Magical History Tour - Color in Film

Between 100 and 365, anthology and context, chronology and work in progress, between rewriting the history of film and canon – our continuous presentation of film history in successive series dates back to the 1980s. These coordinates mark the field of tension in which the various film series can be situated. This is also true of the “Magical History Tour – Film History in 365 Films” to which we invited our audience after moving to Potsdamer Platz in 2000, and which since then has begun nine times a year with different emphases and focuses. In doing so, we have attempted to present a unique, repeatedly altered version of a film history that itself is always in motion, and to make the Magical History Tour a mirror of our understanding of film, a document of our collection, and a testimony to our mission – enabling the interested audience to deal with the history of film each evening at Arsenal. And it is to remain this way with our new edition of the Magical History Tour starting on October 1. Yet we will depart from offering the overabundant number of 365 films a year, as we have done in the past, also from the chronological sequence of the presented works and the attempt to represent a context-related overview of important trends and periods of film history using individual examples. We will stick to the annual rhythm, but from now on group eight to ten selected examples from the history of film around a certain theme each month. This allows us to set films of different styles, genres, periods – from the early days of cinema to the 21st century – and regions in relation to each other in one month. The first theme of the new Magical History Tour is "Color in Film"; the coming months will be dedicated to themes such as "Montage", "Manifestos", "Sound", "Body", "Collective", "Reproduction and Reality", "The Political", or "Excess and Minimalism".