AQUA IMPROMPTU

A young woman is fed up with the usual consumer's television and begins to make her own television, or more correctly, closevision. She is now a reporter who wanders around Berlin with her camera and 'telecasting apparatus' on her back. Her livingroom has been transformed into a studio and here the different programs are assembled and aired: statements, interviews, realistic and phantastic programs.

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.

This film is a documentary composition of new jazz, New York as the city that generates it, and the musicians playing it. The thoughts of the saxophonist Charles Gayle and the bass players William Parker and Peter Kowald from Germany accompany the film. Shot on 16 mm, this film remains one of a kind until today. Some of the recorded musicians have passed away - their spirits live on.

Veronika is a young, devoutly religious Berlin woman from a strict bourgeois background diagnosed with schizophrenia. She experiences a profound mystical awakening, leading her to believe she is chosen by God to experience and absorb all human suffering through extreme asceticism and indiscriminate sexual encounters.

The film combines documentary scenes, TV clips, and passages from an interview with the then Postmaster General Christian Schwarz-Schilling in a fictional plot and mixes video and 16mm film. A film on videotext and the brave new media world, in which the – presumably first – female hacker redirects a few things into other channels. It is also a critique of the working conditions in the emerging information service industry.