Hellmuth Costard

The life and music of Johann Sebastian Bach as presented by his wife, Anna.

An attack on a piece of reactionary German legislation discriminating against young film directors. The film features a head-on, close-up shot of a penis ‘mouthing’ the parliamentary defense of the law by its author. A landmark in political pamphleteering, the film was selected for the 1968 Oberhausen International Short Film Festival by a committee of leading German critics and promptly banned by the city government, causing the withdrawal of almost all German directors from the festival and a national scandal. The title satirically refers to the official certificate of ‘Particularly Valuable’ given each year to the best film shorts by an Establishment selection.

A documentary about the 'critical mass', the Film Coop, a group of young filmmakers in Hamburg during the 1960s - a small group far from the Mainstream or the New German Cinema.

The drawings on which the series is based were created in 1969 and served as a template for a slide series in 1970. During her screening, this is interrupted by the film "Percy McPhee Agent of Horror (6th + 7th episode)".

Two aspiring filmmakers walk through Hamburg with a camera operator and a sound operator. From the time they get out bed to their encounter with a production manager, they are harassed by an intermittent white dot.

The production of a film requires recording equipment and financial resources if nothing else. Hellmuth Costard places these basic prerequisites at the centre of his film: using a Super 8 camera system he developed, he films himself as he tries to raise funding for his film project. This creates an unconventional experimental setup, which reveals how the economics, politics, technology and aesthetics of filmmaking relate to each other – with the ‘great’ Godard being called up as a kind of chief witness.