This weeks first theory movie screening features two extraordinary films: First, "The Bicycle Thieves" from 1948, truly the masterpiece of italian neorealism directed by Vittorio de Sica. Then, "Beijing Bicycle" by Wang Xiaoshuai winner of the 2001 Berlin Film Festival Silver Bears Award.

What does it mean to own an image? Beyond mere possession it seems to be a matter of imagination: an act of determining space and time, a rule of production. From invention, creation and distribution to recognition, exhibition and conservation, images are subject to an infinite variety of operations that are not only characterized by ongoing conflicts about the power of producing, possessing and processing them. In fact, images are the products of struggles for imagination. Images manage their violations rather than obviating them or preventing them from happening.

The second double feature is again a matter of thievery: "Pickpockets", from 1959 directed by Robert Bresson, followed by "Xiao Wu" (Pickpocket, 1997) directed by Jia Zhang Ke who is considered a leading figure of the "Sixth Generation" of Chinese directors.

Chelsea Girls is a 1966 film directed by Paul Morrissey and Andy Warhol. The film was Warhol's first major commercial success, and was shot at the Hotel Chelsea and various other locations in New York City. The film, starring many of Warhol's superstars, takes place at the hotel, and follows the lives of several of the young women who live there.

http://www.warholstars.org/warhol/warhol1/warhol1f/chelsea.html

Presentation by Florian Schneider

My starting point is a series of images taken by surveillance cameras of the Spanish border police in the night of the 29th September 2005. Animated in fast motion the images show how hundreds of immigrants are climbing with self-made leddars across the three meter high fences that sorround the spanish enclave of Ceuta. In the following days the news around the globe were gabbling on a "storm on fortress europe".

Presentation by Jean Matthee:

Exploring the paradoxical stakes of the forces of transgression that launched Post Modernity and ending with the question - what does it mean at our historical time to cross a moral limit for a higher ethical destiny?

What would be the ethical condition for forbidden knowledge to be smuggled, incarnated in art practice, to allow for revivification and movement from the servile and minor forms of practice to a major illumination and an awakening to death.

El Topo (The Mole) is a 1970 Mexican allegorical, cult western movie and underground film, directed by and starring Alejandro Jodorowsky. Characterized by its bizarre characters and occurrences, use of maimed and dwarf performers, and heavy doses of Christian symbolism and Eastern philosophy, the film is about the eponymous character - a violent, black-clad gunfighter - and his quest for enlightenment.