Hartmut Bitomsky

Short thriller about an older woman and an escaped convict.

A man and a woman meet in a bar. They walk through the night without any reason. At dawn they separate again. A long take.

A darkly comedic exploration of personal struggle and societal pressure, we follow the story of a middle-aged man named Max, who is trapped in a life of monotony and frustration. After a series of unexpected events, Max finds himself in increasingly absurd and challenging situations, forcing him to confront his own limitations and fears. With sharp humor and a critique of societal expectations, the film delves into the pressures that shape our lives and the lengths we go to in order to break free from them. A poignant yet quirky tale about bending to life's demands or breaking under the weight of it all.

A look into the life of Holger Meins, the German cinematography student who became a revolutionary and a prominent voice in the Vietnam War protest movement. This film is comprised of interviews with his associates.

An unconventional essay film that interrogates the visual and ideological legacy of the Vietnam War. Blending staged scenes, archival footage, photographs, and philosophical dialogue, the film follows various characters — including an American soldier captured by North Vietnamese villagers — as they reflect on violence, memory, and image-making. Set partly in West Berlin and partly in reconstructed spaces representing Vietnam, the film avoids traditional dramatic narrative in favor of a fragmented montage of voices, documents, and reenactments. Interweaving love stories, political debate, and historical commentary, Farocki creates a critical reflection on how war is represented, seen, and imagined, both in cinema and in public consciousness. The result is a complex meditation on images as weapons and instruments of perception.

Die UFA, a film essay about the eponymous German studio.

“Six young people move through a city in order to establish the starting point of their joint action. But they can’t agree on the topic. In the end everybody goes their own way and leaves the city.” - Hartmut Bitomsky

An educational film about an aspect of political economy. The concepts of use value, barter value and labor as a commodity are the subjects; they are intended to introduce the process of understanding the theory of value of work and the law of values, alienation and fetish.

The film documents a debate about early 20th century films, mainly 1910 to 1920, from short news reels to excerpts from full-length movies. At Amsterdam's Film Museum, film directors, students, and film researchers and archivists look at the moving images and discuss their meaning, in the social and technical contexts. Moody live music was added to the edited film.

A look at the pervasive power of dust from its tiny particles settling in unseen places to its ability to cause illnesses and create the cosmos.

How should one define the relationship of documentary film to reality? Does it aim at authenticity or is it rather an “exile of reality”, a “foreign homeland of reality”, where the pre-filmic, stripped of its immediacy, comes to its own right in the first place? Where in its mis-en-scène would be the line drawn to a fictional film, if drawing a line would succeed at all? These are the kind of questions this film essay on the history and aesthetics of documentary film deals with in its seven chapters.

IT specialist Victor Faber makes a living securing computers for large corporations and banks. His reclusive private life is upended when he falls in love with a strange woman named Juliet. Her friend convinces Faber to exploit his knowledge to rob a bank.

“Why does cinema need death, when it can’t show it?” The filmmaker’s monologue and the discourse of images meet

A West Berlin doctor, married with a two-year-old child, leaves her husband to go to Munich to work in the birth clinic of a hospital. Her husband doesn’t know that she’s pregnant with their second child. Will she have to choose between motherhood and her career?

Using one of the Lumière Brothers' first films of workers leaving the Factory as his starting point, Farocki provides an insight to changes in industrial production, workers' strikes and motion pictures-- via images of workers leaving factories throughout the years.

A worker is sitting at a conveyor belt on which light bulbs are coming in at regular intervals. He takes the light bulbs from the conveyor belt and inserts them into a testing device. The light bulbs light up briefly and bathe the scene in glistening light. The worker puts the light bulb back on the conveyor belt, looks directly into the camera and shouts against the noise of the machines: "We create wealth."

Barrage and Bunker is an essay film about the (narrative) space imagined by fiction films. Reflections and associations about movement in space are the basis of every kind of story-telling. The film is sometimes referred to as part of Bitomsky's Cinema Trilogy. Sequences from over 20 movies are quoted and commented on by a team of three "researchers" (Bitomsky, Petzold, Tanner) in a sort of laboratory. TV-monitors, production stills and screenshots are used as well as quotations from books. A long night's work.

A charming young German meets his biological parents and siblings in Dubai. The wealthy Iraqi family has found their new home there. Their son Sinan grew up in Hesse with his German adoptive mother and now lives and works in Berlin. The camera is almost invisible and very precise in "My father. My uncle." is always present when Sinan encounters the family, language, religion and culture of his ancestors - it is the discovery of a foreign world, an alternative life that he would have lived if he had grown up with his brothers. For Sinan's parents, he has always been part of the family. They have longed all their lives for the return of their prodigal son and now accept him with unconditional love. They make plans, dream of a life together in Iraq and make suggestions for a future wife. Actually, it would also be nice if Sinan converted to Islam.

This compilation film focuses on the contents of Nazi propaganda shorts such as "The Beauty of Work" (1934), "We Have No Problems" (1933), or "The Will To Live" (1944) that preceded the feature films in German movie theaters between 1933 and 1945. The shorts reveal that men and women workers were idealized, uniformity was stressed, optimism in the face of adversity was the goal, and, in general, all the classic lies that dictatorships use to control and mold their citizens are featured.

It takes a day and a half to assemble a VW Golf 2. Hartmut Bitmosky traces a car’s journey through the fully automated production lines in Wolfsburg and explores the development of the VW Group using archival footage. Moving almost in time with the machines, the director constructs a documentary collage—a visual exploration of the corporate giant, which appears as dehumanized and automated as its production process.

Hans Scharoun has built houses which show not only structural substance and aesthetic forms but also how human beings should live in buildings. This depiction can only be imaginary - like reading invisible writing on walls. Bitomsky's film looks at several of Scharoun's buildings.