「Forum & Forum Expanded」2020s

◈ 2022 ◈https://www.douban.com/doulist/147510874/?dt_dapp=1The Forum and Forum Expanded stand for reflections on the medium of film, socio-artistic discourse and a particular sense for the aesthetic.The programmes of the Forum and Forum Expanded aim to expand the understanding of what film is, to test the boundaries of convention and open up fresh perspectives to help grasp cinema and how it relates to the world in new ways. The programmes can include anything that serves these ends: contemporary and historical, analogue and digital film, installation art, performance and music.The Forum and Forum Expanded are programmes independently curated and organised by Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art as part of the Berlinale.What fits into the programme is defined by the filmmakers’ stance towards their medium rather than the question of what commercial potential a film may have. The cinematic form is never subordinate to the content. Both selection committees see their selections as a laboratory and a workshop.The annual selection of typically around 40 films for the Forum focuses on contemporary international cinema productions and eschews conventional distinctions, such as that between fiction film and documentary. With usually around 30 short and feature-length films, a group exhibition, stage and panel events, Forum Expanded provides an open platform for film formats from a broader range of disciplines, including visual art, theatre, performance, music and the media. In combination with the impetus given by politics and society, these works create a discursive framework of a deliberately international character which has the potential to grasp cinema anew and change it in lasting ways.The first International Forum of New Cinema took place in 1971 in reaction to the political turbulence of the previous years, which even led to the Berlinale being called off the previous year. It was organised by the Friends of the German Film Archive (now Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art) founded by Ulrich and Erika Gregor who led the Forum until 2001 and shaped its identity considerably.The Friends had already organised a separate event in parallel to the Berlinale in 1969 and 1970. Now they received an official invitation to take over responsibility for an independent programme to be shown as part of the festival and be on an equal footing with it. The International Forum of New Cinema sought to challenge its audiences, showed previously unknown or underrepresented cinematic forms and documented, as Ulrich Gregor once put it, “the multiplicity and complexity of new film styles between avant-garde cinema, narrative film and documentary”.Since then, the Forum has gone on to write film history. Numerous directors who later gained large-scale international recognition were given a platform for their debut films here. Jacques Rivette, Chantal Akerman, Theo Angelopoulos, Jim Jarmusch, Béla Tarr, Aki Kaurismäki, Ken Loach, Nagisa Oshima, Yilmaz Güney, Atom Egoyan, Michael Snow, Manoel de Oliveira, Yvonne Rainer, Andrei Tarkovsky, Derek Jarman, Raúl Ruiz, Ousmane Sembène, Wong Kar-wai, Helke Sander, Margarethe von Trotta, Peter Greenaway, Avi Mograbi, Claire Denis, Ulrike Ottinger, the Dardenne brothers and many more showed their early works at the Forum.The Forum introduced something new to the Berlinale, a discursive cinema culture characterised by intensive audience discussions and comprehensive accompanying publications in place of glamour and the red carpet. From the very beginning, when films were shown at the Forum, this has also included the subtitling of film prints or files, copies of which have then regularly been kept by Arsenal and added to its distribution range after the festival has ended. This has led to the creation of a living archive of 10,000 films from around the world which redefines perceptions of film history.In 2000, the Friends moved with the Berlinale to Potsdamer Platz. Film critic Christoph Terhechte took over the leadership of the Forum in 2002 supported by Anna Hoffmann. He consolidated the selection, preserved the programme’s appetite for risk-taking and consistently provided the section with fresh momentum in the face of a rapidly changing festival landscape.The names also changed in the meantime. In 2008 the Friends, led from 2004 by Milena Gregor, Birgit Kohler and Stefanie Schulte Strathaus, became Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art; the International Forum of New Cinema became simply the Forum. The Arsenal cinema which opened in 1970 in the district of Schöneberg moved to Potsdamer Platz in 2000. The close connection between the work of the Arsenal cinema and the festival as well as the film archive that developed from that specific collaboration continues today to be the defining characteristic of both the Arsenal as an institution and the Forum and Forum Expanded section.The noughties were marked by an expansion of moving images into the public realm. Digitisation, phone cameras and dissemination on the Internet, as well as the medium of film establishing itself in other art forms, opened the borders of cinema. Inspiration for new narrative formats, together with documentary forms and strategies, also increasingly emerged from visual art, performance, music, political activism and science. To incorporate such approaches into a reinterpretation of cinema and further advancement of film as a medium, Stefanie Schulte Strathaus and Anselm Franke created Forum Expanded as an expansion of the Forum in 2006. The shared idea of both programmes has always been to invite works that question the self-conception of the Berlinale as an institution – because everything that happens socially, politically, culturally or artistically in the world has the potential to have a lasting effect on the festival and its audience.After Christoph Terhechte stepped down in the summer of 2018, the board of directors of Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art, consisting of Milena Gregor, Birgit Kohler and Stefanie Schulte Strathaus, took over the interim leadership of the Forum and the responsibility for its 2019 programme, supported by Anna Hoffmann. Curator and film critic Cristina Nord has led the section since August 2019. Assisted by Anna Hoffmann and through a new selection procedure she prepares the upcoming 50th edition of Berlinale Forum.