Film Screenings
In collaboration with Meredyth Sparks

Rainer Werner Fassbinder
The Third Generation, D 1978/79, 110’

A group of bored young people in late-1980s West-Berlin are bound by secrecy and blind activism rather than political conviction. The group involves itself in terrorism, unaware that it is being manipulated by popular ideology. Their activities culminate on a Tuesday during carnival – according to the Hanns-Martin Schleyer case – in the kidnapping of the American computer manager Peter Lurtz. "A comedy in six parts dealing with parlour games full of tension, suspense and logic, cruelty and mania, similar to the fairy tales told to children to help them bear life". (RWF)


Chris Marker
L’Ambassade, F 1973, 21’

Chris Marker’s short film L’Ambassade is a reaction to the military putsch of Augusto Pinochet on 11th September 1973 in Chile, whose ascent in to power was accompanied by a massive shelling of the governmental palace and the consequent death of the ousted President Salvador Allende. In Santiago de Chile’s French embassy, political refugees appear gathered together on improvised beds, living through their life-threatening predicament by waiting, playing chess, and listening to TV news. One of those sheltering in the embassy films these moments, and comments on the condition with a Super-8 camera until the release. By keeping the camera rolling until the last moment, Marker demonstrates through simple direction and production techniques, how film documentation can be manipulated film and falsified.


Klaus vom Bruch
Das Schleyerband I/II, D 1977, ca. 112’

In a long chain of TV snippets, Das Schleyerband draws a picture of life in the Federal Republic of Germany from September 1977 to June 1978. The kidnapping and assassination of Germany’s captain of industry, Hanns-Martin Schleyer, by Red Army terrorists, as well as the collective suicide in the Stuttgart-Stammheim prison, shake Germany’s public awareness to the core. Klaus vom Bruch condenses the documentary material so that ‘TV’ itself – the medium that most profoundly shaped the memory of the Red Army terrorist’s period – becomes the subject matter. Neither the results nor the display format, neither the terror nor the disposition are recollected anew.


Adam Small / Peter Stuart
Another State of Mind, USA 1984, 78’

Another State of Mind documents the first combined tour of the Californian punk bands Social Distortion and Youth Brigade in the summer of 1982 throughout the USA and Canada. The protagonists are twenty-year-old punks who, driven by ideals of independence and freedom, travel thousands of kilometres in an old school bus, playing in small clubs and bars and fulfilling their dream of a life on the road. Though the tour fails, the film expresses the enormous euphoric mood predominant in that 1980s scene. Based on numerous interviews, Adam Small and Peter Stuart sketch a realistic portrait of this cultural counter-movement including massive social prejudice and discrimination.


Stacy Peralta
Dogtown & Z-Boys, USA 2001, 91’

In this documentary, Stacy Peralta depicts the development of the Z-Boys, a famous skate team from the American west coast in the 1970s. In Venice Beach, a formerly glamorous entertainment district turned ruined landscape with a great deal of crime, youngsters meet at first to surf in the Bay. Out of this youth movement grows a second generation, who discover skateboarding in empty swimming pools and other sites. As Zephyr-Team they take part at the championship in Del Mar in 1975. Their success inspires not only kids around the world but also influences various trend labels and magazines.


Yvonne Rainer
Working Title: Journeys from Berlin/1971, USA 1979, 125’

Journeys to Berlin/1971 is a film essay on radicalisation and rehabilitation with a concise dichotomous form. It was far ahead of its time in its radical confrontation of sound and image, time and memory, or ideology and action. The plot is based on five people: a man, a woman, a girl (who only appear on the audio track spoken by Vito Acconci and Amy Taubin), the patient of a psychoanalyst and the analyst (alternatively performed by a man, a woman and a nine-year old boy). By means of collage, dialogues and statistics on political power in Germany, or on feminism, are woven into a psychoanalysis session as a woman gradually remembers her suicide attempt in Berlin in 1971. The central subject of the relation between public and private spheres is therefore directly transferred into a political context. As an avant-garde filmmaker with close references to dance and performance Yvonne Rainer is connected to the political and discursive potentials of a filmic language, a connection she consequently re-declines.