Hartmut Bitomsky

Looks like an awesome Bitomsky film, deals with images on film shot between 1910-1920.Read More »

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“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.Read More »

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.Read More »

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.Read More »

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.”Read More »

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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.Read More »

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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.Read More »

“We shall make sure that this work will not be separated from those who built it.” (Adolf Hitler)

Legend has it that Hitler came up with the idea of the autobahn while he was in prison in the twenties, and for this reason it was also called “Adolf Hitler’s road”. But neither Hitler nor any other Nazi invented the autobahn – the industry had already worked out the plans before 1933. What the Nazis, however, did invent was the “aesthetic of the autobahn”: it was supposed to be a cultural monument – “not the shortest but the noblest connection between two points”. The autobahn was planned as an artistic work of construction and was elevated to an object of art.Read More »

This compilation film focuses on the contents of Nazi propaganda shorts such as “The Beauty of Work” (1934), “We Have No Problems” (1933), or “The Will To Live” (1944) that preceded the feature films in German movie theaters between 1933 and 1945. The shorts reveal that men and women workers were idealized, uniformity was stressed, optimism in the face of adversity was the goal, and, in general, all the classic lies that dictatorships use to control and mold their citizens are featured. Deutschland Bilder would be offensive to many because of its content alone, even more so when one remembers what these same Nazis were doing in the extermination camps. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie GuideRead More »