“70 is like 18, only with 52 years of experience,” says Anton Biebl, Munich’s cultural advisor at the opening ceremony of the 70th International Film Art Weeks. In 1953, arthouse cinema operators in Munich organized the film art weeks together for the first time to counteract the summer slump. Biebl sees characteristics in this history that are still having an impact: “Namely, that the Munich cinema landscape lives and is shaped by personal commitment and commitment, by the ingenuity of the Munich arthouse cinemas and by the cohesion, the solidarity of the operators with each other.” Then the coordinators of the film art weeks, Dunja Bialas and Ludwig Sporrer, invite the cinema operators involved in the program to the big stage in front of the screen of the Cincinatti, a single-room cinema in Obergiesing that was built in the 1950s for the US occupation soldiers. The organizers briefly present their program before the new film art week trailer is shown again, created by the video artist Valerie Holmeier, who was also in the audience.
The Linz band “Okabre” creates auditory irritations
Only then will the first film of this year’s film art weeks be shown in the classic 4:3 format: the Japanese silent film “One Side of Madness”, which was staged in 1926 by director Kinugasa Teinosuke as a menacing interplay of light and shadow. Teinosuke was only 20 years old when, influenced by expressionist films such as “The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari”, he created a work full of crazy dissolves and triple exposures. However, the fact that a third of the original theatrical version was lost does not make the film any easier to understand. A cinema narrator, as was common in Japanese cinemas during the silent film era, could have sorted the narrative threads here. Instead, the Linz band creates okabre with their real-time soundtrack of the film further, this time auditory irritations.
While on the screen a daughter discovers her father as a caretaker in a psychiatric ward where her mother was admitted after she had tried to drown herself and her child as a result of her experiences of violence at the hands of the same father, guitar, theremin and synth sounds waft and echo into the action, penetrated by incomprehensible individual and choral singing. In this way, the visual psychological game, together with the threatening shadows cast by the bars on the protagonists’ bodies, can also be heard. Accordingly, the audience has earned the subsequent free beer and the projection of a Klaus Lemke documentation on the cinema building. Film art week posters from the fifties and sixties can also be seen in the cinema foyer.