Workshop reports by Masha Matzke & Paul Marie, Leenke Ripmeester + Tanz der Farben

Masha Matzke & Paul Marie, The fusion of political and aesthetic radicalism in Helmut Herbst’s animated film practice 

The experimental animation and documentary filmmaker, professor, and producer Helmut Herbst (1934-2021) is considered one of the key figures of the ‘other cinema’ movement, as well as a pioneer in the fight to preserve independent film and cinema’s early history. Herbst declared the history of aesthetic-political uprisings to be the favorite theme of his filmmaking practice, which he defined primarily as a form of activism in line with his concept of ‘animatory freedom.’ In the fusion of social protest and radical art, Herbst saw a direct link between Berlin Dadaism and the ‘other cinema’ of the 1960s. For Herbst, the power of both movements lay in their ability to equate radical upheavals in political thought with the formation of new ways of seeing.  
The program provides insights into Herbst’s impressive work and the cut-out animation technique of his early political satires, which sought to animate not just paper collages but a political-aesthetic consciousness. Herbst’s unique animation studio, cinegrafik, which has been part of the Kinemathek’s collection since 2022, will also be presented. (FR)

Masha Matzke is film preservationist, researcher and curator and is presently film restorer at Deutsche Kinemathek.

Paul Marie is film archivist at Deutsche Kinemathek.

Leenke Ripmeester, Animation in a hurry – film drawings by Ton van Saane 

Even though analog animation can be very fast and action-packed, the process of making these films is anything but quick. Frustrated by this aspect of animation, Dutch filmmaker Ton van Saane (1930-1973) searched for a technique that preserved the spontaneity of the creative process. He came up with an approach he termed ‘film drawings’. Van Saane tells a story by making drawings, then quickly erasing them and starting the next one. While he made the drawings, the camera was recording one frame per second which led to an acceleration when projected at 24 fps. The results are films that present the filmmaker in a hurry, in action! The viewer needs to accelerate as well to keep up with the drawings and the story being told. Curator of animation Leenke Ripmeester will present one to three films by Van Saane and elaborate on the special technique he developed. (FR)
 
Leenke Ripmeester is a curator of Eye Filmmuseum  in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Tanz der Farben (Dance of Colors)
Hans Fischinger, Germany, 1939, 8 min. 

Introduced by Thomas Worschech 
 
 ‘Dance of Colors’ is an abstract play of colors, shapes, and music in which colorful dots, lines, and surfaces move to the rhythm of the music. The short film is the first and only production by Hans Fischinger, who previously worked for his brother, the animation pioneer Oskar Fischinger. It premiered as an opening short on February 26 1939, and ran for two weeks with great success. The film was subsequently bought by Tobis Filmkunst GmbH, a company complicit with the Nazi regime, and was not shown again until the end of the war. (FR)

Thomas Worschech is curator at the DFF -Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum and head of the film archive and the film-technological collection.