Theo Janßen

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?

A documentary about new apprentices at the coal mine.

Portrait of composer Canlon Nancarrow.

Experimental film based on the radio play "Die Befreiung des Prometheus" (The Liberation of Prometheus) by Heiner Goebbels, based on texts by Heiner Müller: While Heracles circles the mountain to free Prometheus, who is chained and tormented by the eagle's beak, Prometheus is on his way to see his boss as a middle manager—in an elevator. An important appointment. But the elevator malfunctions and becomes his prison... Two texts by playwright Heiner Müller that ironically tell the story of two men. Composer Heiner Goebbels has interwoven these texts and adapted them musically into an audio play: "The Liberation of Prometheus." Theo Janßen composed the images to accompany it: documentary, staged, and journalistic images. Archive footage, photographs, drawings—not illustrative, but associative and contrapuntal. The result is a kind of "film opera" or "film musical."

For a few days now, Carlo has not been feeling so terribly tired. He is slowly beginning to enjoy this fluctuating position between bed and window. The room becomes his cabin again, drifting lazily along with him. However, Peter's unexpected arrival upsets Carlo; the boy's presence annoys him.