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."