Featured Works:

22 films

Program information:

Alain Tanner

Cinemateca Uruguaya       

The Sweet Subversion of Alain Tanner   

September 1-13, 2011

Featured Works:

25 films

Program information:

Retrospective Margarethe von Trotta

Featured Works:

25 films

Program information:

Raúl Ruiz

Featured Works:

33 films

Program information:

Buster Keaton

During his lifetime, Giuseppe De Santis's master student, Elio Petri, was far better received abroad than at home: the leading Italian intellectuals of the new left did not know what to make of his baroque-sardonic, Pop Art vision of Brecht's "theatre of the people"-even as Petri remained so close to them politically, as a scourge of the Christian Democrats. After his death, many of these writers confessed: we were wrong, we had blinders on; he was one of the greatest Italian filmmakers of the 1960s and '70s.

Like De Santis, Elio Petri came from humble beginnings: born in Rome in 1929, he grew up as the son of a coppersmith in a working-class suburb. He was politicized early, joined the Communist Party and worked for their youth organization, wrote for L'unita and Gioventù nuova. After the Hungarian uprising, however, he kept his distance from all PCI organizations. During those years Petri also met De Santis, and handed him a wonderful piece of material, the story for Roma ore 11 (1952). He became De Santis's most important artistic collaborator and co-writer of the screenplays for Un marito per Anna Zaccheo (1953), Giorni d'amore (1954), Uomini e lupi (1957), La strada lunga un anno (1958) and La Garçonnière (1960). Petri also wrote scripts for other filmmakers such as Carlo Lizzani and Gianni Puccini, but as he said later, the man from whom he learned everything about cinema, and life, was Giuseppe De Santis.

As early as 1954, Elio Petri directed his first short documentary, Nasce un campione, but it took another seven years before he was able to complete his feature film debut, L'assassino (1961), with Marcello Mastroianni in the title role. The film indicated the direction in which Petri would develop-grim, penetrating considerations of society in genre form. Not that he necessarily wanted to go there: in his little-known masterpiece I giorni contati (1962), Petri used a very different aesthetic register-something like "existential realism". However, starting with his fourth film, the science fiction allegory La decima vittima (The Tenth Victim, 1965, again starring Mastroianni), Petri remained faithful to genre cinema.

This tendency reveals itself even in Petri's realistic narratives such as La classe operaia va in paradiso (1971), which he imbued with the fury and energetic mise-en-scène of his thrillers-Italy portrayed as a nightmare that made even the most seemingly paranoid fantasy seem like an exercise in cinema vérité. In Indagine su un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto (1970), a high-ranking police officer murders his lover and leaves behind a crime scene full of clues-with little doubt about the killer's identity-just to see if his colleagues will dare to accuse him. Gian Maria Volonte shines in both films; he was Petri's favorite actor next to Mastroianni.

In one of Petri's major works, the two actors appeared together: Todo modo (1976). Among the most radical Italian films of the decade, Todo modo was an allegory about the Gladio conspiracy, Gladio being the code name for a reputedly NATO-backed anti-communist organization with ties to the neo-fascist lodge P2. Petri obviously knew what he was talking about: The film was released just as this entire network of organized crime and fascist elements in the armed forces became publicly known. By this time, Petri had developed into a kind of public enemy; attempts were made to neutralize him and remove the film from Italian movie theaters. Before his untimely death in 1982, he was only able to direct one more feature film, the uncannily "soft" Buone notizie-and a television adaptation of Sartre's "Dirty Hands," Petri's reckoning with the legacy of Stalinism.

Featured Works:

Nasce un campione (1954); L'assassino (1961); I giorni contati (1962); La decima vittima (1965); A ciascuno il suo (1967); Un tranquillo posto di campagna (1969); Indagine su un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto (1970, pictured); La classe operaia va in paradiso (1971); La proprietà non è più un furto (1973); Todo modo (1976); Buone notizie (1979)

Program information:

Elio Petri

Featured Works:

Almost 50 film and TV works.

Program information:

Robert Altman

Since 2006, Hors Pistes has pursued its passion for diversity of forms in contemporary moving images. Screenings, performances, video installations, ephemeral Web images: the event offers an international selection of these forms. Hors Pistes exists to showcase visual works investigating the world we live in by challenging narrative forms and remapping the borders between film genres (fiction, documentary, essay...). Hors Pistes takes place in the cinemas of the Centre Pompidou as well as its exhibition space on the lower floor. The cinemas offer a deliberately eclectic selection of recent films (section 1), while the exhibition space centers each year on a new theme relative to visual representation (section 2).

Program information:

Hors Pistes 2012

Films are collective achievements. In this month's Magical History Tour we are showing films that highlight this collective work. This includes films made by groups that are only loosely connected to each other, as well as by collectives that reject the idea of individual authorship. These film collectives, which mostly emerged from political and social movements, wanted to create an anti-discourse with their work. They wanted to breach hierarchies and authorities and use film as a means of education and agitation, open to as many people as possible, especially those without power. The plurality of voices also plays an aesthetic role and is reflected in the enjoyment taken from experimentation and disparate forms. An incomplete insight into collective filmmaking is provided by films which date from the 1920s (the Factory of the Eccentric Actor) to today.

During the political events that took place in 1968 and the big workers' strikes in France, workers themselves took hold of the camera. We are showing a program with films by the Besançon and Sochaux Medvedkine workers' collectives: Nouvelle société N°5, 6, 7 (1969-70), Sochaux 11 juin 68 (1970), Les Trois Quarts de la vie (1971). Rhodia 4x8 (1969) is a "music video" for the class struggle. Scène de grève en Vendée (Paul Bourron, 1973) shows female workers on strike. Away from the conveyor belts and the obligation to clock in and out, they discover that they can talk and sing with each other.

The Black Audio Film Collective, which was founded in 1982 and existed until 1998, was an important voice in the debate on representation policy that took place in 1980s Britain. Its documentaries combined politics with the enjoyment taken from experimenting with form. Handsworth Songs (John Akomfrah, 1986) is a multi-voice film essay that came out of the 1985 riots in Handsworth, Birmingham and London. A mosaic of images, sounds, archive material, footage of the riots and old family photos results in a multi-perspective collage.

Featured Works:

Nowy Wawilon (The New Babylon, Grigori Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg, 1929); Deux Fois (Jackie Raynal, 1968, pictured); Nouvelle société N°5 (Groupe Medvedkine 1969); Nouvelle société N°6 (Groupe Medvedkine 1969/70); Rhodia 4x8 (Groupe Medvedkine, 1969); Nouvelle société N°7 (Groupe Medvedkine, 1970); Sochaux 11 juin 68 (Groupe Medvedkine, 1970); Warnung vor einer heiligen Nutte (Beware of a Holy Whore, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1970-1971); Femminista di Cinema, 1971); L'aggettivo donna (Rony Daopoulos and Annabella Miscuglio, with the Collettivo Femminista di Cinema, 1971); Les Trois Quarts de la vie (Groupe Medvedkine, 1971); Scène de grève en Vendée (Paul Bourron, 1973); Züri brännt (Zurich Is Burning, 1980-1981); Handsworth Songs (John Akomfrah, 1986); Killer.berlin.doc (Bettina Ellerkamp and Jörg Heitmann, 1999); A Walk Into the Sea: Danny Williams and the Warhol Factory (Esther B. Robinson, 2007)

Program information:

Cinema in the Plural: Collectives, Groups and Factories

Featured Works:

A full retrospective of one of the pioneers within contemporary American cinema.

Program information:

David Lynch: A Reputation Precedes...

Featured Works:

Mr. Orchid (1946); The Battle of the Rails (1946); Les maudits (1947); The Walls of Malapaga (1949); The Glass Castle (1950); Forbidden Games (1952, pictured); Lovers, Happy Lovers! (1954); Gervaise (1956); Purple Noon (1960); Che gioia vivere (1961); The Day and the Hour (1963); Joy House (1964); Rider on the Rain (1970); And Hope to Die (1972); Scar Tissue (1975)

Program information:

Rétrospective René Clément

Barbara Hammer (born 1939) is a pivotal figure in American experimental film. An acclaimed pioneer of queer cinema, her prolific output includes the earliest avant-garde films that openly address lesbian life and sexuality. Her work remains of fundamental importance for a new generation of artists exploring new voices and new modes of experimenting with the moving image.

This major survey of Hammer's work will be launched with the premiere of her new short film, Maya Deren's Sink 2011, a tribute to Deren's longstanding influence on the artist. The month-long series also includes screenings of early, rarely seen Super-8 films, an evening of expanded cinema performances in the Turbine Hall, an event in response to Hammer's work by artist Emily Roysdon, and several events featuring artists and speakers drawn from across Europe and North America, who testify to the powerful creative community Hammer has inspired.

The programme will be punctuated with films by friends, colleagues, and filmmakers whom Hammer considers crucial influences. In addition to Deren, artists include Chick Strand, Stan Brakhage, Shirley Clarke, Gunvor Nelson, Chris Welsby, Gina Carducci, Cecilia Dougherty, John Greyson, William E. Jones, Liz Rosenfeld, Emily Mode, Scott Berry, Kirstin Rossi and more.

Hammer says: "As an experimental filmmaker and lesbian feminist, I have advocated that radical content deserves radical form." She has fearlessly pursued innovation from her earliest experiments with sexuality and feminist identity in the 1960s and '70s to her stunning perceptual and optical printing experiments during the '80s and the documentaries she continues to make that unearth secret histories and give voice to those traditionally without one. Her films have transformed the screen into an active and experimental field that powerfully brings together images and the bodies they represent.

Curated by Barbara Hammer and Stuart Comer.

Featured Works:

19 programs

Program information:

Barbara Hammer: The Fearless Frame

Featured Works:

The Story of Sue San (King Hu, 1964); Sons of the Good Earth (King Hu, 1965); Come Drink with Me (King Hu, 1966); Dragon Inn (King Hu, 1967); A Touch of Zen (King Hu, 1971, pictured); The Fate of Lee Khan (King Hu, 1973); Zhong lie tu (King Hu, 1975); Legend of the Mountain (director's cut, King Hu, 1979); Raining in the Mountain (King Hu, 1979); Tian xia di yi (King Hu, 1983); The Swordsman (King Hu, 1990); Hua pi zhi: Yin yang fa wang (King Hu, 1993); King Hu (Hubert Niogret, 2011)

Program information:

King Hu

The Retrospective of the 62nd Berlin International Film Festival has rediscovered a legendary German-Russian film studio: Mezhrabpom-Film and its German branch Prometheus wrote film history from 1922 to 1936.

Moisei Aleinikov, a Russian film expert and producer from tsarist times who had a great instinct for the right topics, and Willi Münzenberg, a German communist and "red media entrepreneur," joined forces in 1922 to combine clever business ideas, a political mission and boundless enthusiasm for new cinematic narratives. And so the film studio Mezhrabpom-Rus (later called Mezhrabpom-Film), a unique German-Russian film venture, was set up in Moscow, with headquarters in Berlin.

After producing some 600 films, this international experiment was brutally ended eleven and fourteen years later by Hitler's and Stalin's regimes.

Featured Works:

Entitled "The Red Dream Factory", the Retrospective of the 2012 Berlinale will be dedicated to this studio rediscovered in Russian archives.

The Retrospective will present some 30 programs made up of over 40 silent and sound films. The silent films will all be accompanied by live music performed by renowned artists. The program includes diverse German premieres of films that are being made available by Gosfilmofond (Moscow) and the Russian State Documentary Film & Photo Archive at Krasnogorsk.

The film program will be accompanied by discussions and events at the Deutsche Kinemathek. Berlin's Bertz + Fischer will also be publishing a book for the Retrospective. In it, German and Russian authors will illuminate the development of the studio and the aesthetics of the films that were produced there.

In cooperation with Arte/ZDF, the Berlinale presents Sergei Eisenstein's classic Oktjabr (October, 1928). The film about the revolution in October of 1917 has written film history, particularly due to its crowd scenes. The Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra will accompany the screening on February 10th, 2012, at the Friedrichstadt-Palast with the original, reconstructed soundtrack by composer Edmund Meisel.

Program information:

Retrospective 2012: The Red Dream Factory

Program information:

Planète Manga !

Featured Works:

Let Us Do a Dream (1936); The Story of a Cheat (1936); Désiré (1937); Quadrille (1938, pictured); Le comédien (1948); The Lame Devil (1948); Aux deux colombes (1949); Poison (1951)

Program information:

Sacha Guitry

Michael Snow, born in Toronto in 1929, is one of the most influential artists of the past half-century. Among his multiple disciplines-improvisational jazz, painting, sculpture, video installations, photography-film is the medium which secured his breakthrough at the end of 1960s and to which he owes his central position in contemporary art. Film curators and critics advanced Snow's work long before the art world recognized his importance. His "structuralist epics" (J. Hoberman) such as Wavelength (1967), La Région centrale (1971), Rameau's Nephew (1974) and So Is This (1982) are regarded as milestones of a "cinema of thought" which puts the relationship between image and viewer at the center of the work.

Featured Works:

Many of Michael Snow's works are continually screened in the Film Museum's ongoing cycle What is Film. Therefore, the series In person: Michael Snow and the parallel exhibition at the Vienna Secession focus more on those aspects of his work that are lesser known in Austria. They also offer the rare opportunity to experience Michael Snow in talks about his oeuvre.

The four programs of the series deal with Snow's early work (including the animated A to Z from 1956 and New York Eye and Ear Control, propelled by the music of Albert Ayler); with Wavelength, as a core moment of his work, leading to a witty remake of sorts, the 2003 WVLNT-Wavelength For Those Who Don't Have the Time; with his feature-length exploration of the digital medium (*Corpus Callosum, 2002); and with two other major works made right after Wavelength: ↔ (Back and Forth) and One Second in Montreal (both 1969).

Michael Snow will be present for introductions and Q&As at all screenings. The event is held in cooperation with the Vienna Secession: The Secession exhibition "Michael Snow. Recent Works" (February 23 to April 15, 2012) presents both new installations and photographic works.

Program information:

In person: Michael Snow