Heinz Emigholz' early cinematic work provided important impulses for the international experimental film movement of the 1970s and 80s. Within the frame of Forum Expanded 2010, we presented an installation of seven films from 1972-1977 at Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart. Together with Filmgalerie 451, the films were published on two DVDs. For the first time, the project offers the opportunity to survey the interrelations in this completed group of works: SCHENEC-TADY I, II and III, ARROWPLANE, TIDE, HOTEL, and DEMON.
16. Jewish Film Festival Berlin & Potsdam 2010
Until May 6, Arsenal will screen further films within the frame of the Jewish Film Festival that promise unusual, surprising, amusing, and thought-provoking insights into Jewish life across the world.
Archive of a Possible Future (II)
The remembrance of its own colonial past is only very weak in Germany, the common form of archiving being suppression. How can an archive be created that instead remembers actively, also the history of resistance, and that can be used to conceive a possible future? Cinema plays a special role in this regard: as collective memory, as a place for conveying and updating history in the present. Cinema and colonialism are also historically linked; especially in Germany, cinema was a place of colonial fantasies. But cinema is also always resistive. What kind of cinema is created where, how is it made and how is it viewed? What do center and periphery mean in this context?
In Wonderland – The Films of Miguel Gomes
One can't stop wondering and has no idea what is happening to oneself when watching the films of the Portuguese filmmaker Miguel Gomes. His two full-length and six short films offer bizarre topics, wild, meandering forms and an irrepressible imagination. They are in many respects idiosyncratic, inventive, playful, frolicsome, disorderly, anarchic, and absurd. Gomes ignores genre borders and narrative conventions, he doesn't play by the customary rules of the game and employs all kinds of means drawn from the cinematic treasure chest. He confuses the levels of time, artfully blurs the borders between documentary and fiction, unexpectedly changes the stops, and jumps from one genre to the next: His films are fairy-tale, musical, comedy, and melodrama all in one. The theme is often coming of age, or young men’s fear and refusal to grow up. Music always plays an important role.
John Ford
John Ford (1894–1973) is doubtlessly one of the outstanding personalities in the history of cinema, a masterly image stylist and virtuoso storyteller. The scope of his oeuvre – he shot more than 140 films in 60 years (of which many early ones are lost, however) – is imposing, his contribution to the development of cinematography evident, and his influence on following generations of filmmakers undeniable. Ford’s films possess great aesthetic-stylistic beauty and diversity, ranging from the expressionistic-gloomy works of the late 1920s and early 30s, in which one senses the influence of F.W. Murnau (e.g., THE INFORMER, 1935), all the way to his late, strongly reduced and straightforward westerns (e.g., THE SEARCHERS, 1956). A similarly wide range is offered by the number of different genres in which John Ford's movies are set. In addition to westerns, for which he is still most famous (although he shot only one western between 1926 and 1945 –STAGECOACH, 1939), he directed numerous war and adventure movies (THE PRISONER OF SHARK ISLAND, 1936), social dramas (THE GRAPES OF WRATH, 1940, and HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY, 1941), as well as comedies set in the Confederate states (THE SUN SHINES BRIGHT, 1952). Born as the last of 13 children of an Irish immigration family in Maine (USA), John Ford deals in many of his films with the pivotal moments of American history, its mythical dimensions and legends. Frequent themes include the appropriation of land, the violent reclaiming of land in the American West, the Civil War, or the founding of the nation. In Ford’s films, the world is in a state of change and reorientation, his protagonists are searching for community, a homeland and identity. Ford’s heroes are usually lonely persons, outsiders, loners, who mainly in the West, against the backdrop of a seemingly boundless nature and an overpowering landscape (expansive steppes or the claustrophobic Monument Valley), establish a community, but often fail to find one themselves. A special kind of community is what Ford developed behind the camera, repeatedly working with the same crew members and actors. The latter, including Harry Carey, Will Rogers, John Wayne, Henry Fonda or James Stewart, epitomized Ford’s torn heroes, and they often not only began their career working with Ford but also played their best roles in his movies.
Vaginal Davis presents Rising Stars, Falling Stars
THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA (Julian Rupert, USA 1925) features Lon Chaney, "The Man of a Thousand Faces" as the masked and facially deformed Phantom who haunts the Paris Opera House, causing murder and mayhem in an attempt to force the management to make the woman he loves a star. As always silent movie expert Vaginal Davis is hosting the evening. At the piano: Eunice Martins. (24.4.)
Transgression of Cinema – The Borders of Film
One can observe for quite some time now that the close historical ties between the dispositif of "cinema" and the aesthetic practice of "film" have been expanded by a number of other media configurations. Between YouTube and art space, HBO and multiplex: Where can cinema (still and again) be found today, what is (still) film? These are the main questions posed by a conference organized by Volker Pantenburg and Simon Rothöhler (SFB 626 / FU Berlin) which will be opened at Arsenal with contributions by the artist and theorist Victor Burgin ("Log Line and Monologue") and the film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum ("Goodbye Cinema, hello Cinephilia"). On the following two days, lectures will be given at the ICI Kulturlabor by, among others, Raymond Bellour, Diedrich Diederichsen, Tom Gunning, Miriam Hansen, Vinzenz Hediger, Ute Holl, Gertrud Koch, and Lev Manovich. (April 22)
Distribution start: LIVERPOOL
LIVERPOOL (Lisandro Alonso, Argentina / F / D / NL / E 2008): After 20 years at sea, Farell returns to his rough homeland, Tierra del Fuego, to see his mother again. His return is slow and hesitant. When arriving at the place of his childhood, he is not met by a joyful welcome but by a surprising encounter: The family has a new member.
Distribution start: DAY OF THE SPARROW
DAY OF THE SPARROW (Philip Scheffner, D 2010) is a political nature film in which the border between war and peace is dissolved. On November 14, 2005, a sparrow is shot after having toppled 23,000 dominos in the Dutch town of Leeuwarden. In Kabul, a German soldier is killed in a suicide attack. The juxtaposition of these headlines prompted the director to search for war using the methods of ornithology. In Germany, not Afghanistan. For this is where the question arises: Are we living in peace or are we at war?
Premiere: KRATZIG & Classics Not Only For Children
KRATZIG 1 – 3 and SCRATCH (2010, April 25) are the titles of four films on 16 mm, 35 mm and DVD that schoolchildren of the Hunsrück-Grundschule and the Evangelische Schule Berlin Zentrum produced in three workshops by means of manual scratching, painting, anima-tion and sound. We are delighted to present the films in the presence of the young filmmakers and the workshop and project heads, Ute Aurand, Robert Beavers, Dirk Schaefer, and Stefanie Schlüter, at Arsenal. All workshops were supported by funds of the Berliner Projektfonds Kulturelle Bildung.