In April, the children's program is dedicated to the American comedians Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Laurel & Hardy. At the beginning of the month, within the frame of a moderated What-is-cinema? program, we present early slapstick films of all four outstanding comedians. (April 4 & 5) On the Easter weekend, we will screen MODERN TIMES (USA 1936) by and with Charlie Chaplin, who as a factory worker gets caught up in the wheelwork of industry. (April 11 –13) Buster Keaton artistically cavorts on the water, the land and during a storm in the fast-paced movie STEAMBOAT BILL JUNIOR (USA 1928) and proves that even a collapsing building wall can't hurt Buster. (April 18 & 19) Chaos also reigns with Laurel & Hardy in SONS OF THE DESERT (USA 1933), when they try to secretly slip away and attend a convention. A turbulent grotesque movie with remarkable gags and ideas. (April 25 & 26) Hilarious slapstick comedies with the unmatched Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton und Laurel & Hardy.
With Kayak and Kinamo: The Beginnings of Hitler's Cameraman Walter Frentz
The cameraman Walter Frentz (1907–2004) is one of the best-known image propagandists of National Socialism. He began as an amateur filmmaker. As a passionate kayaker, he documented his journeys on water from 1929 on with the hand-held camera "Ica–Kinamo". WILDWASSERFAHRT DURCH DIE SCHWARZEN BERGE (1932), a trip through the Tara gorge in Montenegro enlivened by short shots, frequently alternating perspectives and surprising detail shots and close-ups. The Ufa then engaged him for a journey to America in a modern HAPAG steamship (WASSER HAT BALKEN, 1933). We experience Walter Frentz as a kayaker in DIE WILDWASSER DER DRINA (1934), a typical Ufa culture film by Ulrich K. T. Schulz.
An event of CineGraph Babelsberg with the Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv and the Deutschen Kinemathek. Introduction: Jeanpaul Goergen (April 20)
Book presentation: Kino aus zweiter Hand. Zur Ästhetik materieller Aneignung im Film und in der Medienkunst
The film scholar Christa Blümlinger places the theme of shifting and reconfiguring archival images in the context of a change of dispositifs. The re-use of moving images has become commonplace in the age of digital reproduction technologies, but it was born in film editing. The book deals with an archival art that can be understood, although it is related to the past, as a present act of reading, reshaping and incorporating. By means of repetition, found-footage films and essayistic compilations always aim at alteration, reprocessing, rewriting, and rearranging and thus at the originality of the newly conveyed forms of seeing and hearing. Blümlinger will present the book, published by Verlag Vorwerk8, using the example of Ken Jacobs' film performances. (April 27)
Vaginal Davis presents Rising Stars, Falling Stars
In 1889 Charlie Chaplin was born and 15 years later he gave birth to the Tramp: "A tramp, a gentleman, a poet, a dreamer, a lonely fellow, always hopeful of romance and adventure… not above picking up cigarette butts or robbing a baby of its candy. He will kick a lady in the rear – but only in extreme anger." Vaginal Davis presents films from 1914: CAUGHT IN A CABARET, HIS MUSICAL CAREER, HIS PREHISTORIC PAST and HIS TRYSTING PLACE. Accompagnied with a live music performance by John and Tim Blue and followed by a reception in the Red Foyer, hosted by Ms. Davis. (16.4.)
An Evening for Gertrud Koch
Getrud Koch has long been a keen observer and critic of cinema. She is well-known beyond the specialist public as a film scholar and theorist. To celebrate her birthday, colleagues and co-workers have organized a conference on film studies that will take place on April 24 and 25 at the ICI Berlin. The start will be made with a celebration at Arsenal during which Vivian Ostrovsky, Ulrike Ottinger and Tom Tykwer, among others, will present clips, films and talks for Gertrud Koch. The main focus is on the interactions between the individual "I" and the social "we" in the mass medium of film, something which utopias in art and politics have been addressing time and again since the 1920s. Gertrud Koch is Professor at the Department of Film Studies of FU Berlin and since 2005 Member of the Advisory Board of Arsenal – Institut für Film und Videokunst. (April 23)
The Art of Mediation (5): Films About Films and the Internet
More and more films are available in digital form, and ever more parts of film history and present-day cinema can be seen on the Internet. At the same time, anyone wanting to deal with them and use them is confronted with legal restrictions. What has the Internet changed? In the program with Sebastian Lütgert (pirate cinema), film and Web examples will be discussed. The film selection focuses on works created within the frame of American Weblogs – particularly "Shooting Down Pictures", the project of the filmmaker and critic Kevin B. Lee who will be present at the screening. Examples include video essays on current and classical films by Nicole Brenez, Kristin Thompson, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Matt Zoller Seitz, and others. Films and a discussion on the forms of films about films on the Internet with Sebastian Lütgert. The Art of Mediation, a project by Entuziazm e.V., is supported by the German Federal Cultural Foundation and the Federal Agency for Civic Education. (April 17)
Magical History Tour – Forms of Realism
"For me, Realism is nothing but the artistic form of truth!" (Roberto Rossellini) Alluding this quote, the Magical Mystery Tour in April addresses two trends in the cinematic treatment of Realism before and after the Second World War: French "Poetic Realism" of the 1930s and, often directly associated with this style, "Neorealism", which had a shaping influence on Italian films of the postwar period. Both trends evolved in times of dramatic political and social crises: Authors, filmmakers, cameramen, and set designers formulated a personal and, in the case of French cinema of the 1930s and 40s, highly poetic relationship to reality in film. Their "Realism of style" (André Bazin) established radically new directions in European cinema. The poetic works created in France, by Jean Vigo, Marcel Carné, Jean Renoir, and others, predominantly focused on stories set in a proletarian milieu, not seldom narrated with a pessimistic worldview. The feeling of being lost and damned, imbuing many of these films, was often regarded as expressing the gloomy mood of the pre-war years. The special look of many Poetic Realistic films was created by the set constructions and decors of the Hungarian emigrant Alexander Trauner.
With Slavoj Žižek at the Movies
Slavoj Žižek presents a spiraling tour de force through the history of cinema in Sophie Fiennes' film THE PERVERT'S GUIDE TO CINEMA (GB/A/NL 2006, April 3), which we were able to screen as a première at the beginning of March in the presence of Sophie Fiennes and Slavoj Žižek. Due to the great interest on the side of the audience, we will show the film again, supplemented by several films that Žižek talks about in PERVERT'S GUIDE – "With Slavoj Žižek at the Movies".
bauhaus & film (3)
New Building – Suicidal Objectivity (April 6, with an introduction by Kathrin Peters) "Out of sheer protest against the Art Nouveau and timbered magnificence of his parent's mansion, he furnished his spaces with an all but suicidal objectivity…" Getrud Busse wrote of her husband, the documentarist Wilfried Basse. The 1920s architecture that became known under the term of "New Building" shaped the debates on modern architecture for a long period of time. We reconstruct a historical film program of the same name that took place on January 31, 1932. In DIE NEUE WOHNUNG (CH 1930), Hans Richter literally disassembles the "front parlor" with the help of intertitles and short scenes staged with actors. He contrasts the useless porcelain figures on the Vertiko and other Art Nouveau decoration with modern, objectively sober and purposeful living-room and kitchen furnishing. Here, (with the help of stop and go motion recordings) everything seems to work on its own, the foldable pieces of furniture are moved out of the way as if by magic. Ella Bergman-Michel's WO WOHNEN ALTE LEUTE? (D 1931) is committed to an alternative housing project in Frankfurt/Main: a home for the elderly with functional, light-flooded architecture. The extensive use of glass allows the camera to capture deeply staggered vistas, while the pans, which always end in the sky, evoke the well-known triad: "Light – Air – Sun". The folding doors of the common rooms that can be pushed aside – shown in animated graphics – demonstrate the multi-functionality of the spaces to further the conviviality of the people living there. Wilfried Basse's ABBRUCH UND AUFBAU. EINE REPORTAGE VOM BAUPLATZ (D 1932) was created based on a two-year, long-term observation in the center of Berlin. Between Inselbrücke and Wallstrasse, the Arbeiterbank, a huge old building is torn down and s a modern complex of large buildings is built up again. Old and new working methods encounter each other: demolition is carried out with harnessed horses and jackhammers. Even the metro tubes traversing the port basin have to be excavated. The new buildings gradually rise.
Polish New Wave. The History of a Phenomenon That Never Existed
The film festival filmPOLSKA 2009, which is taking place for the fourth time in Berlin and in the past years has been predominantly dedicated to contemporary Polish cinema, will expand this year, not only with regard to the number of participating cinemas but also to the scope and orientation of the program. In addition to current Polish feature and documentary films of the past months, the retrospective titled "The Polish New Wave" presented at Arsenal takes a look at a film historical and aesthetic phenomenon that hitherto has not existed in Polish historiography as the designation of a specific cinematographic trend. Just recently, the Polish curators Łukasz Ronduda and Barbara Piwowarska from the Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw introduced the name "Polish New Wave" as an umbrella term for a number of Polish documentary and feature films produced in the past 40 years that categorically reject traditional cinematic forms, take formally radically paths and can be situated between contemporary art and cinema. These initiators of rewriting Polish film history have documented their insights in this film series and in a publication edited by both.
Funded by:
Arsenal on Location is funded by the Capital Cultural Fund
The international programs of Arsenal on Location are a cooperation with the Goethe-Institut
