Das Kino Und Der Tod (1988)

Das Kino Und Der Tod (1988)
Cinema and Death
West Germany
46 min
Documentary
Director: Hartmut Bitomsky

Using "basic" cinematic concept and techniques Hartmut Bitomsky made this documentary about murder in celluloid. He explains each scene by showing photographs of film scenes through movement of his hands. All the documentary scenes are static like images and also inside it film images are moving. Through this ways he examines Torn Curtain, Blow-Up, Band A Part and a series of classic/B grade films which include murder scenes.  In this documentary too we are not seeing the film clips as "clips" but we are seeing it. Bitomsky severalize a film into film images, its movements, music and voices then uniting them into a single piece through separation. In cinema time is considerably shrunk while dealing with killing- For 2 days death, cinema allows only 15 minutes which clearly shows the tyrannic fist of film over time and eyes. We can see, in this documentary too, time is slaughtered in editing table, showing a burning cigarette and a digital clock.
In first set of movies ie; Hitchcock's Torn Curtain and Seigel's Killers we can see the potential of killers. When it reaches Band A Part "nothing is more unreal as film death" Godard cancels all detailed symptoms of a so called film murder. Underworld by Fuller, Un Chien Andalou by Buñuel and Psycho by Hitchcock viewer is not exactly seeing the "killing" but his mind conceives "a murder has taken place". How photography played a crucial role in films is studied through Antonioni's Blow -Up, Shakedown by Joseph Pevney. Director brilliantly visualizes Bazins " Photography as shroud of reality" dialogue through the images from Chabrol's Les Bonnes Femmes sequencing from the murder scene to backwards.  Bitomsky points out the two classes of murder victims in film- One with a clear destiny and others without ( usually appear as mass) can be seen in Griffith's Massacre, Neutrality and Mechanization of death in Wild Bunch/ Western Movies, Morality of Killing in Orders to kill and Kiss Me deadly and also some other interesting murder classifications.