Retrospective 2024

People leaving the factory, a gardener struggling with a hose, circus entertainers performing tricks: already in the earliest works of film history, human bodies take center stage. They draw our gaze, their movements excite our fascination, we root for them, we suffer with them. Because it is through the presentation of bodies that cinema developed its unique seductive power, its ability to immerse us as viewers in this wonderful medium, to win us over, move us, sometimes even make us see the world with a different set of eyes. Cinema’s choreographies of the body can draw on centuries of tradition in the fields of dance, acrobatics, and martial arts, all of which play a role in the films of this year’s retrospective – even explicitly, as in ›The Red Shoes‹ (1948) and ›The Raid‹ (2011).

Before the trained body, however, there already exists the body as a natural given. It includes such attributes as gender, race, and disability, each of which comes with its own social categorizations. In cinema, the body is also thematized as a medium for sexual or painful sensations. And just as film theory, via the notion of the “hors cadre”, considers the extension of the cinematic dimension beyond the confines of the profilmic space and the screen, cinema has also consistently considered bodies’ potential for expansion and change, for example in body horror and science fiction.

The retrospective presents twelve films in which the human body always plays a special role and asks how its representation has changed since the beginnings of cinema. In addition to the already mentioned content, we have also taken into account the various relevant genres in order to make the program as diverse as possible.

The historical starting point is ›Steamboat Bill, Jr.‹ (1928), authored by and starring Buster Keaton. In the finale, the famous Hollywood pioneer skillfully navigates his way through a storm – even when the façade of a house falls on top of him, he survives. It is a spectacular episode, a kind of special effects ballet with Keaton’s body at its center. A good 60 years later, James Cameron amazed viewers with another, no less impressive form of ballet in ›Terminator 2‹ (1991): the innovative digital effect of morphing turned the body of the dangerous Terminator into a fluid, mutable object.

However, bodies in films are not only plot catalysts. They are also consistently associated with forms of identity as well as positive and negative judgments. Bodies enable closeness and togetherness, not least through sex (›In the Cut‹, 2003). But they can also be the reason for separation and exclusion, as unequivocally demonstrated by Ousmane Sembène’s ›Black Girl‹ (1968), Cheryl Dunye’s ›The Watermelon Woman‹ (1997) and Catherine Breillat’s ›Fat Girl‹ (2000). And the very possibility of closeness is accompanied by its flipside, the vulnerability of the body (›Audition‹, 1999).

Seduction always entails an invitation to something new. In order for cinema to succeed in this regard, it lets us look at human bodies.

The films of the 2024 Retrospective at a glance:

›Steamboat Bill, Jr.‹ Charles Reisner, Buster Keaton, USA, 1928

›Freaks‹ Tod Browning, USA, 1932

›The Red Shoes‹ Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger, UK, 1948

›The House Is Black‹ Forough Farrokhzad, Iran, 1962

›Black Girl‹ Ousmane Sembène, Senegal, France, 1966

›Videodrome‹ David Cronenberg, Canada, 1983

›Terminator 2: Judgment Day‹ James Cameron, USA, 1991

›The Watermelon Woman‹ Cheryl Dunye, USA, 1996

›Audition‹ Takashi Miike, Japan, South Korea, 1999

›Fat Girl‹ Catherine Breillat, France, 2001

›In the Cut‹ Jane Campion, UK, Australia, France, 2003

›Hunger‹ Steve McQueen, UK, Ireland, 2008

›The Raid‹ Gareth Evans, Indonesia, France, 2011