The introduction of color film in the mid-1930s and the resulting developments in this area are some of the most significant aesthetic innovations of cinematography. Color in film is an important component of picture composition and filmic dramaturgy, as well as a fundamental aspect regarding the perception of film. Our selection of seven films, including examples of tinted silent movies as well as films made with different color material (from Technicolor to Eastmancolor), gives a small insight into the breadth of the approach to the use of color in film and the space between narrative commitment and color autonomy.

Very few films are made in Germany without television funding. Film funding rules mean that public service broadcasters set the course of how a film develops significantly. The decisions of TV departments thus play an important role when it comes to whether a film is made or not. In her function as ZDF editor and a long-serving head of the film department at 3sat, Inge Classen insisted over 20 years with all her force that there was a place for cinematographic art funded by television and she gave it regular slots in the program. Passionately and expertly, she also managed to push through difficult topics and unusual aesthetic forms, both in documentaries and features. She promoted auteurs with a particular style, filmmakers with a specific vision of film and thus supported many films that have enriched German cinema in artistic terms. So as to pay homage to Inge Classen's work and merits, now that she has taken early retirement, we are showing four films that came about under her supervision and hint at the variety of her projects. We are very glad that Inge Classen will be our guest to present the films with the directors and others involved such as the editor Bettina Böhler.

In September, a DVD boxset of 12 films by Gerd Kroske is being released in absolut MEDIEN's "Die großen Dokumentaristen" series. This offers us the occasion to screen contiguously his Hamburg trilogy, which was made between 1999 and 2012, and to discuss it with him. In his un-agitated and reserved manner, Kroske dedicates himself here to outsiders, masters in the art of living, enfants terribles, all colorful characters with disrupted lives. At the same time, the three film portraits are also studies of a particular era and milieu that give an insight into West German subcultures and social conditions.

Cesar Oiticica Filho’s first film is a visually striking found-footage documentary about the filmmaker’s uncle, Hélio Oiticica (1937–1980), one of the most important Brazilian artists of the 20th Century. Foregoing voiceover narration and expert analyses, the film allows Oiticica himself to narrate his life and expound upon his art in his own words, and in extremely rare archival audio and visual material. The artist’s commentary guides us through his artistic development and expansive political and aesthetic interests, from his modernist paintings and sculptures in the 1960s to his expanded cinema installations and slide show environments of the 1970s, and from the favelas and the lively street life of Rio, New York and London to samba schools and the tropicália cultural movement, jumpstarted by Oiticica but associated with musicians Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil. The film’s rhythmic montage of images doesn’t simply illustrate the artist’s commentary, but both contextualises and radically expands upon it. The result is a bold and complex portrait of an artist for whom life (including homosexuality and drug use) and work determined and transformed each other. (Forum catalogue; Marc Siegel)