The Latest at Goethe

Can film archives have lives of their own? What has been collecting here? What does it want to tell us? A project promoted by the Goethe-Institut is now dusting off cinematic rarities and bringing the archives to life. By Arne Scheffler

The little boy is on the case. He does a very good James Dean imitation: posing at the telephone, cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth. He’s playing cinema – Küssen und küssen lassen. The crowd surrounding him like it, they laugh and give the boy a few rupees. From off-screen, the narrator explains that the boy is an orphan. His voice sounds somewhat stilted. A few more carneys are shown. At the fair in Kolkata, they all are trying their luck with acrobatics and all sorts of miracle cures. The scenes appear three-dimensional, with extended shots and plenty of time to become involved in what is happening: people in sandals, dusty ground, all around the city and its millions of people.

The film is recognizably not the most recent; the colours are somewhat faded, bright dots here and there. It is called Dharamtalla Ka Mela, the fair in Dharamtalla, and is a documentary, 60 minutes long, India 1984. There is only one copy of it still in existence worldwide and it is in the archives of the Berlin Arsenal Institute. The original archive in India burned down. To save the film, Arsenal has just had it digitalized.



There are a few such films that have only survived in the Arsenal archives. Since the 1960s, the association, which also operates a cinema, has been compiling a collection that now encompasses 10,000 films. Much of it is non-commercial and much is obscure. To a great extent this is because of the Berlinale Forum, which Arsenal has been organizing for four decades. The forum considers itself the experimental part of the Berlinale, as an interface between cinema and art. The copies of the films often remain here following the festival; the Arsenal collection has literally piled itself up. “What distinguishes our archive is that it reflects the work of the association,” says Stefanie Schulte Strathaus, board member at Arsenal, “both because of the festival, but also because of personal connections. Many filmmakers wanted us to have a copy of their films. This has something to do with the idea of what kind of archive this is, what kind of people work here and how they work.”

Lost knowledge

Three years ago, for instance, Arsenal was given ownership of the complete film estate of underground icon Jack Smith and other partial collections were also received. The Arsenal archives express not only curatorial interests, however. “There was a time,” relates Schulte Strathaus, “when we received a number of films from Chile. Filmmakers in countries under dictatorships have frequently left their films with us quite deliberately to put them in safekeeping.” The archives are hence also a point of exile, a depiction of the political situation, a mirror on international film history.

However, changing generations mean that at Arsenal some of the knowledge of the inventory has been lost yet again. “Particularly because we never officially planned to become an archive, we often no longer know why we have certain films and where they came from,” admits Schulte Strathaus. “Everyone who leaves us takes their specific knowledge along with them.” Although they now have an extensive database online, not every film is accompanied by the same amount of information.

The diversity and the secrets of the collections are not the only reasons that Arsenal calls it a “living archive.” “We assume,” explains Schulte Strathaus, “that a film not only exists in the present. When we look at older films, we see them in the modern context. However, this makes the film a different one than it was at the time it was made.”

“The view of the world”

In order to link the archive and its films to the present, Arsenal is now planning a series of projects with artists, researchers and curators called Living Archive. The inventory will be processed in a high quality way. To digitalize all of the slowly aging film reels at once would be expensive and inadvisable.

One of the Living Archive projects is a scholarship programme together with the Goethe-Institut. Two film and video curators from overseas will be given an opportunity to live in Berlin for up to three months and develop their own ideas on the basis of the collection. “It’s important to us that our viewpoint be turned around,” says Schulte Strathaus. “The archives express our view of the world, now we want the world’s view of our archive.”

One possible aim of the scholarships could be to bring the films back to their home countries. The “return” does not merely mean the actual film material. According to Schulte Strathaus this can also be of a non-material nature. “Over time, the scholarship holders will probably gain an impression of how their country is reflected in our archives. They can then point out certain aspects or perspectives that we ourselves do not see or understand.”

Cinema meets the city

Madhusree Dutta from Mumbai is the first scholarship recipient. The filmmaker and activist is already fascinated by the Arsenal archives. “To me, the collection seems uncommon,” she explains, “its focus on other cultures, works that deviate, that disagree, difficult cinema, things one otherwise has no access to. I’m curious to see all these films.”

For Dutta, the word archive is linked to the themes of “city” and “cinema.” “I think that the city archives the cinema and the cinema archives the city. This is true for Mumbai, but also for other Asian cities.” Her project Cinema City has been dealing with this interconnection for a good while. She is not yet certain whether she will pursue this idea at Arsenal. “The great thing about the scholarship is that I can decide what I want to do on location and on the basis of the material. But, by all means, to find hidden cities in the Arsenal archives would be interesting.”

She has already discovered one cinema city: Kolkata in the mid-1980s, the fair in Dharamtalla and the young boy with Küssen und küssen lassen. There is no projector, no electricity, but lots of cinema. Thanks to Madhusree Dutta and Living Archive, they may soon find refuge in their homeland.