1 Berlin-Harlem (West Germany, 1976, Lothar Lambert) - Lothar Lambert is a maverick who has created a one-man school of Berlin filmmaking: the 'no-budget' film, also known as the 'Kleenex' movie, inexpensive enough to be dispensable but too tough to be disposable.... His cinema is inhabited by searchers, primarily but not exclusively homosexual, ingenuous and perplexed, who attempt with varying degrees of success to come to terms with their sexual and emotional longings.
The first film Lambert edited himself was 1 Berlin-Harlem, a fiction around an American soldier whom he had earlier befriended and whom he asked to play the lead. With mock dispassion 1 Berlin-Harlemdescribes the dispiriting months between a black G.I.'s discharge and his reluctant return to the United States. Trying not to be diminished by the social, sexual, and racial prejudices circumscribing him, he explodes in a rage that turns murderous. The narrative is refractory, but it does allow the G.I. a tour of marginal Berlin.
– Laurence Kardish, "Berlin and Film"
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The fall series will showcase rarely exhibited films that took art-house audiences of New York City and West Berlin by storm during the period of 1968-1989. Based on archival research, this series looks at what audiences at the time were watching and how it formed their thinking on the politics of sex and gender. Program notes based on the films' exhibition histories in NYC and West Berlin will be provided at each screening.
Free and open to the public
Parking $3 in Core West Parking Structure