IndieLisboa definitely ranks among the most exciting young film festivals. Founded in 2004 by committed enthusiasts, it has already become Portugal’s most important film festival and gained high international reputation. Intelligently and ambitiously curated, IndieLisboa shows what is currently causing a stir in international cinema, presenting so-called “Independent Heroes” (like recently Werner Herzog, Jacques Nolot and José Luis Guerín) as well as the newest Portuguese short and full-length films. Each year in April, one can make numerous discoveries in the universe of independent cinema in Lisbon. Arsenal is delighted to offer the highly regarded colleagues of IndieLisboa a platform to present their festival in three programs comprised of current films from Portugal – short and full-length films reflecting a broad range of genres and styles that have never before been shown in Berlin.
Chronicle of Disappearance – The Films of Michelangelo Antonioni
Michelangelo Antonioni's (1912–2007) answer to the question posed in an interview in 1978 – what he would have done in a world without films – was short and concise: "Films!" Even if cinema could look back on a history of close to fifty years when Antonioni started with his first film GENTE DEL PO (1943–47), the "architect of modern cinema" and the "perfecter of forms" innovated, shaped and transformed cinema like few other directors have. With his movies, he redefined the possibilities of filmic narration, the representation of cinematic time and pictorial composition, thus challenging, irritating, polarizing, and enthusing the audience and critics alike. His films always focus on psychologically unstable protagonists (played by Italian, French and later American movie stars such as Monica Vitti, Lucia Bosè, Jeanne Moreau, Alain Delon, Marcello Mastroianni, or Jack Nicholson) and their fragile emotional states. Lonesome and alienated, they move about in labyrinthine, empty cities and architectural landscapes. In a cool and subtle manner, at times distanced, Antonioni stages their inability to enter into relationships – they lose themselves before they get a chance to find each other.
Rising Stars, Falling Stars – Hosted by Vaginal Davis – Two year anniversary!
Vaginal Davis, who came to Berlin from L.A. in 2007, has since then invited the audience each month to intimate silent movie evenings. On the anniversary, the drag performance star will dedicate the program, like at the opening, to the actress Louise Brooks. This time PRIX DE BEAUTÉ (Beauty Prize, 1930, Nov. 29) by Augusto Genina will be screened. It was shot as a silent movie and completed as a talkie. Louise Brooks plays the role of a typist who wins a beauty contest and becomes a celebrated actress. In the last scene of the movie, she is shot dead under her own movie image. Vaginal Davis will greet our piano player Eunice Martins to the screening of the silent version. Afterwards Miss Davis invites her audience to drinks in the Rote Foyer.
Joyful Dissent. Filming against. Filming with.
The UDK seminar of Madeleine Bernstorff puts possibilities of filmic dissent up for debate. What parodic and joyful, rigorous and dead serious filmic/political strategies are adequate for countering the erosion of the political? What makes films propagandistic? How free can images be? Is it about examining them anew time and again? And where can we find the cinema of social and political interventions? "The essential aspect of politics lies in the modes of subjectivization based on dissent, which posits the difference between society and oneself … Consensus is the reduction of politics to the police." (Jacques Rancière) Films by Vera Chytilová, Robert Nelson, États généraux du cinéma, Jean-Marie Straub, Danièle Huillet, Joyce Wieland, Hellmuth Costard, Thomas Struck, Cristina Perincioli, Zelimir Zilnik, Peter Krieg, Marcel Broodthaers, Vlado Kristl, Heynowski + Scheumann, Ken Jacobs, Karl Gass, and Stefan Hayn.
DAAD stipend recipient Dalia Hager
On Nov. 7, the Israeli stipend recipient of the DAAD's Berlin Artists Program, Dalia Hager, will present her film CLOSE TO HOME (Karov la bayit, Israel 2005), which she made together with Vidu Bilu. It is the first feature film dealing with the experiences of women in the Israeli army. Smadar and Mirit, both 18 years old, are assigned to patrol the streets of Jerusalem together as part of their military service. They are assigned to detain any Palestinian passers-by and check their papers. However, the two young girls are immersed in the details of their own lives – their romantic crushes and the multifaceted relationship evolving between the two of them. Then one day, Jerusalem's political reality is forced upon them.
DAAD stipend recipient Daniel Cockburn
On Nov. 5, the Canadian stipend recipient of the DAAD's Berlin Artists Program, Daniel Cockburn, will personally present a program with his short films and videos titled "You Are In A Maze Of Twisty Little Passages, All Different".
Classics Not Only For Children
This month, the program of "Classics Not Only For Children" will again be oriented toward the theme of the Magical History Tour, "Bodies in Cinema". Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin are known for their characteristic body language, their great physical exertion at the service of comedy. We will screen one film of each.
Kino Polska
Two films by Andrzej Wajda that focus on important eras in Polish history – the Stalinist period and the strikes at the shipyards in Gdansk. CZŁOWIEK Z MARMURU (Man of Marble, Andrzej Wajda, Poland 1977, Nov. 4) The film student Agnieszka is planning a documentary on a "hero of labor" of the 1950s. In the basement of a museum she comes upon the discarded statue of the worker Mateusz Birkut and starts researching the "man of marble" in archives and old newsreels.
Super 8 Scores – Films by Helga Fanderl
Within the framework of the UdK seminar "Politics and Poetics of Filming", Helga Fanderl will personally present her super 8 films on Nov. 9. Her short films are created in the camera through the gesture of filming itself and are not processed afterwards. They are concentrated, fragile moments of the present in interaction with the filmed object. Each subject is given its own filmic form and rhythm. For each projection, the filmmaker combines a selection of films that harmonize and give insights into her work.
German premiere: THE INVISIBLE FRAME
21 years after Cynthia Beatt's filmic journey along the Berlin Wall with Tilda Swinton, CYCLING THE FRAME (1988), the two this summer again traveled the line that the Wall cut through Berlin. In THE INVISIBLE FRAME (2009), they follow the same path through a variety of border landscapes, this time, however, on both the Western and Eastern side of Berlin. The further Tilda Swinton gets on her bicycle tour, the clearer it becomes what the Berlin Wall once separated and to what extent the city has changed since the Wall came down. We are delighted to show THE INVISIBLE FRAME on Nov. 8 in the presence of Cynthia Beatt, Tilda Swinton and Frieder Schlaich as a German premiere at Arsenal. From Nov. 15 on, the film we be shown each Sunday together with CYCLING THE FRAME at 5 p.m. at Arsenal. An event in cooperation with Filmgalerie 451.