"Showing Different Films Differently": Cinema as a Result of Cinematic Thinking

At an exhibition opening there's art, talk, and drinks all at the same time. At an opening of a film retrospective or special program you have to watch the film first, then engage in a discussion, and only in the end do you get something to drink.

(A transgressive viewer)

Despite the amused tone of these words, they make one thing very clear: how the institutions of gallery and cinema too often are in the grip of fixed rituals and habituation. To insert a rupture into these structures I will argue that showing films and videos—whether you call it curating or programming—in both spaces has to be based on the film and video works themselves and necessitates a self-reflexive institutional critique of cinema, something that I have seen begin to take shape in galleries in Berlin, the city where I live and work.

In the context of the conference where this paper was presented, it struck me that the differentiation between programming and curating is made within cinema, since what this debate entails has—at least recently in Germany—its origins in an identity crisis over the difference between art and cinema. Who are they connected to, how are they separated? In Germany doing cinema as a practice has remained unnamed, while curating refers to the art world; programming refers only to writing software for computers. This blank space I take as an opening for the possibility of reinventing the practice of cinema.

The debate also marks a generational change. In order to talk about aspects of curating in the realm of film, I would like to begin with a detour through the historical goals and practices of the institution in which I work, the Friends of the German Kinemathek (Freunde der Deutsche Kinemathek, or FDK). The generation of the 1960s, faced with new forms of cinema, already confronted the complex connections and differences between art and cinema. They were concerned with reclaiming film as a form of art, just as the generation of the 1920s before them had. Changes regarding the practice of showing films were so extraordinary that drawing clear boundaries to art institutions were not necessary. Rather, cinema was looking for proximity to the art world, for which the founding of distribution companies with "film gallery" in their title was an obvious sign. The primary focus was to create a counterculture to commercial movie theaters. Both discourses—that of the distinction between art and film and that of the differentiation between commercial and independent film—opened up a space "between," and it is this "in-between" that my paper focuses on. Each "in-between" is the result of a confrontation, or friction; it marks a movement and assumes at least two points of departure. It is because of this that a program always needs at least two films that together form this "in-between," this third space that the viewer will remember together with the films themselves.

The Friends of the German Kinemathek was founded in Berlin in 1963 as an ancillary institution to the Deutsche Kinemathek to enable their collection to actually be publicly screened. The FDK operates a cinema (Kino Arsenal), a film archive, and a distribution company, as well as the International Forum of New Cinema (Internationales Forum des Jungen Films), a section of the Berlin International Film Festival (Berlinale). Shortly after its founding, the FDK began organizing screenings at different locations, going far beyond the mere presentation of film history. In those early years the FDK performed a critical role by playing films that otherwise would never have been screened. These screenings included experimental film, independent political cinema, films from Latin America, and, especially, films from Eastern Europe, which sometimes made their way to Berlin and a Western audience under truly adventurous circumstances. Films were screened in their original...