CINEMA IN TIMES OF CLOSED CINEMAS

Berlin­is­che Galerie in Berlin-Kreuzberg shows Berlin films from the eight­ies

It’s a pan­dem­ic. The cin­e­mas are closed. There is no way to watch movies out­side of your own liv­ing room. Stop, no. I’ve just seen films in pub­lic. With a hand­ful of oth­er view­ers. In a well, cin­e­ma room. But it was great. It gave me a faint mem­o­ry of what it was like the last time I went to the cin­e­ma. After all, I had seen a hand­ful of films in the cin­e­ma 2020. ‚Tenet’ in the IMAX the­atre. ‘Meine Fre­undin Con­ny’, a children’s movie that I’ve seen togeth­er with my son in Wolf Kino in Berlin-Neukölln. And a great Geor­gian film, ‚And Then We Danced’, that I’ve seen togeth­er with my friend Ste­fan at Roll­bergki­no in Neukölln.

And now? Some muse­ums and gal­leries in Berlin have just opened. This is also the case with the Berlin­is­che Galerie in Kreuzberg. And Berlin­is­che Galerie cur­rent­ly is show­ing an excit­ing exhi­bi­tion on Berlin archi­tec­ture of the eight­ies, in West and East Berlin. With mod­els, pho­tos, doc­u­ments, texts, drafts, sketch­es. And with films! In the small screen­ing room of the gallery. With a doc­u­men­tary by Harun Faroc­ki (quite excit­ing, what we learn from Faroc­ki about the ‚front gar­den’, the front gar­dens as a minia­ture land­scape gar­den). With a sur­re­al, inter­est­ing short exper­i­men­tal film by Ulrike Ottinger. The film that was most worth see­ing for me was Cyn­thia Beatt’s ‚Cycling the Frame’ with a young Til­da Swin­ton cycling through divid­ed Berlin. And in all of these short films, Berlin (and its eight­ies archi­tec­ture) plays the main role – exper­i­men­tal, essay­is­tic, poet­ic, artis­tic, sub­cul­tur­al, doc­u­men­tary. If you are inter­est­ed, like me, you should go there now and book tick­ets in advance. The pro­gram runs con­tin­u­ous­ly dur­ing the open­ing hours of the muse­um.

Kain Karawahn: The Berlin­er Sum­mernight­dream, 1985
Cyn­thia Beatt: Cycling the Frame, 1988
Die tödliche Doris, Städte­film Berlin-West, 1983
Ulrike Ottinger, Usin­im­age, 1987

Berlin­is­che Galerie
Alte Jakob­straße 124 – 128
10969 Berlin
Wes – Mon 10 a.m. – 6 p.m.
Closed on Tues­days

The pur­chase of online tick­ets is required: berlinischegalerie.de/