Looks like an awesome Bitomsky film, deals with images on film shot between 1910-1920.Playback is a documentary film about a workshop that took place at the Nederland Fimmuseum in Amsterdam in 1995, and which was supported by the Goethe Institute. The subject of the workshop was the early documentary cinema between 1910 and approximately 1920 – and also making of this video.

The participants included film students, filmmakers, visual artists, film historians and archivists from the Filmmuseum, and surrounding them was a crew of cinematographers, sound technicians and camera and production assistants, who recorded almost everything that was going on.

During the two weeks of sessions more than 30 films were reviewed, a few times in a movie theater and additionally on TV screens, and in discussed in general group sessions, in which reports were prepared and presented by individual participants. Later on, various video installations were set up, which were then again recorded by cameras. Finally, the workshop was presented to the public at the Rotterdam Film Festival, where the films were shown and the first results of the workshop discussed with the festival audience.

What are these old and seemingly old-fashioned films able to tell us today? Do they still convey to us a meaning, and if not, does the difficulty in understanding them lie with us or them?

And is there any need to preserve films if they are no longer capable of communicating to us in a manner that corresponds to our contemporary way or perceiving and understanding reality?

While we are working on coming to terms with these kinds of questions in the workshop, the following quotation from Umberto Eco appeared, who was visiting Amsterdam at that time: ‘Creativity is not so much the inventing of new materials as it is the rearranging of materials that are old’. This rearranging of old materials is exactly what the video Playback does. It conjugates, so to speak, old films by using various media and by offering interpretations, and through forms of perception and experimenting with ideas in order to find out how much we are alienated from our (even recent) history and how much work is involved in showing it again.

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“Playback” is a documentary of workshop in Amsterdam, for studying films which was made in 1910`20s.It’s important that this film is also a documentary of people studying ‘media literacy’.For example there is a sequence that people discuss with each other while they watch fragments of silent films called ‘beauty contest’.One says ‘They’re called ‘beauty contest’ but they’re all beautiful’,one says,’No,they might have been forced to face the camera like Pasolini’s “Salo”,and they look sad.’,and another one says,’But there is a part that a boy stands close to a girl as if he protect her’…Probably “Playback” is influenced by the sequence of Rouch’s “Chronique d’ete” that people who were filmed comment after projection of the film,but it is a great documentary of the meeting between people and images that separates the time of 80 years,and of inventing an idea and discourse from there. And we can imagine someone makes a documentary of people who discuss while they’re watching “Playback” in future.It’s a rare documentary opening to the future.

Bitomsky says the collapse of the direct relation between image and reality because of digital image’s appearance and disappearance of images in war, are challenges to documentary.It may lead falling down of truth of image,and our judgment under presence and consumerism is submit itself to ‘official announcement’?Will it become impossible for us to persuade a trace in an image?If we could be liberated from prompt reaction and secure the space and time to think,we can have something that was potential surface to view. He says “the task of the future documentary will be to create doubt. You could say, the more sophisticated literacy that could read not only images but also the method of working images.” Cinema is the only place because it lost position of the mass media. The circulation of preservation, criticism, and creation of image can offer us how to defend ourselves.

1.36GB | 1h 19m | 576×432 | avi

https://nitro.download/view/F9E6994FA183690/hartmut_bitomsky’s_playback.avi

Language(s):English
Subtitles:None

The post Hartmut Bitomsky – Playback (1995) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
“Das Kino und der Tod/Cinema and Death”(1988), is one of his ‘Cinema Anthology’ ,which was made by extraordinary Bitomsky’s voice and movement of his hands that turn over photos of murder in films.It’s ‘a film noir as a film essay which analyzes film noir’. When he analyzes classic films like Hitchkock’s “Torn Curtain”,Lang’s “Hangmen also die”, Siegel’s “The Killers”,Aldrich’s “Kiss me deadly”,etc, each viewer tries to remake the images that always becomes uncertain in the memory,with the movement of Bitomsky’s hands and voice as a detective showing photos of evidence of murders. There is an astonishing moment of new discovery of the image which we remember as a movement of the film.

598MB | 46m 42s | 738×554 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/4C456E96686B35E/Das.kino.und.der.tod.1991.Dvdrip.x264-MMENDES.mkv

Language(s):German
Subtitles:English Hard

The post Hartmut Bitomsky – Das Kino und der Tod aka Cinema and Death (1988) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Looks very interesting, some of Bitomsky’s classic techniques dollying through spaces, stop pans and quite a lot of movement with the camera. Among other structures looks at a housing complex, several houses, a library, a school and a concert hall designed by Scharoun.

Hans Scharoun has built houses which show not only structural substance and aesthetic forms but also how human beings should live in bulidings. This depiction can only be imaginary – like reading invisible writing on walls.

In the Nazi period – when modern architecture was condemned, the new style of construction prohibited, and Scharoun was permitted to build next to nothing – he began to discard what up to then he had thought designed and built. The dilemma in which architecture probably still finds itself was obvious: on the one hand, it depends on money and political interests, and on the other, it must endeavour to liberate itself.

After the war he became the great, dynamic architect of the young German Federal Republic, who resolved to thoroughly consider once again from the beginning everything that had to do with buliding. The result has remained controversial till today. With the Philarmonie and the National Library in Berlin he succeeded in creating two enormous public bulidings, which have no intention of conveying anything representative and which renounce pathos. It has been said that he built from the inside to the outside, around that space in the middle that was meant to evoke a coexistence of contrasts and differences, something that should be endured.

The notion that we must try to gather everything under one roof was his first idea, and the second one was that we – after the experience of history – are comdemned to accomplish that which is provisional.

‘The main thing is the movement’ was his motto, and he meant this literally. Indeed, there is no other architect in whose constructions we sense such an intense impulse to put things in motion.

1000MB | 01h 05m | 528×400 | avi

https://nitro.download/view/9FD2ECBB06D46B4/bitomsky’s_imaginare_architektur.avi

Language(s):German
Subtitles:English hardsubbed

The post Hartmut Bitomsky – Imaginäre Architektur – Der Baumeister Hans Scharoun aka Imaginary Architecture, the architect Hans Scharoun (1995) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

KINO FLÄCHEN BUNKER (Das Kino und die Schauplätze) [Cinema, Surface, Bunker (The Cinema and its Settings)] which is also known as »Bombardement und Bunker« [Barrage and Bunker] is an essay film about the (narrative) space imagined by fiction films. Reflections and associations about movement in space as the basis for every kind of story-telling. The film is sometimes referred to as part of Bitomsky’s Cinema Trilogy. Sequences from over 20 movies are quoted and commented on by a team of three »researchers« (Bitomsky, Petzold, Tanner) in a sort of laboratory. TV-monitors, production stills or screenshots are used as well as quotations from books. A long night’s work.

694MB | 0h 52m | 576×432 | avi

https://nitro.download/view/571EB890DB2778B/Bitomsky_Kino_Flaachen_Bunker.avi
https://nitroflare.com/view/D8752FE923A053E/Bitomsky_Kino_Flachen_Bunker.srt

Language(s):German
Subtitles:English

The post Hartmut Bitomsky – Bombardement und Bunker aka Kino Flächen Bunker (1991) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

DAS KINO UND DER WIND UND DIE PHOTOGRAPHIE
Sieben Kapitel uber dokumentarische Filme

The Cinema and the Wind and Photography
Seven Chapters about Documentary Films

“That’s how we’ll begin: the street of the first film. This street is located in a suburb of Lyon. That’s where the factory of the Lumiere brothers was. They made the first films for cinema. These were documentary films.”

This is a film about other films, and this means about the reality of films and about theories concerning this. The situation of creating the adaptation and working on the project is integrated into the film. It is a look inside a workshop in which work is at this moment being done.

There is no commentary, but rather there is a discussion of films that involves dealing with ideas and quotations, and in doing so there is a direct and unmediated confrontation with the film clips on the part of those discussing. The cinema is examined using its own instruments.

This examination does not intend to be systematic; it is more of a kind of wild, disorderly hunting, a cheerful science in which the important things are permitted to stand next to what is marginal, and concepts are found in what is simply casual

What emerges from this offers no solution for problems and also no formulas (such as, documentary film equals reality times film art divided by critical consciousness…). What emerges is cinema enthusiasm.

1991 Betacam video SP, colour, standard format, 56 min.
Written & Directed by: Hartmut Bitomsky
Camera by: Arthur Ahrweiler
Edited by: Ann-Malen Witt
Big Sky Film Berlin, West German Broadcasting (WDR) Cologne

From the net –
“Das Kino und der Wind und die Photographie/Cinema and Wind and Photographie” (1991),another one of ‘anthology’, consists of monitors that show documentary films from Lumiere to Robert Frank,Bitomsky and his stuff who is analyzing and making this film.The director’s reading texts about these films and the movement of stuffs,camera movement are choreographed precisely.Bitomsky shows himself on monitor and stops it,revises it,and he reads the text again in front of the monitor to shows how he revised. It’s a brechtian,and it’s a representation of our situation surrounded by images.I want to call it a new fiction about realization of documentary.

998MB | 55m 50s | 528×400 | avi

https://nitroflare.com/view/62D6EB7C3719951/Bitomsky_Kino_Wind_Photographie.avi

Language(s):German (the audio is out of sync)
Subtitles:English Hard subbed

The post Hartmut Bitomsky – Das Kino und der Wind und die Photographie aka The Cinema and the Wind and Photography (1991) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
The latest film by Hartmut Bitomsky is, just like much of his early work, a original film essay about film and film history. Just as in earlier films, he makes inventive use of the potential offered by the medium video to analyse films.The history of the UFA is the story of a risky financial venture in the twenties and a propaganda instrument in the thirties. Bitomsky’s approach stands out because he involvesthis social and political context in investigating and dissecting films. In this way the UFA – the largest film production company in Germany – stands for Germany between the wars and hence for the traumatic period of the Third Reich. Bitomsky also takes advantage of the opportunity to question prevailing opinions among the writers of film history. He takes a fairly open-minded look and primarily seeks his answers in the film images themselves.Bitomsky shows many UFA films in a kind of video installation on several monitors and allows a scanning camera go from film to film. He also leafs through photo albums, looks at posters and brochures and talks to the odd expert. Bitomsky made two versions of this film; the French co-producer La Sept demanded a shorter version*.

1.04GB | 1h 29m | 720×528 | avi

https://nitroflare.com/view/4E90E26026C3247/DIE_UFA_Hartmut_Bitomsky.avi
https://nitroflare.com/view/492F05E49F6DEA7/DIE_UFA_Hartmut_Bitomsky.srt

Language(s):German
Subtitles:English

The post Hartmut Bitomsky – Die UFA (1992) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
However a VW is put together, what comes out is always the Federal Republic of Germany.

The VW factory is a museum of industrial technology, and at the same time it is its Utopia. The old factory buildings convey the impression of almost like being in a cathedral. In order to communicate with the crane operators high above, the workers beat on the steel griders with heavy hammers. The new buildings, however, are much lower – like in a complex of new apartments, in which you can touch the ceilings with your hands. While going around inside the buildings, you can follow the creation of an automobile and at the same time bid farewell to the industrial age.

1. What is a complex? A hyperactive reaction to a defect, which continues to grow rampantly until finally the defect becomes comprehensible.

2. Carstuffing: Some people had fun with the capacity of the automobile by attempting to set records in putting as many people into a car as possible, with the result that more people fit into the car than there is space for them inside.

3. Automobile paint shop: The paint contains dangerous substances, and the workers have to wear protective masks. However, most of the time they don’t. The masks get in the way and are unconfortable. It is also degrading to wear a mask while working; and it is terrible to have to protect yourself from the work that you do.

4. Planning engineer: “The assembly department will not turn into a ghost factory.” Assembly worker: “If you were to develop a car that a robot has better access to, then a lot of the work done now would no longer be necessary and there would only be some residual tasks left over.”

5. Transfer line: They are located in the dark; robots work blind. They work in isolation on divided-off floor sections of the factory, behind fences and chain-linked enclosures, securely protected by means of sliding bolts and photoelectric beams. These can no longer be called jobs. Work is in the process of dissapearing. What is thus being lost here cannot even be imagined.

6. Scrap metal: Cars wear out. What the rust didn’t eat up is crushed by the shredder. Future archeologists will hardly have anything to dig up when they endeavour to investigate what concerned us most in our age.

1989 35mm, colour, wide screen 1:1.66, 91 min.
Written, Edited, Narrated and Directed by: Hartmut Bitomsky
Camera by: Axel Block
Big Sky Film Berlin, Cofilm Berlin, FAS Film Hamburg, LA Sept Paris, West German Broadcasting (WDR) Cologne
(Der VW Komplex) Direction: Hartmut Bitomsky, NĚM, 1988, German version, English subtitles, 90 min

The film is a documentary about the Volkswagen factory in Wolfsburg. The beginning is of course the present time: after a view of a giant industrial complex, the camera comes to rest on a pile of scrapped cars. Then clips from the news of 1935, with Hitler at the automobile exhibition. A few years later Dr. Porsche built the first “Beetle” model. Bitomsky follows in his film modern factory production of the VW with his camera and microphone.

But, however, it is not an industrial film – it goes well beyond the mere facts. Bitomsky also takes up the role played by the VW factory for the National Socialists armament production, and refers also to the prisoners who had to keep up production during the war years through forced labour. And so in the end the Volkswagen factory appears as an exemplary case of German industrial and cultural history, and the car itself, from the first Beetle to the newest models, both technical product and myth, becomes a revealing example of the history of German values.

1.17GB | 1h 29m | 640×480 | avi

https://nitro.download/view/094E1AC4D4BAE3A/Bitomsky_Der_VW_Komplex.avi

Language(s):English Voice Over
Subtitles:English Hard where required

The post Hartmut Bitomsky – Der VW-Komplex aka The VW Complex (1990) first appeared on Cinema of the World.