Living Archive represents an attempt to process the archive’s holdings with an eye on the contemporary, allowing the archive to be preserved whilst creating new material and generating fresh approaches at the same time. More than 30 Filmmakers, artists and curators are developing projects that take the archive’s holdings as a starting point. Since the beginning of June, the participants have been viewing material at our editing tables and holding discussions at the premises of our cooperation partner Salon Populaire. Public screenings are also held once a month.

On August 16, we will be discussing three films that each relate to different projects: AMY! (Laura Mulvey, Peter Wollen, GB 1980, 33 min), SIGMUND FREUD'S DORA: A CASE OF MISTAKEN IDENTITY (Andrew Tyndall, Anthony McCall,Claire Pajaczkowska, Ivan Ward, Jane Weinstock, USA 1979, 35 min) and COME BACK, AFRICA (Lionel Rogosin, USA 1958, 84 min).

For the August edition of their monthly film series, the DEFA Foundation will be presenting films about the building of the Berlin Wall, which took place 50 years ago this year. Two documentaries and a fiction film approach this far-reaching event from very different perspectives.

Walter Ruttman’s BERLIN: SYMPHONY OF A GREAT CITY (Germany 1927) is not just the singular portrait of a glittering mid-1920s metropolis, but also the linchpin of a series of documentaries from the 1920s and 30s which carry its name: the city symphonies, which employed rhythmic montage and associative sequences of images to capture the increasing dynamism, mechanization and modernity of cities and how it felt to live in them at the time. Rhythm, tempo, movement, abstraction and a lust for experimentation govern these cinematic approximations of Berlin, Nice, Moscow, New York, Paris and Rotterdam, which we will be showing in July. The series will also be supplemented by several, more recent films which either make explicit reference to the city symphony genre or are related to it.

The program for the next public screening on July 19 is confirmed: We’re showing

PASSAGES FROM FINNEGANS WAKE by Mary Ellen Bute (US 1965, 89 mins). Based on James Joyce’s novel, Bute’s only feature-length film was named Best Debut of the Year at Cannes in 1965. It has been in our archive since 2007, alongside most of the director’s shorts.

The "public screenings" series is running in conjunction with the Living Archive project we launched in June. Once a month, the project’s participants select films that are rarely screened, offering the public new ground for discussion. The screenings give an insight into the project’s diversity as well as that of the Arsenal film archive itself.