This Marxist education offensive cast into actions and images is part of a bigger cycle of so-called educational films that, following Bertolt Brecht’s concept of the didactic experimental play, use lucid illustration to fill abstract terms with practical meaning. In fifteen learning unites, Harun Farocki and Hartmut Bitomsky address the basic concepts of Karl Marx’s main political work, “Capital”, discussing a section that, according to their own statements, they do not consider self explanatory. “The intention is to make a person who is walking think about walking so that he falls down,” as the two filmmakers noted about their project. It remains to be seen whether such a fall also makes the penny drop among the audience.

An exercise on “colour” in Michael Ballhaus’s class at the DFFB in West Berlin went down in the history of cinema and subversion. In retrospect, this silent miniature became the harried document of a movement of departure that was to grow criminal powers. It was shot on 18 January 1968, five years after JFK’s statement of bloc affiliation, “Ich bin ein Berliner,” just before the murder of Benno Ohnesorg, a few months before the assassination attempt on Rudi Dutschke. Director-in-training Gerd Conradt and fourteen fellow students and friends organised a relay race to the Schöneberg town hall to raise the red flag there. The final leg was run by cinematography student Holger Meins, who was to become a terrorist with the Red Army Faction and starved himself to death in Wittlich prison in 1974.

Words of the poet Mahmoud Darwish open this film: “I do not hate people, I do not assault anyone, but if I get hungry, I eat the flesh of my usurper. Beware, beware of my hunger, and of my anger.” This is followed by the title, then the subtitle: “An Israeli reports.” Her name is Edna Politi; she was born in Lebanon, emigrated to Israel and was accepted into the German Film and Television Academy in West Berlin in 1971. Politi’s student film is explanatory: Where does the Palestinian rage, the desperation come from? Soberly and carefully, she compiles everyday observations, facts and figures to draw attention to the mechanisms of the economic and political disenfranchisement of the Palestinian people. Her aim is to convince, not persuade.

A Soviet figure skater, a female Yugoslav sex partisan, a Vietnam veteran, Father Stalin and the Austro-American orgasm researcher Wilhelm Reich rumble in the belly of this film. Some people believe that Dušan Makavejev invented subversion in the first place. He exploited the gaps of freedom in the Yugoslav brand of socialism and developed an exceptional cinematic model which irritated both the dos and don’ts of the medium as well as those of political unambiguousness. The Western world was amused by this collage of feature, documentary and sexual education that transgressed all boundaries of ideology and modesty, but the tolerance of the Yugoslav censorship authorities was overstrained – at least temporarily. The 1971 screening ban was lifted in 1986. In 1988, Makavejev returned to Yugoslavia from the West.