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)

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)

"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.

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".

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.

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.

The Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul (born 1970) is one of the most outstanding and idiosyncratic proponents of international auteur cinema today. His unique films elude conventional categories: neither unambiguously fiction nor documentary, they do not adhere to narrative plausibility and logic, but deliberately work non-linearly with voids and irritating moments: The films are often divided into two parts, with the relation between both frequently remaining opaque; at times the opening credits run till the middle of the film; there are intertitles, animals gifted in language or suddenly a black hole in the picture. This instinctive freedom of narration lends Weerasethakul’s films a fascinatingly hypnotic effect and enormous imaginative power. What characterizes Weerasethakul's oeuvre, in addition to the documentary basis of his aesthetics and his work with lay actors, is his interest in Thai oral history as well as his adoption of existing popular formats (soap operas, legends, radio plays, comics, vintage films), which he newly contextualized in his films. Pivotal to his work is the topos of the jungle, the place of a different intensity, a different level of awareness, of a utopia or of a mythical realm that opposes the order of reality. His imaginations are based on myths and memories, but at times indeed possess political contours, for the real can be permeated by the supernatural (and vice versa).

A bag falls from the sky, inside: MILLIONS (Danny Boyle, GB 2004, March 7 & 8). What appears as a sudden fairy tale in the orderly settlement of new residential buildings in Liverpool, where Damian, his brother Anthony and their father live after the death of the mother, turns out to be the continuation of fantasy with capitalistic means. For Damian's world is already populated by fantastic heroes – saints. That's why Anthony calls him a weirdo and endorses soberly investing the millions. Damian, on the other hand, wants to act like his holy role models and distribute the money among the poor: a field study is to reveal who is needy in the neighborhood. Boyle creates poetic and whimsical images that tell of the belief in fantasy, not without satirical interludes.

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.