is being organized by the DFG graduate school “Visibility and Visual Production: Hybrid Forms of Iconic Knowledge.” In the rarely screened film EROSU + GYAKUSATSU (Eros + Massacre, Yoshishige Yoshida, Japan 1969), Japanese anarchism in the ’20s meets the student life of the late ’60s. The central focus is the love relationships of the anarchist Ōsugi Sakae, who was assassinated by the military, with three women, each of whom has a different claim over what Ōsugi stood for. This in turn also interests two students who have been influenced by Ōsugi’s ideas about life, for example looking into what the politics of free love is all about.

What do 16mm, 35mm and 70mm actually mean? What is screen masking and what is it used for? How does a dissolve work? And what is actually happening when the image on the screen stops moving and begins to melt? If you’re interested in finding out how films get on to the screen, Arsenal would like to invite you to take a peek behind the scenes on one of our projection room tours. Our projectionist Bodo Pagels will show you round the projection room, tell you all about film formats, projectors and projection techniques, demonstrate how films are fed into the projector and provide a full introduction to the secrets of film projection. He will also be happy to answer any questions you might have about the cinema set-up and will adapt the tour to your wishes and interests as far as possible. The next scheduled tour will take place on Saturday December 7, at 4pm. Please register in advance. 


The third and final part of the retrospective of Frieda Grafe's 30 favorite films began at the end of October and continues from November 1–3. The first evening brings together Jean Renoir and Chantal Akerman and thus confronts two variants of the auteur film. Sternberg meets Rossellini on the second evening, each with a film from the early 50s. Two social microcosms coalesce in places that have been forgotten by history - a hazy volcano in southern Italy and a remote island in the Pacific Ocean, places that belong to two countries that just a few years earlier formed part of the fascist Axis alliance. On the final evening, Moullet's oppressive anatomy of a relationship rubs up against the liberating colors of Hawks, who makes "not even the slightest effort to maintain realism."

"My school was the streets, the communist cells, the cinema, variety entertainment, the municipal library, the struggles of the unemployed, the detention cells, clashes with the police, the studios of artists of my age, the film clubs. And then I also learned from those who at the time were called 'professional revolutionaries'." That's how succinctly and precisely the Italian director, screenwriter, critic and intellectual, Elio Petri (1929 – 1982) described his personal, artistic and political points of reference. His working class background, his love of cinema, and of cinema as a popular art, his politicization and the revolts, the influence of painting as well as the debates with dogmatists of his time lead right to the center of the unique oeuvre of Elio Petri, one of the most important players in 1960s and 70s Italian cinema. Like no other, Petri was able in his acute examinations of post-war Italian society to combine politics and genre, Marx and pop, autobiography and analysis, experiment and narration. He thus created an unsettling cinema that often triggered controversy and whose energy, force and directness remains just as potent today. For a long time, Petri's oeuvre stood in the shadow of his contemporaries, such as Bertolucci, Pasolini or Bellocchio, and did not receive enough attention. It has long been time for rediscovery. On the occasion of the English publication of selected texts by Petri ("Writings on Cinema and Life", Contra Mundum Press, 2013), we present a comprehensive retrospective of his films featuring many guests. In conjunction with the Italian Culture Institute in Berlin.

Since, increasingly, reality is perceived from the perspective of critical art as the unknown which it is imperative to invent in relation to aesthetic means and to elevate to visibility and audibility, this seminar-esque film and lecture series will present and discuss advanced film artworks. The program was initiated by Prof. Michaela Ott (HfbK Hamburg) and Prof. Dieter Mersch (Universität Potsdam/ZHdK Zürich) and will involve the participants of the DFG graduate course "Visibility and making visible. Hybrid forms of visual knowledge". It will present research on experimental, documentary and features that is as varied as possible. The series will continue until January.