Parakino Florian Wüst/Screaming City: West Berlin 1980s
Centrum Sztuki Wspólczesnej Laznia
ul. Jaskólcza 1, 80-767 Gdansk
Poland
www.laznia.pl
13 June 2009, at 6 p.m.

Between the end of the 1970s and the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, a vast number of films were produced in and about West Berlin, dealing with the ambivalent realities of the enclosed city. Highly subsidized by the Federal Republic of Germany as a "shop window of the Free West", West Berlin had become an island, an inverted fortress for all those who saught to experience themselves without economical pressures, and to express themselves by all means. It wasn't about devoting oneself to the World Revolution anymore, but to implement alternative life styles and ways of housing, giving rise to social resistance, strident underground cultures and sexual border-crossing. Pessimism and apocalyptic moods, not least driven by the enhanced arms race and nuclear threats of the period, mixed with extravagance, punk and queerness.
Where images lived a special life inmidst the deadlock of socialist and capitalist ideologies that nowhere else materialized as spectacular as in the divided city of Berlin, an idiosyncratic crossover of music, performance, art and super-8 movement developed. For many young filmmakers, super-8 facilitated the production of low cost and truly independent films. The technical limitations of the medium embodied a strong means of spontaneity and purposeful dilettantism, while super-8 was easy to distribute and show in underground cinemas, clubs and cafés. Even institutions like the German Film and Television Academy in Berlin (dffb) fostered a spirit of radical subjectivity and experimentation among students.
Screaming City: West Berlin 1980s presents a selection of short experimental and documentary films based on an extensive retrospective in October 2006 at Kino Arsenal, Berlin, entitled Who says concrete doesn't burn, have you tried?. Since then, Schulte Strathaus and Wüst have been showing selected tour programs of West Berlin '80s films internationally, and published a book of the same title in November 2008, casting light on this unique historical period and urban site of German film production.
With films by, amongst others, Brigitte Bühler & Dieter Hormel, Michael Brynntrup, Christoph Doering, Die Tödliche Doris, Yana Yo.