My enthusiasm for the movies goes way back and by the end of the 70s I had already systematically started studying film history and theory and watching as much as I could. Turning 18 and being of age I went to the cinema at least 3 times a week.
In Regensburg there was a film club at the university that changed location in 1982 and became officially embedded (and subventioned) into the city's official gallery and musuem buildings. At that time they had a little room for projecting 16mm films and a small office, and the club had a great program of film classics and independent productions. Within a year I turned from regular visitor to a full member of the film club organizing retrospectives and film seminars on my own. On top of that I kind of slid into the office work doing 8-hour days there and then projecting the movies at night. In no time I was one of the main members of the club, and after nearly a year it was decided that I get a salary for the work that I had been doing for free till then.
It wasn't much, but it allowed me to move out from my parents' home and have an apartment of my own. I was 24 by then. I'd say the moving out was the main turning point of becoming adult (I guess my family thought so, too).
Although I was doing well with my studies at the university I must say I hardly had any time left for that, and I dragged them along till way into the 90s till I finally quit.
Here's a pic from a festival in the Filmgalerie (unfortunately small):
The members of the film club were mostly a wee bit older than me and all politicized left-wingers from the 60s and 70s, so the program we presented very much mirrored that including a very distinct intention to 'enlighten' the audience.
You may imagine that this very well suited my own intentions, but very soon I got estranged with this attitude, because it included some anti-American resentment, a closed-mindedness towards popular culture and - worst of all - a tendency to censorship.
Among my many activities at the cinema was also recruiting new members which I managed very successfully. One of them came directly from one of my film seminars ("How to Read a Film") and became a friend as well as a member of the club, Walter Harteis. As a movie enthusiast he introduced himself with a well-prepared suggestion for a retrospective of early Hitchcock movies which I also fully supported, since it consisted of many rarely seen works. The idea, however, was immediately rebuked with the comment: "We don't play Hollywood shit!"
It might seem irrelevant, but this one rejection was a watershed that set the goals to my future. Needless to say that I fought this discussion out and we DID show the retrospective.
The rebuff was uttered in pure aggression by one my my (till then) best friends who thought (and probably still thinks) he was a fervent Nouvelle Vague fan. There's so much wrong with that one sentence, but here are the important points:
- early Hitchcock movies were German and British productions and had nothing to do with Hollywood
- the Nouvelle Vague adored Hitchcock as one of the greatest artists of cinema; they also admired the Hollywood classics
- why should you reject anything just because it's from Hollywood?
- the whole thing revealed a shocking ignorance about cinema in its entirety
As a result I decided to form a sub-group within the club to enforce a program containing all that cinema rejected by the rest of the club: genre movies, B-pictures, avantgarde flicks, etc. This was not really that new a idea. It was loosely oriented on Amos Vogel's book "Film as a Subversive Art" and was much in the vein of what the more recent documentary "Midnight Movies" displayed.
I managed to get the permission to run an independent program on weekends at midnight, and we managed to continue it over a period of more than 15 years with enormous success, but also with constant aversion and attacks from the leftist 'establishment' inside the club and from similar groups all over town plus all the conservative powers. You must know they are just as conservative in their own way as their supposed political opponents. But we managed.
Out of the core of this cinema group we called Lyssa humana (human rabies) we founded a band. Inspired by our avantagrde favourites The Residents, Borbetomagus and the industrial bands like Throbbing Gristle and Whitehouse we built our own 'instruments' out of scrap metal and spare parts, amplified the sound electrically and made what by today is officially called 'noise music'. Although this was really nothing new or very innovative we did succeed in shocking nearly everybody and managed to end sold-out concerts to a nearly empty auditorium. At least we became something like a local legend.
Lyssa humana was not simply a band, the music was just one small part of it. We organized the film nights on weekends (later once a month), exhibitions, concerts, even seminars and published our own magazine. It's not like we earned money, but it was fun. Besides that we were friends who spent a lot of time together and visited as many independent rock concerts that we could. We probably saw a few hundred bands, some of them meanwhile legendary.
By the end of the 80s I was active in all these things: organizing the film club and doing most of the screenings (as the projectionist), our activities in Lyssa humana, being active in the record collectors scene and doing many different and changing day jobs to earn a bit more money, too.
There would tons of stories to tell, but there's just not enough room here for that.
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