Helmut Herbst

Cinématon is a 156-hour long experimental film by French director Gérard Courant. It was the longest film ever released until 2011. Composed over 36 years from 1978 until 2006, it consists of a series of over 2,821 silent vignettes (cinématons), each 3 minutes and 25 seconds long, of various celebrities, artists, journalists and friends of the director, each doing whatever they want for the allotted time. Subjects of the film include directors Barbet Schroeder, Nagisa Oshima, Volker Schlöndorff, Ken Loach, Benjamin Cuq, Youssef Chahine, Wim Wenders, Joseph Losey, Jean-Luc Godard, Samuel Fuller and Terry Gilliam, chess grandmaster Joël Lautier, and actors Roberto Benigni, Stéphane Audran, Julie Delpy and Lesley Chatterley. Gilliam is featured eating a 100-franc note, while Fuller smokes a cigar. Courant's favourite subject was a 7-month-old baby. The film was screened in its then-entirety in Avignon in November 2009 and was screened in Redondo Beach, CA on April 9, 2010.

A “film-noir” on double identity and role reversal. A man is looking for a woman to love. He finds her in a seedy bar and persuades her to marry him. The day she decides to flee… he kills her. To ward off suspicion, he moves in with the sister of the deceased.

In conversations with his friends and colleagues, among them Bernd Upnmoor, Helmut Herbst, Alexander Kluge, Klaus Wyborny, Daniel Kothenschulte and Helge Schneider, Ulrike Pfeiffer takes us on a journey into the broad expanse of Nekes' cabinet of wonder and his cinematic works. At the same time, this documentary provides an insight into the history of experimental film in Germany.

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.

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An essayistic documentary about the action art movement that emerged in the 1960s: In interviews with various action artists, including Wolf Vostell, Joseph Beuys and Allan Kaprow, director Helmut Herbst illuminates the performative and participatory tendencies in art that began in the 1960s and outlines the diversity of motives and strategies.

Astronaut Mulligan sets out to find a mysterious planet.

Hollywood opening credits with crashing sea waves and expectant orchestral music opens the film. Then the viewer's gaze is carried through a room. In a mirror you see for a moment a naked girl holding the recording subjective camera under her arm, she pulls open a drawer, puts the camera inside and closes the drawer. The viewer's gaze and thus the viewer himself is caught in the darkness.

A man-made catastrophe depopulates entire regions. How do survivors observe this event, and how do others react?

This documentary concerns the contributions of German artists to the Dadaist movement. Created in 1916, the organizers rejected previous convention and delighted in nihilistic satire in painting, sculpture and literature. Comparisons are made between the movement and the political and social upheaval at the time of the release of this feature (1969).

In the first half of the 19th century there was a revolt in the central state of Hesse, led by Georg Büchner (Gregor Hansen), the well-known German writer, and a fellow rebel, Pastor Weidig (Franz Wittich). Büchner wrote a kind of declaration of peasant rights against the tyranny of the landholders of the time, and once that declaration ("Der Hessische Landbote") was made public, Büchner escaped to Strasbourg, and then to Zurich where he was killed in 1937, at the age of 23. Pastor Weidig was captured, sent to prison, tortured, and killed in prison. The revolution the two men had hoped for died on the vine due to an informer -- a planned uprising was brutally squelched -- and the peasants had to bide their time for another 12 years before the 1848 Revolution would bring them some of the rights demanded in Büchner's pamphlet.

In the 1970s, music critics and military personnel meet in a recording studio at NATO's European Command to discuss a final music program for Central Europe.

Reel 27 of Gérard Courant’s on-going Cinematon series.

A day in a young slacker's life in Hamburg, Germany.

Short film by Helmut Herbst.

The grotesque portrayal of an attempt at communication, graphically and rigorously depicted: In the LCB's second production, Peter Rühmkorf and Helmut Herbst bitingly trace a relationship story that is already over before it has begun.

A paean to alcohol as a means of survival to this world, and to the ephemeral communities created by our need not to be alone. On Christmas Eve, between six in the evening and four at night, Klaus Wildenhahn films people who are excluded from this "must be" celebration, and land up in a bar in St. Pauli, Hamburg: truck drivers and prostitutes, regular or casual customers, a coach and an amateur boxer... all desperately in search of happiness, tenderness and sex.

The film makes fun of the superficial changes in power in their birthplaces. Herbst's painting depicts a society of excited string toys who first march to the strains of the Kaiser's anthem, whose black, white and red flag dominates the swastika, before being incorporated into the colors of a conglomerate of right-wing newspapers. Black, white, red. Three times, the Germans march organized in columns and ranks: under the colors of the Kaiser, the Führer and Axel Springer.

Figures in a side-scrolling landscape.

Documentary about the film pioneer Guido Seeber.