Presentations Session 1

10:00
Cyankali – A Film That Spoke Out
Julia Wallmüller

Hans Tintner’s ‘Cyankali’ was a pivotal film in the campaign to reform the controversial Section 218 of the Weimar legal code which criminalized abortion. The film went before the censorship board a total of six times and was accused of corrupting public morals, having a brutalizing effect, inciting class hatred and endangering public safety and order.

‘Cyankali’ was made on the cusp of the sound-film era. It contains intertitles but also came with a soundtrack comprising music and sound effects, and it had spoken dialogue at its climax. The audio, recorded using the Tri-Ergon optical sound process, has only been partially preserved, with six of the original ten reels of the optical sound negative surviving. The film’s original image negative also contains gaps. Alongside providing a history of the film’s release, this presentation will discuss the challenges which arose during its restoration given the condition of the surviving materials.

Julia Wallmüller is a film restorer at the Deutsche Kinemathek where she heads the team of restorers within the “Digitization of National Film Heritage” (FFE) project.

10:30
Unstable Signals – The Lost Video History of the DFFB
Network Lost Video History dffb

It’s a risky business, telling stories from the margins while relying on the notoriously unstable video signal; likewise, archiving unstable magnetic tapes nearing the end of their lifespan. Students at the German Film and Television Academy Berlin (DFFB) produce not only films but also videos, the earliest known of which date back to 1969. In 1980, working with video became part of the mandatory curriculum. Today, most of these videos are no longer available; the tapes have been scattered and are in urgent need of archival rescue.

In this presentation, we will take a brief look at the DFFB’s history of working with video, its archiving practice and the significant gaps within the archive. We will also ask what is required to preserve and digitize video. And we will discuss what students back then thought about archiving and the institutions that undertake this task. If archiving is about preservation and conservation, how do we archive a medium characterized precisely by its instability and fluidity? A risky business indeed.

11:00

Projecting Wanjiru Kinyanjui
Karina Griffith

A workshop entitled “Projecting Wanjiru Kinyanjui” took place at Sinema Transtopia in June 2025. Its goal was to check the 35mm print of Wanjiru Kinyanjui’s DFFB graduation film, ‘Der Kampf um den heiligen Baum’ (‘The Battle of the Sacred Tree’, 1995) held in the Deutsche Kinemathek’s archive and to take a ‘projection studies’ approach to repairing the relationship between archives and Black German cinema. Comprising Kinyanjui herself along with projectionist Florian Höhensteiger and ten participants, the workshop examined the physical 35mm reels and ‘read’ them to uncover the film’s screening history.

Film professor and curator Gabriel Menotti argues that cinema studies scholars need to be more like projectionists – studying the trajectory and condition of analogue prints and fumbling in the dark to investigate the production and screening context of cinematographic works alongside their interpretation. This proposition requires an examination of the “negative spaces in the circuits” of these films.

This case study demonstrates a model for intersectional custodial film work and indexes the risks of excluding filmmakers from the process of archiving, distributing and contextualizing their films made in Germany.

Karina Griffith