The Cinema and the Wind and Photography | Hartmut Bitomsky-Volker Pantenburg

Volker Pantenburg:

In Hartmut Bitomsky’s Das Kino, der Wind und die Photographie (The Cinema and the Wind and Photography), the issue of copyright is not explicitly addressed. However, the elaborate dispositif Bitomsky sets up can be interpreted as a precautionary gesture against copyright claims. The 55 minute TV programme, made in 1991 for Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR), is a playful investigation into the specificities of documentary cinema. It argues with historical film footage from the Lumière Brothers, Dziga Vertov, Joris Ivens, Pare Lorentz, Robert Gardner, and many others, and is made as if it was the rehearsal for a proper film. The setup consists of monitors and VCR-players, stacks of books, VHS-cassettes, and the camera alternates between these different working media (see Lang 2020, pp. 165-172).

In The Cinema and the Wind and Photography, Bitomsky and his team (including Christian Petzold, DFFB student at the time), decide to show not only the clips but also the process of watching them and working with them. Inserting a VHS tape into the VCR, one could say, equals the gesture of putting the clip in quotation marks – an inventive method of turning the excerpt into an audio-visual quote. From today’s vantage point, this method represents a “desktop” approach to the analogue, electronic era.

Copyright questions on television are a thorny subject. In the 1970s, it was possible to use film clips without caring too much about ownership (Bitomsky made a 90 minute programme composed entirely of clips from John Ford Films in 1976). In the 1990s, when public television in Germany entered into competition with private TV channels, things got more complicated, with the focus on copyright questions and the financial value of archival images becoming more pertinent.

Werner Dütsch, the commissioning editor of this program, recalls: «Buying film clips depended on prices that had a habit of constantly increasing, and consequently could stop a programme from being made. Or, as in the case of Hollywood films, it might take much too long to clear the rights in every detail.» (Dütsch 2019, p. 7-8) However, in one important court case, public TV prevailed against Leo Kirch: «1985: Germany’s biggest film dealer, Leo Kirch, loses a lawsuit, in the second instance, against the Südwestfunk in Baden-Baden. Without buying the rights, the channel had used more than five minutes of a single film in one of its programmes. The court verdict became a guideline for us. The lawyers at our own WDR had previously assured us that film clips, as constituent parts of a programme, were not regarded as quotes. Now they supported us as long as we could plausibly explain that, and how we used a clip as a quote, not as an attractive decoration for a programme. This enabled us to include Mark Rappaport’s films about Rock Hudson and Jean Seberg in our programmes, without obtaining the rights.» (Ibid.) Hence in 1991, Bitomsky might even have had the right to use the clips, but integrating them into a collective research process made it a much more interesting formal experiment.

Getting access to TV archives is a difficult task. Bitomsky’s programme, like many other TV productions, is not easily accessible. However, someone uploaded a version with bad audio and English subs in 2019. We therefore decided to mimic Bitomsky’s method and film a 10-minute segment from the programme – quoting it instead of appropriating it.

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Das Kino und der Wind und die Photographie (The Cinema and the Wind and Photography) | Film | Hartmut Bitomsky | DE 1991 (55’) | 10-minute-excerpt as filmed on September 6, 2024 by Volker Pantenburg

More Info:
“Hartmut Bitomsky: Das Kino und der Wind und die Photographie” [film text], in: Jutta Pirschtat (ed.), Die Wirklichkeit der Bilder. Der Filmemacher Hartmut Bitomsky, edition filmwerkstatt, Essen 1992, pp. 107-116.

References:
Werner Dütsch, “The Three Musketeers” (2017), in: Werner Dütsch, WDR/As You See/Lola Montez, ed. Harun Farocki Institut, HaFI and Motto Books, Berlin 2019, pp. 3-9
Frederik Lang, Hartmut Bitomsky. Die Arbeit eines Kritikers mit Worten und Bildern, Synema, Wien 2020

Expanding the discussion

Johannes Binotto reacts to Volker Pantenburg's proposal with the videographic reading "flowing matter": watch the video essay.