Vaginal Davis präsentiert Rising Stars, Falling Stars
"I was asking for something specific and perfect for my city, / Whereupon lo! upsprang the aboriginal name. / Now I see what there is in a name, a word, liquid, sane, unruly, musical, self-sufficient, (…) / The mechanics of the city, the masters, well-form'd, beautiful-faced, looking you straight in the eyes, (…) / the most courageous and friendly young men, City of hurried and sparkling waters! city of spires and masts! City nested in bays! my city!" (From: Mannahatta by Walt Whitman). This month, silent-movie expert Vaginal Davis presents a program revolving around MANHATTA (1921), a production of the cameraman Paul Strand and the painter and photographer Charles Sheeler. New York's urban architecture is translated into geometric compositions, interspersed by verses from Whitman’s Mannahatta. Accompanied by the musicians John and Tim Blue and followed by drinks in the Rote Foyer. (July 12)
Berlin Premiere: CASANEGRA
To stay or to go? Despair or hope? Reason or adventure? The friendship between two young, jobless men, scratching along with small capers in their hometown Casablanca, is put to the test in CASANEGRA (Nour-Eddine Lakhmari, Morocco 2008). Adil dreams of a better life in Malmö and wants to buy a visa; Karim engages two boys to trade with cigarettes and is lovesick. Both have problems with their father: one is violent, the other strongly disabled after decades of piecework in a fish factory. Happiness and misery, humor and violence, lie close to each other in the chaos of their daily lives. To improve their situation, they let themselves be hired by a brutal debt collector … At once a socio-critical drama and an action movie, CASANEGRA bears witness to the upheavals in Moroccan society. In cooperation with the Zentrum Moderner Orient. (August 7)
ZUM VERGLEICH a film by Harun Farocki
"I wanted to propose a film that contributes to the concept of labor. A film that compares labor in a traditional society, for example, in Africa, with an early industrial society, like in India, and a highly industrial one in Europe. House construction is the subject of comparison." The smallest unit of this kind of labor, on which Harun Farocki's film ZUM VERGLEICH (By Comparison, 2009) exclusively concentrates, is the brick. The film's title imparts an essential aspect: Farocki merely offers material – the task of comparing lies with the spectator. ZUM VERGLEICH – new at arsenal distribution – will celebrate its premiere on August 28 at Arsenal in the presence of the director. The film will be shown at fsk-Kino in Berlin-Kreuzberg starting on September 3.
Art of Mediation (8): Films about films and cinéphilie
With his analytical video works on Fritz Lang’s M, Citizen Kane or La règle du jeu – produced in the context of French education initiatives – Jean Douchet decisively shaped the genre of films about films in the 1980s. He regularly produces bonus material for France’s most important DVD marketers. In addition to his video essay on Murnau’s Sunrise and Xavier Beauvois' film Le petit lieutenant, which reveals Douchet's connection to film history as well as current cinema, we are delighted to be able to show the just recently completed film A BICYCLETTE: A person diabled through a bicycle accident is healed with films about films by Claude Chabrol and Xavier Beauvois. Jean Douchet will be present for a discussion.
The Art of Mediation, a project by Entuziazm e.V., is funded by the German Federal Cultural Foundation and the Federal Agency for Civic Education. (July 10)
As a guest: Jean Douchet mit LITTLE FUGITIVE
Jean Douchet, born three years before Truffaut and a year before Godard, has been following French cinema closely for six decades. As a critic of Cahiers du cinéma, as an occasional actor (in Les 400 coups, among others), as a fellow traveler and enthusiast, and, since the 1980s, also as an analytical and passionate thinker on video and DVD, he belongs to the most important protagonists of Parisian cinéphilie. Sensation – feeling, percept and experience – is the key concept uniting his various ways of dealing with cinema. "To deeply feel a work and to communicate this enthusiasm is already an act of critique. Even if it's only done verbally." Douchet's cinema appearances in Paris are legendary; they have been taking place for many years as "Ciné-Club de Jean Douchet" in the Cinémathèque Française. L’art d'aimer – the title of his best-known text – takes place in the social situation of the movie theater under the immediate impression of the film and in a verbal, improvised and analytical form. At Arsenal, Douchet will speak about LITTLE FUGITIVE (Morris Engel, Ray Ashley, Ruth Orkin, USA 1953) after the screening, a film without which the Nouvelle Vague would not have evolved, according to Truffaut. A boy (like Jean-Pierre Léaud in Les 400 coups), who believes he has killed his brother, flees from Manhattan and rambles through Coney Island for two days (like Jean-Paul Belmondo in À bout de souffle through Paris).
Summertime: Festival of Festival
This year we will again screen movies of the past twelve months that are especially dear us. In REVANCHE (Austria 2007, August 4 & 8), Götz Spielmann interlaces two opposite worlds: the red-light milieu and the tranquil environs of Vienna. He combines the story of Alex, the gofer of a pimp, with that of a policeman living with his wife and an unfulfilled desire for a child in a tidy homestead in the country. After a bank robbery, during which a friend of Alex, a Ukrainian prostitute is killed by the policeman’s bullet, the film revolves around the themes of guilt and revenge in a convoluted way.
Magical History Tour – New German Cinema, Nouvelle Vague, Tradition and Modernity in Japan
"Old cinema is dead. We believe in new cinema." Once again a manifesto marking the start of a fundamental renewal. "We" consisted of 26 young German filmmakers and critics including Edgar Reitz, Alexander Kluge and Peter Schamoni, who with their "Oberhausen Manifesto" on February 28, 1962, heralded the "New German Cinema". With this call and several short works they set themselves off against "old cinema", the plain films produced during the "economic miracle" of the 1950s, "papa's cinema". The first full-length films of "New German Cinema" were produced a few years later. Inspired by British Free Cinema and the French Nouvelle Vague, the signatories of the manifesto, along with other auteur filmmakers, e.g., Volker Schlöndorff, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Wim Wenders, created the most various images of West German reality in terms of content and style. An important point of reference in their works was also the National Socialist past. At the center of the selection are debut films and works from the early years of "New German Cinema".
Straub/Huillet and Peter Nestler – Film, Painting, Seasons of the Year
New films by Jean-Marie Straub and Peter Nestler – combined with earlier works. The background is also formed by the question if and how painting, or more precisely, its condensation of time and relation to reality, can be conceived as a perspective for filmmaking.
Arsenal Summer School – Workshops on Film Mediation
From August 26 to 29, we will for the first time offer workshops on film mediation under the title "Space Odyssey: Spaces for Film and Video Art". Movie theaters are being rebuilt in order to persist in the digital age. Numerous smaller movie theaters are falling victim to this process. In a time of radical media-related changes, cinema is having a hard time. Against this background, the issue is to take a look at the real and virtual spaces in which cinema is today as lively as ever. We encounter moving images in public space, in museums and galleries, on stage and on the Internet – social realms and spaces of thought that define cinema in numerous ways. The boundaries between cinema and other art forms and discourses are fluid. The architecture formed by all these spaces is an expression of the utopia of a cinema in flux: How can curatorial practice newly define spaces?
Andrei Tarkovsky Retrospective
Tarkovsky in the summer – this is a tradition that has grown dear to us and our audience over the past 20 years. In August we will screen the seven full-length and one short film of the Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky (1932-86), whose monumental oeuvre gives rise to lasting fascination.