BO-Kino

Bo-weekend, matinee theatre with pea soup, neon signs, football vouchers – as director of the Bochum Schauspielhaus, Zadek threw open the doors of that temple of culture, the municipal theatre. His programmatic popularization of the theatre (Fassbinder’s biting scorn followed immediately, “Charly’s Aunt every night!”), his chosen path of keeping in touch with the everyday, the media and the other arts, they all helped turn an art ghetto into an open platform. This transformation of a studio theatre into a cinema went by the name of BO -Kino. The theatre showed a progressive programme of art cinema at low prices on Sunday mornings, Monday evenings and Friday nights.
The RuhrTriennale and Bochum’s Casablancacinema have taken this historical programme concept as the starting point for a tribute to Peter Zadek the film director. The Bo-Kino film club will be showing pioneering film projects. Zadek is the only German theatre director to have continuously concerned himself with the popular media of film and television. Whilst rejecting being described as a television director, he worked much like a video engineer, trying to keep the boundaries of technical imagination open for impulses from the arts. The results have set standards.

Admission is free for film club members. Membership cards are only available at the cinema box office, for a token fee of €5.
Reservations at
tel: 0234.3 25 91 77.

Cinema Casablanca Bochum

13. September 8.15 pm double bill
Das Porträt – Peter Zadek / Ich bin ein Elefant, Madame

20 September 8.15 pm double bill Simon / Rotmord

27 September 8.15 pm Kleiner Mann, was nun?

4 October 8.15 pm double bill Simon / Eiszeit

8 October Bo-Kino Long Sunday
2.30 pm Das Porträt – Peter Zadek / Ich bin ein Elefant, Madame
5.15 pm Simon / Rotmord
7.45 pm Kleiner Mann, was nun?
10.15 pm Eiszeit

Simon It is surprising to see all the topics of later years spread out in this first, multi-award-winning: the outsider, disappointed love, group pressure. The film arose in cooperation with London’s Burgess Hill School, one of the first schools to adopt an integrative approach of including handicapped children in lessons. The camera enters into an archaic, exclusive world of children. At some points, one gets the impression that Peter Zadek is already spelling out the Dogma filmmakers’ manifesto at the beginning of the 50s. A game of hide-and-seek in the woods, without a happy end.

1951
Script: Peter Zadek
Cast: Children from BurgessHillSchool, Hampstead, London
B/W 17 min.
English without subtitles

The film Rotmord (Red Murder) is based on Tankred Dorst’s play Toller. Dorst’s work uses the setting of the soviet republic established in Munichto dramatically formulate questions about the relationship between intellectuals and revolution. Zadek first filmed the scenes in Rotmord, then reworked them electronically. A dialectical television collage on the subject of revolution.

1967
Script: Tankred Dorst, Peter Zadek
Cast: Gerd Baltus, Ingrid Resch, Wolfgang Neuss, Hans Schweickart, Jürgen Flimm, Erich Fried
B/W, 85 min.

Ich bin ein Elefant, Madame / I’m an Elephant, Madame The film is a double portrait. One of them deals with Germany, the other is of Peter Zadek. It tells the story of an intuitive anarchist. Jochen Rull, alias Big Chief Old Hat, performs a wild, ecstatic St. Vitus’s dance on the market square in Bremen. The helpless cohorts of police look on questioningly. It is noticeable, how unfamiliar people still were with artistic action taking place in public space. The film was awarded the Silver Bear at the 1969 Berlin Film Festival as well as receiving the German Film Award.

1969
Script: Robert Muller, Peter Zadek
Cast: Günther Lüders, Ingrid Resch, Tankred Dorst, Peter Palitzsch, Wolfgang Schneider, Heinrich Giskes, Ilja Richter, Rolf Becker, Werner Dahms
96 min.

Das Portät – Peter Zadek Who is Peter Zadek? The question is addressed by newsreaders; they give a few dates, a few facts, and speculate about the mind and character of this troublemaker. A theatre comic strip runs. It is of the two robber brothers fromBremen, Bruno Ganz and Vadim Glowna! Where are we? In the early seventies; the barometer still shows stormy but the methods of protesting have become more self ironic, more cheerful. A woman’s mouth painted red and committed to always the same words: “vitality, humour, fantasy”. The camera travels through grey industrial areas, Rosel Zech sings, “Little man take heart, all will still be well!” Change of scene: A troupe of leg-swinging showgirls on stage at the Schauspielhaus Bochum stirs up the audience's enthusiasm. The portrait shows the theatre, film and television director as co-inventor of pop culture: “I want sharp contrasts! The only effective form for polemics is silliness.”

1973
Director: Thomas Ayck
NDR documentary
43 min.

Kleiner Mann, was nun? / Little Man, What Now? Peter Zadek began his directorship at the Schauspielhaus Bochum with a dramatization of Fallada’s Little Man, What Now?. Zadek reacted to the damaged self awareness of the Ruhr district using the methods of political cabaret. He presents the decline and fall of a petty bourgeois man around the end of the Weimar Republic, his struggle for work and pay, his lies and his defeats. A quite contemporary scheme of things emerges: a society that covers up its social conflicts with popular music and masquerades. Hannelore Hoger and Heinrich Giskes are at centre stage, a brave couple moving through the rotten demimonde of the Golden Twenties.

1973
Script: Tankred Dorst, Peter Zadek after Hans Fallada
Cast: Hannelore Hoger, Heinrich Giskes, Brigitte Mira, Klaus Höhne, Rosel Zech, Hans Mahnke, KarlHeinz Vosgerau, Herrmann Lause, Ulrich Wildgruber et al.
133 min.

Eiszeit / Ice Age Television film after the play of the same name by Tankred Dorst. The fictitious story is based on a period in the life of the Norwegian poet Knut Hamsun. Following the end of the Second World War, the 90 year old writer is living in a Norwegian old people's home and awaiting his trial for collaboration. A young partisan plots to murder Hamsun. However, an intense relationship develops between them.

1973
Script: Tankred Dorst, Peter Zadek
Cast: O. E. Hasse, Walter Schmidinger, Heinz Bennent, Hannelore Hoger, Hans Mahnke, Ulrich Wildgruber
B/W 101 min.