As part of REVOLVER magazine’s HANDS ON FASSBINDER series, a discussion with the artistic directors of Arsenal, Stefanie Schulte Strathaus, Birgit Kohler und Milena Gregor, is being held this Saturday (15.9.). They will be talking to Christoph Hochhäusler and Ekkehard Knörer about the tasks, challenges, conditions, goals and contradictions that go hand in hand with an institution which is not only Berlin’s most important cinema and one of the most well-known film organizations in Europe, but is also active in the fields of distribution, archival work and, in the form of the Berlinale Forum, curation.

At the request of Stephan Geene two films from our Archive by Raúl Ruiz in connection with his project „if sex takes no time (and was no lebendes bild)“ will be screened and discussed.

The submission regulations and online registration portal for the 2013 Berlinale will be available from mid-September 2012 at www.berlinale.de.

In October the Arsenal will be organising the "Think:Film – International Experimental Cinema Congress 2012" in collaboration with the Film Institute at the Berlin University of the Arts. The congress will take place at the Akademie der Künste in Hanseatenweg from October 10 - 14 and accommodate more than 15 panel discussions with international filmmakers, artists, scholars and curators. On the opening night Isidore Isou's film TRAITÉ DE BAVE D'ÉTERNITÉ will be presented. The central goal of "Think:Film" is to make a philosophical reassessment of the special position enjoyed by film and the cinematic image in artistic and intellectual practice and to redetermine what this position might be. What direct influence does the cinematic image have on current thought and how can film itself become a way of thinking?

In our series Filmmakers' Choice Martin Ebner will be presenting works by Ernie Gehr, Larry Gottheit, Peter Hutton und Pat Sullivan on August 20. "My first visit to the cinema, around 1970, holding my grandmother's hand at a matinee screening, the cruelty of Laurel and Hardy so incomprehensible to me that I fled out into the blazing sunshine after only a few minutes. "Fantasia" then followed, which I can only remember as a confusing orgy of color and sound. Since then, I have had a healthy respect for cinema as an apparatus that structures time and perception, yet I do sometimes imagine it being transformed into the sort of extravagant, fantastic, random, imaginary, atmospheric, chaotic, fragmentary, complex and ornamental place that it maybe used to be or might yet become." (Martin Ebner)