Arsenal (cinema)

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The Arsenal cinema of the Arsenal - Institute for Film and Video Art e. V. has been based in the Filmhaus in Berlin's Sony Center since 2000 . It used to be in Schöneberg . Since his move, it has had two halls. During the Berlinale , the Arsenal is a venue for the International Forum for Young Cinema , which emerged from the Arsenal in 1971 .

history

The Friends of the Deutsche Kinemathek was founded in 1962, but did not start work until 1963. It was supposed to use the holdings of the Deutsche Kinemathek e. V. using the example of the film archives from Paris, London, New York, Stockholm and others.

After Manfred Salzgeber found out in the summer of 1969 that the “Bayreuther Lichtspiele” in Schöneberger Welserstraße 25 - until 1958 Bayreuther Straße - on the ground floor of a residential building near Wittenbergplatz - was opened in 1912 and has only been operated with a brief interruption in 1945 Cinema - were up for sale, he and the manager of the "Friends" Heiner Roß initiated the purchase of the cinema . However , an application made to the German Class Lottery on the recommendation of the Senate Department for Culture was rejected by the Advisory Board of the German Class Lottery at its meeting on December 10, 1969, also because of the lack of support from the Senate Department.

Since the preliminary contract for the purchase of the cinema with the operator as well as the long-term lease agreement with the house owners had already been signed and the deposit amounts - raised by Heiner Roß and Manfred Salzgeber - had already been paid, an appeal for donations was started, but it was not particularly successful.

Provisions for receivables from contractual partners of the film distributor of the “Friends”, including Sergio Gambaroff (Pegasus Filmverleih) and Fernando E. Solanas (director of “La Hora de los Hornos”) as the largest partners, as well as around 100 other filmmakers, were helpful for the acquisition of the cinema. The money borrowed was used to buy the cinema for a purchase price of DM 25,000, and on January 3, 1970, the "Friends" opened their own cinema. It was named after the silent film " Arsenal " by Oleksandr Dowschenko , which premiered in 1929 . The Schöneberg cinema had a hall with 175 seats. In 1971 it was rebuilt by Wolfgang Rasper.

The annual program consisted of about 1200 screenings, with three to five different film screenings taking place every day. Great commitment went to the film of the Third World , the film of the socialist countries, the free documentary film and the independent film . Much of the work was done on a voluntary basis by the association members and other sponsors, including well-known personalities such as Manfred Salzgeber , Erika and Ulrich Gregor . During her American Academy scholarship in the early 1990s, Susan Sontag showed the film Satanstago by Bela Tarr in the Arsenal, which she counted as one of her favorite cinemas.

New arsenal at Potsdamer Platz

The last cinema screening took place on February 29, 2000 on Welserstrasse, and the Arsenal cinema was relocated to the Filmhaus in the Sony Center on Potsdamer Platz . The old cinema was initially used as a porn cinema by a new operator until it was finally removed during a house renovation in 2007. The neon letters on the old facade were installed in the ground floor foyer of the new cinema, where the first screening was on June 1, 2000.

In 2002 the Arsenal, until then the municipal cinema of Berlin, was threatened in its existence by the threat of cuts by the Berlin Senate. Two years later it was possible to secure the long-term existence of the Arsenal by taking over the financing by the Federal Cultural Foundation. In the same year, the old board was replaced and replaced by a management trio. The three current chairmen Milena Gregor, Birgit Kohler and Stefanie Schulte Strathaus had been program managers for the association since 1994 and 1997 respectively.

The move to Potsdamer Platz brought some technical improvements compared to the Arsenal in Schöneberg: Instead of the old, narrow rows of seats with poor visibility, the Arsenal now has two fully equipped cinema halls with larger screens (9 by 4 meters and 5 by 2 meters) and much better sound in Dolby Digital , DTS or SDDS as well as cinema technology for all common film formats ( 16 , 35 and 70 millimeters ) as well as the common formats of digital cinema . The auditorium seats 236 (Arsenal 1) or 75 people (Arsenal 2).

program

The program has several priorities, including a .:

  • Retrospectives by internationally known important directors, whose films are otherwise rarely seen in Germany. B. in 2005 the American documentarist Frederick Wiseman
  • Accompanying film series for exhibitions and series of events: 2004 z. B. on the Buenos Aires – Berlin series
  • An overview of film history: until 2009 in the year-round series Magical History Tour in 365 films , of which only a heavily abridged version still exists today.
  • Documentary and experimental films that have been presented in the Arsenal Expanded division for several years , but also repeatedly
  • The presentation of international film culture that is usually not seen in Germany. This is how the cinema of the Arab countries has been presented in the Arsenal in recent years. In addition to the strong presence of Asian film culture in the forum, important directors from Japanese film history are repeatedly presented in the Arsenal (for example in the Kurosawa retrospective 2011) and in 2013 the first ever retrospective on film history of the People's Republic of China was presented, curated by the Berlin curator collective The Canine Condition .

Festivals

The Arsenal held since 1971 with the International Forum of New Cinema an alternative program on their own responsibility within the framework of the International Film Festival .

The Arsenal is also host to the Lesbian Film Festival and the Jewish Film Festival.

Until his death in 2007, the silent film pianist Willy Sommerfeld performed regularly in the cinema . Eunice Martins has been the resident pianist since 2000 and accompanies the screenings of silent films.

See also

literature

  • Ulrich Gregor: The Arsenal cinema. In: Karsten Witte (Hrsg.): Theory of the cinema. Critique of ideology of the dream factory. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1972, pp. 256-264
  • Arsenal. In: Hans-Jürgen Tast: Cinemas in the 1980s. Example: Berlin / West. (Kulleraugen, No. 35), Kulleraugen-Verlag, Schellerten 2008, p. 32 f., ISBN 978-3-88842-035-1

Web links

supporting documents

  1. ↑ Hungary's unforgettable mud. In: Der Tagesspiegel. Retrieved January 8, 2020 .
  2. ^ Susan Sontag Revisited. In: arsenal-berlin.de. Arsenal - Institute for Film and Video Art eV, January 2015, accessed on January 8, 2020 (German).
  3. ↑ The Canine Condition ( Memento from February 3, 2015 in the Internet Archive )
  4. ↑ Willy Sommerfeld in memory. In: arsenal-berlin.de. Arsenal - Institute for Film and Video Art, accessed on January 8, 2020 (German).
  5. ↑ Biographies. In: arsenal-berlin.de. Arsenal - Institute for Film and Video Art, accessed on January 8, 2020 (German).

Coordinates: 52 ° 30 ′ 34 ″  N , 13 ° 22 ′ 26 ″  E