Our next event for children aged 5 years and up takes place on Sunday November 8. “The color is the key. The eye is the hammer. The soul is the piano with many strings”, said painter Wassily Kandinsky in 1911. In film too, forms have a rhythm and colors can dance to the music of the film, such as in Mary Ellen Butes’s ABSTRONIC (USA 1952), which shows how sounds moves The fact that tones can be made audible by colors and forms is proved by Evelyn Lambart and Norman McLaren in their hand-painted film BEGONE DULL CARE (Canada 1949). Images that play with music on the screen can be seen in EARLY ABSTRACTIONS by Harry Smith (USA 1939–1956). And how forms can rhythmically appear and disappear again via scratches in the film strip is illustrated by MONDLICHT by Bärbel Neubauer (Germany 1997). After the screening, all the children can paint their own rhythms and take them home with them.

Our next event for children aged 6 and above takes place on October 4. Films are usually projected at 24 frames per second. Whether they appear fast or slow depends on what you’re looking at, how the film was edited, how you perceive the film and sometimes also what you can hear. We will screen widely different short films that are fast or slow in one way or another. M.M. Serra’s PPII (USA 1986) has an incredible speed due to its many very short cuts. In contrast, Bruce Baillie’s ALL MY LIFE (USA 1966) is one, single shot without any cuts at all. Jonas Mekas filmed NOTES ON THE CIRCUS (USA 1966) over the course of three circus performances, but exposed all three one above the other. As a result, the viewer sees at the same time what actually occurred in a sequence. Elena Duque paints in a real filmed landscape (VALDEDIÓS , Spain 2019), creating two layers of time. And as for Ted Fendt’s THE STONE TOWER (2020), we’ll give nothing away.

Our next film event for children takes place on September 20, for all aged eight and above: Since the first time films were shown in 1895, they have been accompanied by sounds and music. Noises, music, sounds and language are combined to make a soundtrack. Before we make our own sound experiments and create a soundtrack to DÉMÉNAGEMENT À LA CLOCHE DE BOIS by Alice Guy (France 1905), we will find out what can be seen and heard in four shorts: In ROOTS (Germany 1996) by Bärbel Neubauer, colors and shapes swirl around and keep transforming themselves. In his FILMSTUDIE (Germany 1926), Hans Richter plays with light and shadows. LANTOUY by Isabell Spengler and Daniel Adams (Germany 2006) entices us into a magical world of images and sounds. Finally, in Matthias Müller and Christoph Girardet’s PLAY (Germany 2003) a moment full of suspense between thundering applause and the beginning of a piece of music being played seems to be never-ending.

Kinozauber, Arsenal’s film education project for pre-school children, kicked off again: Now that the new school year has started, the artists of Arsenal Filmatelier will finally be able to continue their cooperation with EKT Regenbogen-Kidz and also expand the project to two more kindergartens. The project involves groups of pre-school children making several visits to Arsenal to watch experimental shorts from our collection and engage creatively with aspects such as light, shadow, color, sound, film material and projection.