Center of a metropolis, ruined landscape, Berlin Wall, no-man's-land, huge construction site, tourist attraction: the past 100 years of history have left their mark on Potsdamer Platz. From Thursdays through Sundays at five pm, we'll be screening films that, through the variety in their aesthetics and content, are atmospherically dense descriptions of a city caught in the vicissitudes of history.

When Hartmut Bitomsky returned from the United States to Berlin to take on the position of director of the German Film and Television Academy (dffb), Arsenal greeted him with a retrospective of his films. The Filmhaus (Arsenal, Deutsche Kinemathek and dffb) now says farewell to Bitomsky, who will leave the dffb for health reasons. On this occasion, the media scholar Dietrich Leder will talk about Bitomsky's films and texts. Bitomsky wrote about the film of the evening, JACKSON COUNTY JAIL (Michael Miller, USA 1976): "Each shot is taken with an eye for reality, and reality is shot with an eye for cinema. The film is edited like crazy, hell for leather. People were at work here without ulterior motives. They are as hard-boiled and mean as the story they came up with." We are looking forward to greeting Hartmut Bitomsky as well as Barbara Kisseler (Head of the Senate Chancellery) and Christian Petzold. (Bodo Knapheide) (Sept. 26)

The exhibition "Die Technische Stadt" that took place in Dresden in summer of 1928 uses the example of a modern city to show how technology has an impact on people's lives. The technological body of the city is exhibited, its organism: electricity, gas, water, traffic and communication, police and fire department. The program bundles all preserved films and film fragments of the ambitious show. The sensation of the exhibition was DAS ERSTE KUGELHAUS DER WELT [The World's First Spherical House] (1928). DAS STAHLRAHMENHAUS DER STAHLBAU-GMBH DÜSSELDORF [The Steel Frame House of Stahlbau-GmbH Düsseldorf] (1928) also caused a stir. In addition, we will show the advertising film about the ZEITGEMÄSSE HAUSHALT [Contemporary Household] (1930) as well as the first documentary on Berlin's Radio Tower as DAS NEUE WAHRZEICHEN BERLINS [Berlins New Landmark] (1928).

Kino Polska will screen two films by Andrzej Wajda: The story line of his masterpiece POPIÓL I DIAMENT (Ashes and Diamonds, Poland 1958, Sept. 22) unfolds between May 7 and 8, 1945. A resistance fighter is to murder a communist functionary. But he mistakes his victim with someone else and kills another man. "Within this classical unity of time and place, Wajda symbolically narrates the immediate postwar history as a continuation of the Polish tragedy." (Filmarchiv Austria) The film was highly acclaimed worldwide and made the leading actor Zbigniew Cybulski a star.

From September 24 to 26, the Deutsche Kinemathek in the Filmhaus will organize the conference "The Camera as Weapon – Propaganda Images of the Second World War>". It focuses on photos and film recordings of German "propaganda companies" that until today shape the memory of this war.

Vaginal Davis, performer and expert on 1920s cinema, is back with her legendary series. The new season starts with STRIKE (1924) by Sergei Eisenstein. The film depicts a strike by the workers of a factory in pre-revolutionary Russia and their subsequent suppression. Eisenstein's influential essay "Montage of Attractions" was written between STRIKE'S production and premiere. Accompagnied with a live music performance by John and Tim Blue and followed by a reception in the Red Foyer, hosted by Ms. Davis.

In September, the French philosopher Jacques Rancière will be Fellow at the Collaborative Research Centre 626 "Aesthetic Experience and the Dissolution of Artistic Limits" of the FU Berlin. On Sept. 24 he will deliver a short lecture at Arsenal titled "Narrations of Time and Space". Beforehand, the film GABBLA (Inland, Algera/F 2008) by the young Algerian director Tariq Teguia will be shown. It was screened last year in the competition in Venice. GABBLA tells the story of a topographer in the Algerian South-Oran region, where he is confronted with police violence, Islamist violence and the migration of Africans to Europe. The times mesh: The present is haunted by the past.

The encounter between Fidel Castro, Pope John Paul II and Madonna on the cover is as unusual as the entire book project published by Stroemfeld Verlag, "Das ABC des Kinos. Foto, Film, Neue Medien" by Winfried Pauleit. The slipcase contains a theory audio book on CD and ten artistically designed booklets, the interdisciplinary contents of which bear witness to other unexpected encounters initiated by the author. It brings together thoughts on post-cinematography, on Kracauer's essay on photography, on cinema and schools, and on how cyborgs can learn from cinema with reflections on video surveillance, on the filmic and theoretical work of Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, the motif of card games, and Tom Tykwer's movie LOLA RENNT (Run Lola Run, D 1998, Sept. 1), which we will screen on the occasion of the book presentation at Arsenal.

In the early 1960s, the twins Mike and George Kuchar, born in the Bronx in 1942, became the favorites of the New York underground film scene. Sponsored by Jonas Mekas, pioneer of the U.S. independent film scene, the teenagers presented their 8 mm home movies alongside films of experimental film heavyweights such as Ken Jacobs or Michael Snow. Their "pictures", as they called them, distilled the essence from the Technicolor cinema dreams of B-movies, melodramas, sci-fi and horror films shot in 1940s and 50s Hollywood – something which was later termed "camp". They were "Readers Digest abridgements of a Hollywood life." (George Kuchar) The Kuchars created their own star system, searched for their props and costumes at flea markets and inspired contemporaries such as Andy Warhol and John Waters.