In 1947, avant-garde cinema pioneer Maya Deren notes: "Marxism - only theory of politics which designed a mechanism capable of changing itself - as in the concept of the withering away of the state." Media scholar Ute Holl begins a paper on this film poet’s theories and conception of cinema, which takes the form of "a sustained inter-vention in the social and sensory relationships of all those who take part in this ongo-ing form of communication." The title of this year’s Forum Expanded programme is taken from this same paper, with "A Mechanism Capable of Changing Itself" referring to the specific agency possessed by cinema, which is especially well expressed in the rich spectrum of forms to be found in documentary works.

Since its foundation, Forum Expanded has always placed a special emphasis on doc-umentary forms. This year once again the term encompasses archival works, fiction and experimental film, in the sense that the selected works function as an expression of a reality that represents a new take on the past while transforming it into a possible future.

Three years after Harun Farocki's sudden death in summer 2014, the versatility and consistence of his nearly 50-year career are undeniable. Between 1966, the year in which he started studying at the newly founded "Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin" (dffb), and 2013, Farocki shot numerous cinema films and television programs, wrote film criticism and numerous, often polemic texts that carried out diagnoses of their respective eras, taught at universities and film and art schools. From the 90s onwards, he was increasingly regarded as an installation artist and theoretician of the image. Farocki's work can be emphatically understood as comprising a theory, critique, and politics of myriads types of images, but also exemplifies precise analyses of working processes in an era of the progressive mechanization of both production and seeing. The spectrum of his interventions ranges from agitation-focused, pamphlet-like films about self-reflexive, associative, open forms all the way to reserved, patient observational studies.

"Year by Year/Side by Side" is the most comprehensive retrospective of Harun Farocki’s cinema and television work to date. Alongside the exhibition "Harun Farocki: Mit anderen Mitteln – By Other Means" (curated by Antje Ehmann and Carlos Guerra) at the neuer berliner kunstverein, the temporary "Farocki Now" academy organized by the Harun Farocki Institut at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt and the silent green Kulturquartier (October 18th-21st) and the recent publication of his incomplete autobiography, the program gives audiences a chance to become acquainted, or reacquainted, with the documentarian's oeuvre and all the many directions it points in. Numerous productions thought lost or seldom shown were able to be researched in archives and brought together. The retrospective suggests "Two Ways" (which is the title of Farocki's first ever film) through his work. Under the title "Year by Year", all of Farocki's cinema and television productions currently accessible are being showing in the order in which they were made. The second series is called "Side by Side" and takes place in parallel to the chronologically programmed one and borrows the name of an exhibition by Farocki in order to reveal the specific references that hold together a body of cinema and television work that spans nearly 50 years. Each program is accompanied by introductions or conversations with colleagues, friends and co-workers of Farocki.

Paintings, sketches, etchings, drawings and the people that create them have always been a point of reference for filmmakers, cinematographers, scriptwriters, and not least production designers. Using film to breathe movement into motionless pictorial art provides the visual worlds of the original artworks with new contexts and paves the way for a whole range of different semantic and perceptional shifts. Grappling with aspects of the lives and creative processes of artists and stylistic movements in cinematic terms opens up new perspectives on art history as an echo chamber for the production of film images. The Magical History Tour is showing examples of the productive relationship between painting and film that span eight decades.