A negative test result from the same day (or alternatively proof of full vaccination or recovery from Covid) is required to attend screenings at Arsenal until further notice. It is obligatory to wear an FFP2 mask at the Filmhaus, in the foyer, and in the cinema auditorium whenever you are not at your seat.

The summer Tarkovsky retrospective is a tradition that has grown dear both to us and our audiences for 40 years now. We are showing the seven feature films by Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky (1932–1986), whose monumental oeuvre exudes a lasting fascination.

This summer, HKW invites audiences to attend evening open-air concerts, readings, performances, and films as part of their 21 sunsets program from July 15- August 15. Arsenal is involved once again: 21 archives grasps films and film programs themselves as archival spaces. Found footage, that is, the appropriation and editing together of previously discovered material, is a widely used cinematographic approach. In addition, 21 archives examines the possibilities that arises when this approach leaves its standard operating procedure behind: what if the material used is not found, but rather produced (perhaps because certain perspectives are not included in the existing material)? Or what if it’s not images and sounds that are appropriated, but other things (such as bodily experiences or linking strategies)? Archival practice thus becomes a practice of reorganization and the archive becomes a site of radical critique and lived design. The archive becomes cinema, cinema becomes an archive. The program is held together by 21 planetary events.

In the midst of fishermen’s huts on a gravel beach of the south coast of English, in the direct vicinity of an atomic power station and a military basis, stands Prospect Cottage: the last residence of British artist, activist, and filmmaker Derek Jarman, who died in 1994 from the consequences of an HIV infection. “I waited a lifetime to build my garden. I built my garden with the colours of healing on the sepia shingle at Dungeness.” (Chroma: Book of Colour, 1993).

The exhibition project The Garden. Cinematics of the Soil is dedicated to the life of Derek Jarman. His film of the same name THE GARDEN (1990), in which he examines the garden as a utopian place of collaborative coexistence of humankind and nature, but also as a liminal space between reality and fantasy, healing and destruction, hope and grief, as well as Prospect Cottage itself, form the starting point for a contemporary exploration of the essential questions of our society and its future: environmental pollution and disease, collectivity, and the power of resistance.

After a one-year break, the Arsenal summer school will be back from August 19-21, dedicated to the silent green project The Garden. Long-term friends and collaborators of Derek Jarman – costume designer Annie Symons, artist Peter Fillingham, photographer Howard Sooley, filmmakers David Lewis, composer Simon Fisher Turner, and producer James Mackay, supported by author and poet Mary Katharine Tramontana and curator and author Alexandra Symons Sutcliffe – will draw on photos and film excerpts to speak about Jarman’s cinema as a collaborative project. In addition, the artists and curators Dagie Brundert, Peter Cusack, Bettina Ellerkamp, Jörg Heitmann, Philip Scheffner, Kerstin Schroedinger / Oliver Husain, and Stefanie Schulte Strathaus will discuss their contributions to the group exhibition The Garden. Cinematographies of the Earth.

Marina Vlady, born Catherine Marina de Poliakoff in France to Russian parents, is one of the most fascinating and expressive actors of her generation. She was one of the greatest stars of the 50s and 60s worldwide, working with a series of significant directors and actors. Her filmography comprises over 80 works, which transgress political and cultural borders and reflect the rich and varied landscape of post-war European cinema. There is barely a European country, including West Germany, in which Vlady did not work, thus creating bridges between two systems. She was able to take on various national identities that she combined very convincingly with her very own screen personality. She was a committed feminist from the start, and she helped artists persecuted by communist regimes, either with funds and/or by finding contacts for them in the West. She continues to actively support disadvantaged people today. At the end of the 1980s, she began to work as a writer and found worldwide acclaim with her book about her tumultuous marriage with the Soviet singer-songwriter Vladimir Vysotsky. Though many of her films were popular when they came out in Germany, many have since been forgotten. There has not been a comprehensive representative overview of her performances in Germany or France, yet this is long overdue. Gary Vanisian has curated a program of 21 feature films and one documentary, which presents an adventurous and militant artist and a multifaceted cartography of European auteur cinema and its potential for cinematic expression. (29.7.-30.8.)

Painter, writer, photographer and filmmaker Clemens Klopfenstein (*1944) has had special links to Arsenal for many years now. Since 1979, he has shown several films at the Berlinale Forum and been our guest at the Arsenal cinema on various occasions, his films are distributed in Germany by arsenal distribution. A selection of his cinema oeuvre can be seen as an online summer special at arsenal 3 for an exceptional two months from July 1st to August 31st.

"For us, Clemens Klopfenstein is the independent filmmaker par excellence – creative, temperamental, fanciful, humorous, open to experimentation. A auteur who refuses to compromise in any way or to follow any recipe for commercial success and who develops instead new, fresh impulses again and again from his surroundings, his experience, his contact with friends and his engagement with the medium of film; also from his reaction to landscapes, milieus, and environments. The joy of adventure and the exploration of the foreign/exotic, but also the ironic, self-critical observation of the close-by, the familiar and the well known are Klopfenstein’s basic motifs. And there’s always a level of irony in his work, of ambiguity, of playing around with nuance. Klopfenstein’s films, which are located in the border region between fiction and documentary, could easily dispense with a conventionally narrated plotline, but he actually uses the narrative as a tool, as a thread upon which he can string together pearls, episodes, spontaneous ideas or improvisations." (Ulrich Gregor)

Archival Assembly #1 marks the conclusion of the five-year project „Archive außer sich“. From September 1 to 8 film archives and film archival projects will meet for a public exchange.