Der Fischmarkt und die Fische

Die Palette was a legendary basement bar at 55 ABC Street, where a colorful crowd of dockworkers, vagrants, students and runaways, artists and petty criminals gathered in the 1950s and early 1960s. With his novel Die Palette, published in 1968 – four years after the bar closed – Hubert Fichte created a literary monument to this venue. Conversations with former Palette regulars, pictures, and documents bring the scene of that time back to life: What did the Palette look like? What music blared from the jukebox? What about sex? And what about hitchhiking? Who, pray tell, was the sheriff? And what did that actually mean—subculture in Hamburg in the 1950s?

The film depicts the daily routine of a wage laborer looking for work every day, who is at the lowest social level of the worker hierarchy. The commentary partly takes up the language of the dock workers and blends wonderfully with the black and white photographs. The two together result in a precisely constructed reportage about work and leisure in the port environment and its social conditions. Three moving film sequences interrupt the photo sequence and thematize the photographic form.

The film explores the eponymous location in Rome. Photographs and commentary run almost completely separately side by side.The sequence of photographs approaches the people depicted and then moves away again. The result is a pulsation, a waxing and waning in the sequence. An attached film sequence is integrated into the film. It reflects the form of the photographic film, as the flipped comic strip is transformed into a flip book through the movement of the fingers.

12 minutes. 6 pages of text. 180 lines. 90 photos 2 lines per photo. 45 photos of the new Agadir. 45 photos from the slums of Morocco.