Hartmut Bitomsky — Director (9)

Movie

Imaginary Architecture, the architect Hans Scharoun (1995)
Imaginäre Architektur - Der Baumeister Hans Scharoun IMDb TMDB
other title: Imaginäre Architektur - Der Baumeister Hans Scharoun
Hans Scharoun has built houses which show not only structural substance and aesthetic forms but also how human beings should live in buildings. This depiction can only be imaginary - like reading invisible writing on walls. Bitomsky's film looks at several of Scharoun's buildings.

Movie

Barrage and Bunker (1991)
Kino Flächen Bunker IMDb TMDB
other title: Kino Flächen Bunker
Barrage and Bunker is an essay film about the (narrative) space imagined by fiction films. Reflections and associations about movement in space are the basis of every kind of story-telling. The film is sometimes referred to as part of Bitomsky's Cinema Trilogy. Sequences from over 20 movies are quoted and commented on by a team of three "researchers" (Bitomsky, Petzold, Tanner) in a sort of laboratory. TV-monitors, production stills and screenshots are used as well as quotations from books. A long night's work.

Movie

The Cinema and the Wind and Photography (1992)
Das Kino und der Wind und die Photographie IMDb TMDB Douban
other title: 电影、风与摄影 / Das Kino und der Wind und die Photographie
How should one define the relationship of documentary film to reality? Does it aim at authenticity or is it rather an “exile of reality”, a “foreign homeland of reality”, where the pre-filmic, stripped of its immediacy, comes to its own right in the first place? Where in its mis-en-scène would be the line drawn to a fictional film, if drawing a line would succeed at all? These are the kind of questions this film essay on the history and aesthetics of documentary film deals with in its seven chapters.

Movie

B-52 (2002)
Douban
哈特穆特·毕托姆斯基 actor: The B-52's
Shot in the U.S., Germany and Vietnam and using nothing more than archival footage, interviews and facts, B-52 relates the story of America’s bomber, tracing the history of the aircraft from its inception in the Cold War days of 1947 until now where the planes are obsolete, and many are sitting in the Arizona desert. Through his portrait of an American society that invests its intellectual and economic capital into its military machinery, Hartmut Bitomsky manages to convey a message about the importance of peace.

Movie

Cinema and Death (1991)
Das Kino und der Tod Douban
other title: 电影与死亡 / Das Kino und der Tod
"Das Kino und der Tod/Cinema and Death"(1988), is one of his 'Cinema Anthology' ,which was made by extraordinary Bitomsky's voice and movement of his hands that turn over photos of murder in films.It's 'a film noir as a film essay which analyzes film noir'. When he analyzes classic films like Hitchkock's "Torn Curtain",Lang's "Hangmen also die", Siegel's "The Killers",Aldrich's "Kiss me deadly",etc, each viewer tries to remake the images that always becomes uncertain in the memory,with the movement of Bitomsky's hands and voice as a detective showing photos of evidence of murders. There is an astonishing moment of new discovery of the image which we remember as a movement of the film.