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Pirate Cinema Berlin presents: The Parallel Street                              
                                                                                
"The Parallel Street" is Ferdinand Khittl's only feature film, and it remains   
an absolute outlier in German cinema. Released in 1962 to an almost             
non-existing audience, and only recently rediscovered, it manages to transform  
a two-year journey around the world into an impossible, globe-spanning          
travelogue that treats the fragmentary form of its own material with constant   
suspicion and great irony. About a third of the film's runtime is devoted to a  
group of analysts who, in a thoroughly absurd setting and increasingly          
desperate mood, are trying to make sense of the images they are presented with. 
What makes their task even more hopeless is that Khittl's footage marks a       
radical departure from the tradition of European ethnographic cinema, as he     
persistently refuses, or sometimes intentionally fails, to transform the people 
and places he encounters into objects of reflection. Instead, Khittl, whose     
background in industrial film shines through in many of his shots, and whose    
camera does not discriminate between the mysteries of chemistry, religion,      
labor, architecture or color, delivers an equally distanced and delirious       
monologue in which the centuries of colonial history that his narration         
traverses -- the extraction of natural resources, the construction of           
transportation networks, the self-perpetuating crimes of war and the            
never-ending rituals of love and death -- retain all their horrors, as horrors. 
                                                                                
http://savvy-contemporary.com/index.php/projects/filmseriesupcoming/            
                                                                                
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                                                             the parallel street
                                                                ferdinand khittl
                                                     de 1962 83 min english subs
                                                                                
                                                                       wednesday
                                                                        march 29
                                                                            7 pm
                                                                                
                                                              savvy contemporary
                                                              plantagenstraße 31
                                                                          berlin
                                                                                
                                                                    copies to go
                                                               bring a usb stick
                                                                   or hard drive
                                                                                
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pirate cinema berlin                                                            
www.piratecinema.org                                                            

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