The five minute short version of a documentary film by Walter Ruttmann is deeply influenced by filmmakers like Sergei Eisenstein and Dsiga Wertow.

Creator and Creatures

On the 7th day god was resting and said:
I really went through something,

I created humans and amphibians,
both were a total failure

Hymn to Beauty
O Beauty! do you visit from the sky
Or the abyss? infernal and divine,
Your gaze bestows both kindnesses and crimes,
So it is said you act on us like wine.

Your eye contains the evening and the dawn;
You pour out odours like an evening storm;
Your kiss is potion from an ancient jar,
That can make heroes cold and children warm.

Are you of heaven or the nether world?
Charmed Destiny, your pet, attends your walk;
You scatter joys and sorrows at your whim,
And govern all, and answer no man’s call.

Beauty, you walk on corpses, mocking them;
Horror is charming as your other gems,
And Murder is a trinket dancing there
Lovingly on your naked belly’s skin.

You are a candle where the mayfly dies
In flames, blessing this fire’s deadly bloom.
The panting lover bending to his love
Looks like a dying man who strokes his tomb.

What difference, then, from heaven or from hell,
O Beauty, monstrous in simplicity?
If eye, smile, step can open me the way
To find unknown, sublime infinity?

Angel or siren, spirit, I don’t care,
As long as velvet eyes and perfumed head
And glimmering motions, o my queen, can make
The world less dreadful, and the time less dead.

Charles Beaudelaire
Le Fleurs du mal

Helmut Newton had worked for more then a year in the Studio of German Photographer Yva between 1937 and 1938. She was a glamorous Fashion and Portrait Photographer, who got deported and murdered by the Nazis in 1942. Hotel Bogota in Berlin-Schlüterstrasse was a Residency for the Rich in Charlottenburg those days. Yva alias Else Ernestine Neuländer-Simon had her Studio there. She was like Helmut Newton alias Helmut Neustädter German Jewish. Newton was able to leave Germany in 1938. Yva had been banned from being a Photographer and closed down her Studio. She was arrested with her husband Alfred Simon, when they were preparing for leaving Germany in 1942.

Newton had been only 17, when he worked at the Studio in Schlüterstrasse. He learned how to place the models and how to use light. Yva was a very talented Portrait Photographer as well. Incredible, that Newton was blamed by German Feminists to be a Sexist and even a Fascist for some time.

The Video shows Newton’s Photographs “Coco Chanel and dog Marta, “Love in the Office” and “Andy Warhol”. At the Hotel Bogota in Berlin Schlüterstrasse the Studio of Yva is dedicated to her memory. Although most of the Photographs are lost there is a portrait of her, a shot of Yva working and three of her Fashion Photographs. A symbolic stone is implemented in the pavement in front of her house in Schlüterstrasse. Passing by you are stumbling over it and many people start reading.

Helmut Newton’s famous Photograph “Self-portrait with model and June” shows the artist working. Portraits of Judy Foster, Isabella Rossellini and David Lynch and of Linda Evangelista mark an important part of the History of Fashion and Art Photography.

Helmut Newton died in 2004 and was buried in Berlin, the Helmut Newton
Foundation is running a museum close to Bahnhof Zoo. A must to see.

Arthouse Bethanien at the Mariannenplatz in Berlin-Kreuzberg is the result of the
Occupy movement of the 197oth and 198oth in Berlin.

Georg von Rauch was a radical anarchist and part of the Occupy-movement. He got
shot on the 4th of December 1971 at the Eisenacher Strasse in Berlin by the Police
trying to arrest him.

1970 the hospital Bethanien was closed, a demolition was prevented by the
uprising of the neighboorhood. The “Martha-Maria-House” had been the hostel for
the hospitals nurses. It got invaded by the occupy movement in 1971 an was
renamed into “Georg-Rauch-Haus”.

On the 19th of April 1972 there was a Razzia in the “Georg-Rauch-Haus”. The
musicians of the Group “Ton-Steine-Scherben” performed the “Georg-Rauch-
Haus-Song.

The public protest resulted into the “Culture-and Youth-Project” in the
Rauch-Haus. The Berlin Senate decided one year later for an Arthouse in the
main building of the Bethanien Complex.

“Ton Steine Scherben” was the most listened Occupy Band. Did you know, that Claudia Roth was there PR Manager in those days? Singer Rio Reiser composed the Rauch-House-Song. This is the first strophe.

“The Mariannen Square, was blue, we won’t get it like that again. So much Police was around.
Mensch Meier had to cry, probably because of the tear gas. He was asking someone, what’s up here? Do we celebrate something? The guy answered. Something like this. We do occupy the Bethanien right now!
Mensch Meier said, you even got late, it was empty the whole time. Life would be so beautiful without the police. The policechief was shouting: do empty the Maraiannen Square immediately. My pushstick guards need space to beat you all up. The people in the occupied house shouted: we won’t go out.Ypu won’t get us out from here. This is our house. Why don’t you through out Schmidt, Press and Bosch (building tycoons from Berlin in those days) out of Kreuzberg?”

The refrain: “this is our house” was the most popular slogan of the occupy movement in Germany. After Berlin in all the bigger cities empty houses sentenced do demolition were occupied. The normal population started to feel empathy. Police forces and the government had to compromiese. Later on the first free living communities were built in these houses. Bethanien is an Arthouse eversince.

Song: TMKB – Lucky Shot