Film Programme

Thu 8 May / 3 pm

Sans toit ni loi, F 1985, dir. Agnès Varda, with Sandrine Bonnaire, Macha Méril and Yolande Moreau, 105 mins, OV with English subtitles
* With introduction by Birgit Kohler

The vagabond Mona wanders aimlessly through the bleak winter landscape of southern France. She experiences freedom, but also feelings of envy and incomprehension – and acts of patriarchal violence. The film opens with her death and – inspired by Citizen Kane – tells her story through the recollections and impressions of her fleeting acquaintances, which are all she has left behind.

The red clothes Mona wears are the only reminder of the post-1968 feminist liberation struggles, to which Varda turned her attention amidst the conservative turn of the 1980s. In the film, the red tones increasingly mingle with the blues of the vineyard, signifying both Mona’s own personal stagnation and that of the women’s movement. The film was awarded the Golden Lion in 1985.

‘A drifter who shares little about herself, a blank canvas the people she encounters project their own thoughts onto. In interviews, the people she fleetingly met try to tell us something about her, but end up only telling us about themselves. […] Following a female character who doesn’t explain herself, and that the film doesn’t try to explain either, is, I think, something special even today’ (Maren Ade, 2023).

Content note: Depictions of animal skinning and drug/alcohol use, implied references to sexual assault

Thu 8 May / 8.30 pm
* Short film programme curated and presented by Christine Rüffert, approx. 90 mins

Varda’s aesthetic is always rooted in her personal interest in people, places and their stories. The thematic commonalities between two of her early short films and works by other contemporary directors bring Varda’s distinctive style into sharper relief.

Orchard Street by Ken Jacobs depicts the eponymous shopping street at the heart of the Jewish neighbourhood in New York’s Lower East Side. On the other side of the Atlantic, Varda’s L’opéra-mouffe subjectively documents the bustling market on Rue Mouffetard, located in a similar district in Paris.
In A Portrait of Ga, Margaret Tait, who lived on the remote Scottish Orkney Islands, presents a portrait of her grandmother, while in Oncle Yanco Varda travels to San Francisco to film her uncle in exuberant colour and reflect on her family history.
 

   | Orchard Street // Ken Jacobs, USA 1955/2014, 27 mins, no dialogue
   | L’opéra-mouffe //Agnès Varda, F 1958, 16 mins, original with English subtitles
   | A Portrait of Ga // Margaret Tait, GB 1952, 4 mins, in English
   | Oncle Yanco // Agnès Varda, F/USA 1967, 22 mins, original with English subtitles

Fri 9 May / 7.30

Menschen am Sonntag, D 1930, dir.Robert Siodmak and Edgar G. Ulmer, with Brigitte Borchert, Valeska Gert and Heinrich Gretler, 74 mins, German intertitles with Englishsubtitles
* With introduction by Winfried Pauleit
* Live music by Eunice Martins

A group of working-class friends meet for a Sunday outing. Even without a soundtrack, the film is full of music: the friends play a portable gramophone at the start and end of their trip to the lake. The film brings a series of moving portraits to the screen that are bound up with a culture of listening to music and taking photographs outdoors. On the one hand, the sound of the gramophone records has the power to set bodies in motion; on the other, the act of photography captures a moment of moving life as a static pose.

Based on a screenplay by Billy Wilder, this late work of the New Objectivity movement depicts the life of young working-class Berliners in the late 1920s. The filmmakers labelled it as a work of ‘reportage’, while the press spoke of an ‘experimental film’.

Subject to massive editings and then lost shortly after its release, the film was reconstructed from a range of sources in Amsterdam in 1998, digitised in 2K in 2010 and then remastered in 2014 under the supervision of the Deutsche Kinemathek.

‘Many documentary images of Wannsee reveal even more clearly than has previously been realised that the staged sequences were artistic products. Menschen am Sonntag is precisely NOT the fortuitous result of pure improvisation that film history, familiar with later developments such as neorealism and the French New Wave, saw it as. Over the six to eight-week shoot, the ambitious young filmmakers […] had enough time to perfectly orchestrate the movements of people and the camera work’ (Daniel Kothenschulte, 2018).

Content note: Implied reference to sexual assault

Eunice Martins is a composer and pianist, who composes for ensembles, films, VR and sound design projects. She regularly performs at international festivals, theatres and film archives. Since 2000, she has been the resident pianist at Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art. eunicemartins.eu

Sat 10 May / 3 pm

F/USA 1981, dir. Agnès Varda, with Sabine Mamou and Mathieu Demy, 65 mins, OV with English subtitles
* With introduction by Colleen Kennedy-Karpat (Ankara)

Emilie lives with her son Martin in Los Angeles. The film follows them around the grey, rainy city. Amidst all the people that make up the urban mosaic, Emilie feels lonely and unsettled. Documenteur is a thinly fictionalised self-portrait of the director, who paints a highly fragmented picture of Emilie and Martin’s existence. Rather than an overarching narrative arc, Varda presents scattered episodes in which her fictional protagonists merge with the real-world shooting locations and extras. A lyrical voiceover provides emotional cohesion. The title of the film, which was made in parallel to Mur Murs (F/USA 1981), signals a blurring of the lines between documentary and fiction: menteur is French for ‘liar’.

‘Nowhere does the director seem more nakedly on display than in a film in which she doesn’t appear at all: Documenteur (1981), a wrenching fictionalized account of her temporary separation from her husband, Jacques Demy, which Varda punningly refers to as “an emotion picture”’ (Melissa Anderson, 2015).