In a small selection of films, which we will screen on the occasion of the sixth edition of the Polish film festival in Berlin, filmPOLSKA, we present the work of two numerously awarded, internationally renowned Polish cameramen: Paweł Edelman and Arthur Reinhart. Both graduated from the famous film academy in Łódz and did their first camera works in the mid 1980s and early 1990s respectively. During the course of their careers, both have collaborated with certain directors: Paweł Edelman shot a number of films with Władysław Pasikowski, Andrzej Wajda and Roman Polanski, while Reinhart has been regularly working with Dorota Kędzierzawska since 1994 as a cameraman and cutter. Not only the five films which we will screen from April 15 to 22 give insights into the working methods of Edelman and Reinhart, but also the discussions with the two cameramen: We are looking forward to greeting Paweł Edelman on April 15 and Arthur Reinhart on April 19 at Arsenal.
On the Occasion of the Ingmar Bergman Symposium
In the framework of the exhibition "Ingmar Bergman. Von Lüge und Wahrheit (Truth and Lies)," a project of the Deutschen Kinemathek, a symposium will be held in cooperation with the Einstein Forum Potsdam on April 29. As the title of the exhibition indicates, the field of tension between truth and lies in Bergman’s filmic oeuvre is to be gauged from different perspectives. The author Ingmar Bergman always intensively drew from the story of his childhood and family, particularly from his own professional and private relationships, transforming them more or less encoded into the subjects of his movies. He thus provides possible interpretations, but also plays games with the interested viewer. Like little Alexander in Fanny och Alexander (1982), who much to the displeasure of his stepfather, a strict Protestant bishop, blurs the boundaries between truth and lies with his excessive imagination, Bergman, too, creates artistic mirages between dream and reality from his personal universe of images. Alexander, as with the main characters in almost all of Bergman's movies, is Bergman's alter ego. In his autobiography, The Magic Lantern, the director, who always claimed to have suffered under his strict father, a Protestant pastor, writes: "I believe I came through best, because I trained myself to be a liar. I created an exterior persona that had little in common with my true self. Since I couldn’t keep mask and self apart, these damages had consequences, even when I was already long an adult, and they affected my creativity. Sometimes I have to find consolation in the fact that everyone who has lived a lie, loves the truth."
Film education program for schoolchildren: What is Cinema?
The monthly jour fixe of our film education program, What is Cinema?, has already become a firmly established part of Arsenal's program, taking place for the fifth time in April. On the first Friday of the month, this time on April 1, we invite Berlin schoolchildren, in two programs divided according to class levels, to examine the question giving our film education program its name: What is cinema? Clues are given by a program with experimental short films from different periods and countries that disassemble films into its components and make visible what film, what cinema is or can be. Program 1 starts at 9:30 am and is for schoolchildren in first to sixth grade; program 2 is for schoolchildren in tenth grade or higher and starts at 12 o'clock noon. Further information and — as always — registration by phone under (030) 269 55 131.
Classics Not Only For Children
EMIL UND DIE DETEKTIVE (Emil and the Detectives, Gerhard Lamprecht, GER 1931) Two years after the introduction of sound film, Lamprecht has this first film adaptation of Erich Kästner's children’s book start with a wink of the eye as a silent movie: dramaturgy, picture composition and the mode of depiction make one think of past times and practices, before the medium underwent a change—until, shortly after the warning whistle of a child amidst the noisy world of the children, the story begins. On a train trip to Berlin, somebody steals 140 marks from Emil, which he was supposed to bring to his grandmother in Berlin. At the Bahnhof Zoo train station he notices the theft and along with a group of Berlin kids chases after the thief (Fritz Rasp). A thrilling pursuit through Berlin bathed in bright summer light, through a city of kids, for whom the adult world is at times a huge adventure playground. (April 3, 10, 17, 24; from 6 years of age)
Book presentation
To explore film history as a historiography of crises from the perspective of its threshold phenomena and manifestations of transition and to analyze the way in which films aesthetically deal with their historical conditionality, are the two basic approaches in Michael Wedel’s book, Filmgeschichte als Krisengeschichte – Schnitte und Spuren durch den deutschen Film, just published by Transcript-Verlag and that we would like to present at the beginning of the month. With a special interest in historical asynchronicities and aesthetic ruptures, the fourteen chapters of the book offer a history of German cinema seen from its breaks and transitions, specific situations and constellations. On the occasion of the book presentation and in conjunction with the Magical History Tour, which in April is dedicated — following the book — to breaks in film history, we will screen the last film that Fritz Lang directed, DIE 1000 AUGEN DES DR. MABUSE (1960), in which traces of the past are inscribed in an enigmatic way. (April 2)
The DEFA-Stiftung presents
In April the DEFA-Stiftung will continue its monthly film series at Kino Arsenal with two films by Peter Pewas from the program "Breaks and Continuities." The series, conceived in cooperation with the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung is dedicated to nine directors who worked for the UFA prior to 1945 and the DEFA after 1945. The gloomily poetic love film, DER VERZAUBERTE TAG (GER 1944), tells the story of the florists Christine and Anni, who are both longing for fulfilling love. After being repeatedly presented to the censorship in 1944, the film was not released until the end of the war and shown for the first time in 1951. In the film set in the ruins after the war, STRASSENBEKANNTSCHAFT (SBZ (GDR) 1948), young Erika gets lost in the nightlife of the big city on her quest for a luxurious life — with risky consequences. The morally tinged film seeks to educate the audience on the loss of values and venereal diseases. (April 4)
Telémachos Alexiou
As a world premiere, we present two full-length films by the young Greek director, Telémachos Alexiou. His debut, THE LOGIC OF THE CAT (G/GER 2009), is a film about Themos, his lovesickness, his everyday life that drags along, his friends, and their political activism. It is also a film about Athens and the imminent unrests in the summer of 2008. In VENUS IN THE GARDEN (G/GER 2011), the two hustlers, Nikos and Alain, and their procuress, Monica, are entangled in a complicated relationship. Is it a role play emerging from the boredom of a summer, or have the three read Jean Genet? Beforehand, two short films will be screened: THE DREAM OF NORMA (GER 2010), which was shown at the Berlinale's Forum Expanded, a dancing duel between Norma, played by drag superstar Vaginal Davis, and her shadow, and the melancholy fake documentation AN INTERVIEW WITH AN ARTIST (GER 2010). (April 11, in the presence of Telémachos Alexiou)
FilmDokument
A central promise of the government under Adolf Hitler was to overcome mass unemployment. NS propaganda films were to mount support to this end, but above all prove success: AUS DER TIEFE EMPOR (1934) celebrates the upswing brought about by various job-creation measures. KAMPF UM BROT (1936) pays tribute to the labor service in the frame of land reclamation. ARBEIT UND WEHR (1936) praises job-creation measures and arming without connecting the two. Finally, in EINER VON VIELEN (1936), the job-creation lottery not only brings employment but also great luck to ordinary people. (Detlev Humann)
An event of CineGraph Babelsberg in cooperation with the Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv and the Deutschen Kinemathek. (April 18)
Vaginal Davis presents Rising Stars, Falling Stars
This 1920 silent classic from Sweden stars Tora Teje as Irene, the bored wife of inattentive entomology professor Carpentier. Seeking some spice in her life, she becomes involved with a dashing aviator but secretly desires her husband's best friend, Preben Wells. Meanwhile, the professor is beginning to get unusually close to his niece.
Followed by drinks in the Red Foyer. At the piano: Eunice Martins. (27.4.)
Celluloid – The Medium as Material
15 films marking the start of the UdK seminar "Celluloid." The seminar focuses on exploring the medium of film as working material and working technique. Film exposed, illuminated, edited, cut up, pasted, scratched, corroded, buried. On view are classics of the genre as well as precursors and films further developing the genre. Most of them are from the time when experimenting with film initiated the genre of the same name. But also earlier and later examples proving that experimenting with the medium is an ongoing working method. Yet while the experimental filmmakers of the 1960s hardly had an alternative to film and its technology, today, opting for this material and its apparatuses is a deliberate decision. (Björn Speidel)
(April 26, introduction: Stefanie Gaus and Björn Speidel)
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
