This exhibition will display the artistic richness and originality of the magic lantern and the evolution and variety of the iconography projected by the lantern since its origins (1659) until its gradual disappearance in the 1920s.

Program information:

The Magic Lantern and Painted Film: 400 Years of Cinema

Tremendous canyons of skyscrapers with airplanes and elevated railways, monotonous columns of workers in bleak clothes marching stoically in step, a robot encircled by radiating light rings-a cyborg-these images from Metropolis have engraved themselves into our collective memory.

The film comes to life as a result of its strong visual images and locations, which captivate us precisely because of their dichotomous nature: The paradisiacal City of the Sons and the dreary Workers' City with its enormous Machine Rooms; the futuristic Upper City with its vertiginous skyscrapers and the inventor Rotwang's small witch's cottage with its alchemistic laboratory; the archaic necropolis of the Catacombs and the majestic Gothic Cathedral. It is here that myth and the modern age clash.

Visually, Metropolis is certainly one of the most influential films in film history. This is owed to Fritz Lang's artistic vision, as well as to the abilities and inventiveness of his film team. The exhibition "The Complete Metropolis" unites all of the preserved original documents for the first time: the film script, the musical score, architecture and costume designs, trick paintings, props, and cinematographic equipment. Hundreds of working photos, which were taken during filming, demonstrate not only their strenuous efforts, but also the creativity of those who participated in the film.

However, the exhibition title "The Complete Metropolis" also makes reference to the film itself. Vigorously shortened soon after its premiere in 1927, a nearly complete version of the film was first rediscovered in Buenos Aires in 2008 and is now premiering for the first time in a restored version. The extensively compiled documents and the newly restored film images make its production process come alive, allowing a deeper understanding of this film that has already been proclaimed as part of the "world's cultural heritage."

Featured Works:

The exhibition includes excerpts of the film script, the musical score (condensed score), trick paintings, architectural and costume designs, props and cinematographic equipment predominantly from the archives of the Deutsche Kinemathek; it also includes 200 working photos as a large-scale slide projection (from the collections of the Cinémathèque française and the Deutsche Kinemathek); nearly 30 minutes of film material from Metropolis, divided by film setting locations; five media stations describing several of the film's special effects; and the films Die Reise nach Metropolis (Artem Demenok, 2010) and Metropolis Refound (Evangelina Loguerico, Diego Panich, Laura Tusi, and Sebastian Yablon, 2010)

Program information:

The Complete Metropolis

Complete retrospective curated by Jean Douchet.

Featured Works:

Several sections:

The Critic: cinema and politics

The short films before Breathless (pictured)

From Breathless to 1968

Combat films, 1968

Research and video

Return to cinema

Around Les Histoire(s) du cinéma

After Les Histoire(s)

Program information:

Jean-Luc Godard

The cycle examines the character of the father in film, sometimes a role-model and a protector, sometimes a violent, quiet, absent, or destructive person. With the ongoing radical transformations of the traditional image of the family, fatherhood is undergoing serious changes, inseparable from the redefinition of manhood.

Featured Works:

Various themes: the patriarch, the evil father, how to become a father.

Program information:

Cycle: Fatherhood

Featured Works:

The Discipline of D.E. (Gus Van Sant, 1982); Mala Noche (Gus Van Sant, 1985); Midnight Cowboy (John Schlesinger, 1969); My New Friend (Gus Van Sant, 1987); Five Ways to Kill Yourself (Gus Van Sant, 1987); Ken Death Gets Out of Jail (Gus Van Sant, 1987); Drugstore Cowboy (Gus Van Sant, 1989); The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949); Paris, je t'aime (Gus Van Sant, segment "Le Marais", 2006); Chacun son cinéma (Gus Van Sant, segment "First Kiss", 2007); My Own Private Idaho (Gus Van Sant, 1991); Chimes at Midnight (Orson Welles, 1965); Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (Gus Van Sant, 1993); Lonesome Cowboys (Andy Warhol, 1968); To Die For (Gus Van Sant, 1995); Good Will Hunting (Gus Van Sant, 1997); The Last of England (Derek Jarman, 1988); The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939); Finding Forrester (Gus Van Sant, 2000); Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960); Psycho (Gus Van Sant, 1998); Werckmeister harmóniák (Béla Tarr, 2000); Gerry (Gus Van Sant, 2002); La Cicatrice intérieure (Philippe Garrel, 1972); D'Est (Chantal Akerman, 1993); Elephant (Alan Clarke, 1989); Elephant (Gus Van Sant, 2003, pictured); Last Days (Gus Van Sant, 2005); Dead Man (Jim Jarmusch, 1995); Last Tango in Paris (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1972); Wassup Rockers (Larry Clark, 2005); 8 (Gus Van Sant, segment "Mansion on the Hill", 2008); Paranoid Park (Gus Van Sant, 2007); The Times of Harvey Milk (Robert Epstein, 1984); Milk (Gus Van Sant, 2008)

Program information:

The Universe of Gus Van Sant   

An infinitely enigmatic and profound gaze. Strategic charms, looks as a weapon. A body language explicitly seductive, simultaneously a caricature and a perpetuation of the feminine mystique. What is the modern sphinx after? Would she rather be a perverse and perfidious praying mantis than a supporting role? V as in Vampire. V as in Vengeance. The Cinematek introduces 20 or so femmes fatales, sex symbols of silent films.

Featured Works:

More than 20 films  

Program information:  

Vamp Fatale

The Cinémathèque presents a series of films set in the Antiquity: Homerian adventures, tragedies, and contemporary transposition of Racine, Hölderlin, or Kleist. The films adaptations are diverse: sometimes they are very faithful to the original text, sometimes they pastiche it, or make it more modern.

Featured Works:

More than 20 films           

Program information:

Greek Dramas

To propose a "different" history of German cinema is by necessity experimental. The revisionist attempt at hand treats existing traditions as a kind of quarry and abandons any hope of proposing a rounded whole. Germany in the Night, on the one hand, challenges the German film canon which (in spite of several important rediscoveries), has become even more sedentary during the last decade. On the other hand, the fragile, ambiguous images of history that appear in many films of the retrospective may also serve as a modest antidote to the myth-making prevalent in German television and cinema today. Critical memory vs. somnambulant conformity; unfettered gestures of cinematic thoughtfulness and presence vs. the self-assured "know-it-all" position toward history as embodied by German blockbusters such as Downfall or The Baader Meinhof Complex.

German cinema: a nocturne, a passage through gray areas and various states that were all Germany: the Weimar Republic, the "Third Reich," the Federal Republic of Germany, the GDR. A cozy feeling of home cannot take hold, rather there is a sense of alienation or an increasingly obsessive longing. The tangled threads brought together in this program may perhaps join up in the ever-present anxiety and failure of reconciliation also felt by Heinrich Heine, exiled in Paris: "Should I think of Germany at night / it puts all thought of sleep to flight."

Established masters such as Fritz Lang or F.W. Murnau, and icons of the New German Cinema such as Fassbinder, Kluge, Herzog, and Schroeter have as much vested in this restlessness as those flickering figures that each succeeding generation discovers anew, and often returns to oblivion: Phil Jutzi, Frank Wysbar, Peter Pewas, or Roland Klick. Those who returned from exile after the war-Peter Lorre, John Brahm, or Robert Siodmak-as well as the foreigners who worked in Germany during the seventies and eighties, such as Sohrab Shahid Saless or Želimir Žilnik. Those, whose radical view of Germany came ‘from the outside' (such as Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet) and those like Herbert Achternbusch, who cast an ‘insider's stare' until their homeland would take notice. The unredeemed families (Veit and Thomas Harlan) and those who counter them-through a belated late remake (Christoph Schlingensief's paraphrase of Opfergang) or through self-reflexive parallel action (Robert Kramer's Unser Nazi, commissioned by Thomas Harlan as a mirror-film to his own Wundkanal). And in between: outsider films made by well-known directors, such as Helmut Käutner's Schwarzer Kies (1961), which drew the collective hatred of film critics at the time, and whose "moment" only arrived 40 years later.

Featured Works:

In an analogue to Romuald Karmakar's oeuvre, the program devotes as much space to documentary and essay films as to narrative cinema. Two key films from East and West Germany about the reality of genocide will be presented, films with a ‘canonical' reputation but hardly seen: Eberhard Fechner's Der Prozess (1975-84) and Walter Heynowski and Gerhard Scheumann's Der lachende Mann (1966). Germany at Night unearths small treasures of left-wing Weimar film culture (by Albrecht Viktor Blum and Ella Bergmann-Michel) and brings to light works which were actively suppressed at the time of their completion, such as Thomas Heise's Volkpolizei (1985) or Želimir Žilniks Öffentliche Hinrichtung (1979) by Klaus Volkenborn, Johann Feindt and Karl Siebig. This film examines two parallel German lives: that of a Nazi general who continued in his job during the democratic era and a communist bricklayer who could hardly make ends meet after the war. Both had fought in the Spanish Civil War, but their stories can't be merged; the audience gazes into a wound that will not heal. (1974). The program also pays tribute to another key document: Unversöhnliche Erinnerungen

Some of the works selected are direct references to Romuald Karmakar: Peter Lorre's Der Verlorene and Fassbinder's Händler der vier Jahreszeiten are among his favorite films; Siodmak's Nachts, wenn der Teufel kam and Utopia by Sohrab Shahid Saless were studied by Karmakar and his creative team during preparation for Der Totmacher and Ramses. In other cases the relationships are more speculative: nothing in Karmakar's work indicates an interest in Georg Büchner, yet watching his films, the poor soldier Woyzeck might appear as a distant relative. Groups and couples of films-such as the two selected Woyzeck films-structure the selection, and sometimes the associations reveal an entire network. The volcano at the end of Achternbusch's Das letze Loch leads perhaps to Hölderlin's Tod des Empedokles as adapted by Straub/Huillet; Hölderlin and Straub, in turn, might lead to Christian Geissler, one of the great forgotten figures of German literature, and to his teleplay Wilhelmsburger Freitag, directed by Egon Monk in 1964: one day in the life of a couple, with a radical ending-a strange mirror of Karmakar's Die Nacht singt ihre Lieder.

This program is designed in a fragmentary manner-no monuments shall be erected. It is more about process, dialogue, questions than any definitive answers. It intends to evoke the rich culture that German cinema represented once upon a time, including all the personalities that did not quite "fit in" (or fit too well). A few shards of this culture are gathered here.  

Program information:

Germany in the Night. A Film History

Discover the legendary universe of the studios and the film sets when movie production was still the work of artisans. Paris, Berlin, and Hollywood were the three major capitals for cinema and it wasn't unusual to have filmmakers travel from one country to the other to shoot, or even to emigrate. Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder, Ernst Lubitsch, Robert Siodmak, and more made that choice, sometimes stopping in Paris before going to Hollywood. From silent films to the talkies, these photographs show us the magic of filmmaking in process and what happens behind the screen. The technology evolved but the mystery of the film sets remained intact.

Featured Works:

69 films and 200 photographs  

Program information:  

On the Film Sets: Paris-Berlin-Hollywood, 1910-1939

Takeshi Kitano started as a stand-up comedian, became a politically incorrect TV personality, a film and a TV actor. He is also an intuitive and genius filmmaker who directed sober gangster films (Sonatine, Hana-bi), an adolescent romance (A Scene At the Sea), a comedy obsessed with sex (Getting Any?), a melodramatic tale (Dolls), a sword film (Zatôichi), self-mocking comedies (Kikujirô no natsu, Takeshis'). He is also a painter, novelist, editor, and singer. His double signature, "Beat Takeshi" for TV and comedy and "Takeshi Kitano" for film and serious creation, is not enough to organize his multiple identities. He is the only artist who pushes the limits of experimenting contraries so far and who puts so relentlessly his creation, his image, and his sanity on the line.

Featured Works:

Along with the exhibition "Beat Takeshi Kitano, Gosse de peintre" that the artist conceived for the Fondation Cartier, the Centre Pompidou will screen 40 feature films, films made for TV, and documents: the most complete retrospective to date on Kitano as a director and actor, in his presence.

Program information:

Takeshi Kitano, the iconoclast

Of course, he's not Jean Renoir, but even Jean Renoir isn't always Jean Renoir, whereas Julien Duvivier is always Julien Duvivier: a director true to himself, and never the same. He directed only films that didn't reflect each other, so that they didn't reflect him. He was criticized for what was considered a weakness: he stayed away from style in order to explore all of the genres. Diversity was his only rule.

Featured Works:

60 films        

Program information:

Julien Duvivier

Romuald Karmakar, born in 1965, is one of the towering figures produced by the German cinema. His consistently exciting analysis of life in Germany and his formal precision have secured him a unique position in European film. The response to his work in other countries (and in other artistic disciplines) seems to be stronger than at home where the official film industry has remained suspicious of his non-conformism. Karmakar, who spent his school years at the German School in Athens and his military service in the French army, feels more in tune with the exiles and "foreign legionnaires" of German cinema (or with American mavericks like John Cassavetes and Monte Hellman) than with the established film business of the Berlin Republic.

Karmakar's first feature, Eine Freundschaft in Deutschland (1985), starts with a phrase that can be applied to the entirety of his work: "In this film, everything that is documentary is true, and everything that is fiction is not necessarily false." Traditional boundaries between modes of film are less important to him than the passionate quest for repressed or neglected themes-and the development of a sharpened and resistant form. Applying his deep-drill machinery to many sensitive areas, Karmakar has created some of the key films in the last two decades. Das Himmler-Projekt (2000) is a prime example. The actor Manfred Zapatka recites a notorious three-hour speech by Heinrich Himmler, but there is no attempt at historicist "reconstruction". Instead, the audience becomes part of a re-concretization of history-a performative act that places the film squarely in opposition to the prevailing discourse about the Nazi era (as well as the "Bonn Republic" that followed).

Karmakar's early work-Eine Freundschaft in Deutschland (with Karmakar playing Adolf Hitler), or the auto-erotic apotheosis Candy Girl (1984)-already shows a highly independent aesthetic, his main interests at the time being punk music, soccer, and the history of cinema. The following three shorts made his name: Coup de boule, Gallodrome, and Hunde aus Samt und Stahl (1987-89) triggered a very public debate over Karmakar's preference for "intolerable" subjects and characters. With his epic documentary Warheads (1992), this confrontation reached an early climax: For the more pedagogically minded parts of his audience, Karmakar's unbiased portrayal of two soldiers of fortune was hard to accept. The people he films are not "pre-classified" via commentary or written text, and are not relegated to easy moral or political categories. Which is exactly what makes his work so rich: Karmakar forces himself to look at the world with wide-open eyes and allows himself to be led astray-not by evil but by the profusion and the contradictions of lives lived under a different set of ethics.

It is precisely this refusal to prejudge his subjects which also characterizes Karmakar as a fiction filmmaker. The chamber-piece Der Totmacher (1995) about an imprisoned serial killer in the 1920s is emblematic of his work with historical sources-and of his understanding of the actor's role: a probe that can be lowered into the text. Karmakar's ethos of filmic construction makes no distinction between the underlying materials: literary texts are worked through and staged with the same meticulousness as archival documents. Das Frankfurter Kreuz (1998), an adaptation of Jörg Fauser's radio play, and Manila (2000), his masterful collaboration with the writer Bodo Kirchhoff, are equally strong examples. With Manila, Karmakar presents a choral tragicomedy about air travelers in a state of waiting and wasting away-a disturbing cross section of German society at the dawn of the millennium. This was followed by Die Nacht singt ihre Lieder (2004): a dance of death between two people frozen with alienation. Adapted from a play by Jon Fosse, the film represents a high-water mark of Karmakar's lifelong preoccupation with language and/as music.

The Himmler project allowed the director to free himself from the constraints and delays of the film subsidy system: since then, he has almost single-handedly produced a steady series of challenging digital documentaries. Hamburger Lektionen (2006) extends the methods used in the Himmler film: Manfred Zapatka's performance now reveals the deadly rhetoric in the "lectures" of an influential Imam, given in a Hamburg mosque where some of the 9/11 perpetrators-to-be were regular visitors. Land der Vernichtung (2004), which resulted from Karmakar's research for a fiction film about Nazi war crimes, delivers a harrowing essay on memory and its denial-in the year when Downfall made the headlines. In a parallel movement, the director has followed his passion for techno and electronic music, exploring this cinematically uncharted terrain with a groundbreaking trilogy. 196 bpm (2002), Between the Devil and the Wide Blue Sea (2005) and Villalobos (2009) give us a direct and unapologetic representation of how music is produced, performed, and experienced. Like everything in Karmakar's cinema, these films reveal unexpected truths as they listen to a world which might otherwise have remained closed.

The retrospective will be held in cooperation with the Diagonale in Graz, where a selection of Karmakar's work will be presented. Romuald Karmakar and Manfred Zapatka will be guests in Vienna and Graz. They will offer workshops, lectures and introduce films.

Featured Works:

Adelheid und Konrad (1984); Candy Girl (1984); Eine Freundschaft in Deutschland (1985); Coup de boule (1988); Hellman Rider (1988); Der Tyrann von Turin (1989-94/2001); Gallodrome (1989); Hunde aus Samt und Stahl (1989); Sam Shaw on John Cassavetes (1989-93); Warheads (1989-92); München - Berlin - München: Der Filmkritiker Michael Althen (1991); Demontage IX - Unternehmen; Stahlglocke (1992); Infight (1994); Der Totmacher (1995); Das Frankfurter Kreuz (1998); Das Himmler-Projekt (2000); Manila (2000); 196 bpm (2002); Die Nacht von Yokohama (2003); Die Nacht singt ihre Lieder (2004, pictured); Land der Vernichtung (2004); Between the Devil and the Wide Blue Sea (2005); Hamburger Lektionen (2006); Ramses (2009); Villalobos (2009) 

Program information:

Romuald Karmakar

In May, the National Theater is hosting the first part of a trilogy directed by the Groupov entitled Fare Thee Well Tovaritch Homo Sapiens, whose subject-the possible destruction or mutation of our species-is familiar to cinema.

Featured Works:

More than 20 films  

Program information:

Farewell Homo Sapiens

Coinciding with the major exhibition at MAMbo, a complete retrospective of Fellini, the director-magician who gave his films the size of an infinite dream.

Featured Works:

In addition to his work as a filmmaker, the exhibition will present a selection of feature films in which he worked as a designer, writer or actor, an anthology of his interviews and other rare and unreleased footage.  

Program information:

Fellini. From Italy to the Moon

Made in black and white on a relatively low budget by a crew drawn partly from the TV series Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Psycho was not only one of his biggest hits; its extraordinary success also paved the way for countless imitators, and this season, which accompanies a very welcome re-release of the film, gathers together just a few of the titles which in one way or another display its influence. But we should also remember of course that the film, notwithstanding its own originality and the many psycho-killer movies that followed in its footsteps, was not created in a vacuum; and while it would be rash to imply that Hitchcock intentionally or even consciously borrowed elements from specific titles while making Psycho, it's certainly possible to situate the film within various cinematic traditions.   Above all, the movie is not just 'about' a psychotic murderer. It is also "about" sex, mother-love, motels, grief, solitude, theft, envy, fear, cross-dressing, voyeurism, driving, disappearances, detection... not to mention (catastrophically) bad luck, birds, bathroom plumbing, the American landscape, Freudian theory, symbolism, casting, editing, art direction, lighting, camera movement, narrative structure, audience-manipulation, etc, etc. Nor should genre or tone be ignored. Hitchcock specialized in romantic suspense films about crime and espionage, but Psycho, which atypically for him deploys shock tactics, often veers closer to the Gothic atmosphere of a horror film. Moreover, he seems to have regarded Psycho as a fun picture, and while the humor is different from the kind to be found in witty, light-hearted thrillers like The 39 Steps, The Lady Vanishes, or North by Northwest, there's no denying that part of what makes the film so distinctive is its delicious black comedy. Long before Tarantino, Hitchcock found ways of making audiences laugh (nervously, perhaps) even as they gasped in terror.   Besides offering up a selection of films that are extremely rewarding in their own right, this season attempts to demonstrate just how rich and resonant a work Psycho is. Fifty years on, it remains as fresh, mysterious, and utterly engrossing as ever.

Featured Works:

Secrets of a Soul (Georg Wilhelm Pabst, 1926); Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Rouben Mamoulian, 1931); M (Fritz Lang, 1931); My Name is Julia Ross (Joseph H. Lewis, 1945); On Dangerous Ground (Nicholas Ray, 1952); Les Diaboliques (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1955); Touch of Evil (Orson Welles, 1958); L'Avventura (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960); Les Bonnes femmes (Claude Chabrol, 1960); Peeping Tom (Michael Powell, 1960); Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960); Repulsion (Roman Polanski, 1965); Pretty Poison (Noel Black, 1968); Deranged (Jeff Gillen and Alan Ormsby, 1974); Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978); Dressed to Kill (Brian De Palma, 1980); Psycho II (Richard Franklin, 1983); Barton Fink (Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, 1991); Psycho (Gus Van Sant, 1998, pictured); Spider (David Cronenberg, 2002); The Hours of the Day (Jaime Rosales, 2003)  

Program information:

Psycho: A Classic in Context

Related Articles:
Psycho Analyzed by David Sterritt posted Mar. 02, 2010