Wilhelm Hein was a close companion of Arsenal and the Berlinale Forum from the very beginning. During the 4th International Forum of New Cinema in 1974, he spoke at a discussion at the Delphi cinema about the far-reaching potential of experimental cinema and the difficulty of finding a place for it within the institutionalized film landscape. This open, never completed form was a matter of the heart for him until the last: his most recent one-hundred hour film epic “Das Große und das Kleine Tohuwabohu”, which Arsenal presented excerpts of in September, is, in his words, “another attempt to show what subversive avant-garde cinema is capable of.” The promise he made to this end reads as follows: “GUARANTEE FOR THE AUDIENCE: NOT JUST ANOTHER PIECE OF BORING AVANTGARDE RUBBISH.” In 2007, his 16mm work “You killed the Undergroundfilm or The Real Meaning of Kunst bleibt... bleibt....” was finally completed, which he had worked on for many years. His own film material, found footage, musical set pieces, studies of friends such as Jack Smith, Otto Mühl and Nick Zedd, random observations, self-portraits and abstract structures come together to form a dense, 15-hour collage of obsessions, which was accompanied by a book.
Together with his former partner Birgit Hein (1942-2023), with whom he lived and worked until 1988, he began to make structural films from found material in the 1960s already, including Rohfilm (1968) and the series of Kali films from the 1980s. The material they used didn’t just stem from cinema however, as they also incorporated their own bodies and sexuality into their shared films and performances. In 1968, they founded the underground cinema X-Screen at a construction site for the Cologne metro. In 1972 and 1977, they took part at the Documenta.
Following their joint films Love Stinks – Bilder des täglichen Wahnsinns (1982) and Verbotene Bilder (1985) that were screened at the Berlinale Forum, Hein also presented his work-in-progress film To Those Who Found No Graves at the Forum in 1995, a search for the traces of everything left behind by the Holocaust. In 2007, he presented the Materialfilm-Performance: Ein 35mm Cinemascope Expanded Cinema Event at Forum Expanded together with John and Tim Blue. His work appeared in various Arsenal projects outside the Berlinale too, such as the series “Underground/Übersee: Von Jack Smith und Andy Warhol bis Zanzibar” (2007) curated by Marc Siegel and the festival “LIVE FILM! JACK SMITH! Five Flaming Days in a Rented World” (2009) curated by Susanne Sachsse, Marc Siegel und Stefanie Schulte Strathaus, which he viewed critically in relation to the institutional structures within which it was embedded as well as with respect to the narrative of the history of the underground being presented. In a tribute to the Wilhelm Hein for his 85th birthday, Daniel Kothenschulte wrote the following in the Frankfurter Rundschau: “Like hardly any other filmmaker, he used the tools of the avant garde to create a personal narrative of the 20th and 21st century.”
Artistic director of Arsenal – Institute für Film and Video Art Stefanie Schulte Strathaus said the following on the death of Wilhelm Hein: “The artistic oeuvre of Wilhelm Hein was, like his personality, marked by a deep conviction, a clear gaze and great passion. In his films, performances and texts, as well as at events and in conversation he repeatedly challenged the institutional boundaries of film and cinema. He was thus an indispensable inspiration for Arsenal, but also for the film community worldwide. We have lost a friend and a comrade-in-arms”.
