"There are many filmmakers in Berlin for whom even a no-budget film is an extravagance: those who make super-8mm films. These are not aesthetic poor cousins to 16mm and 35mm films. The super-8mm films may be as vibrant, as fluid, and as visually sophisticated as any work in the more costly gauges, whose range of stylistic and thematic approaches they may vigorously mimic or cheekily deconstruct. In the early 1980s, Berlin became a center for super-8mm filmmaking, exhibition and distribution.... "Some filmmakers, like Michael Brinntrup, blissfully ignore conventional technical limitations and expand the presentation possibilities for super-8mm. Brinntrup's single-screen The Rhine, A German Tale is an ambiguous reworking of a home movie of a family trip which the filmmaker layers so that an uncomfortable equation is made between the sentiment of nostalgia and the spirit of war. The brief opening text was written by a young soldier, a relative of the filmmaker, killed during the Second World War. "OYKO is one informal super-8mm filmmaking collective with an ever-changing membership, typical of many groups in Berlin. It began in a building where resident squatters showed and discussed their films. Other groups, including the Notorische Reflexe (NR) and Die tödliche Doris (The Deadly Doris), comprise visual and performing artists. Christophe Döring, a painter, performer and founding NR member, has made a number of super-8mm films including his fervid recollections of late-night taxi driving, The Taxi Film "3302". The Deadly Doris's The Life of Sid Vicious, perhaps Berlin's most notorious super-8mm film, is a short biography of the punk star performed by toddlers. Another group, the ambitious Teufelsberg Studio, since 1980 has completed several cheaply sequined melodramas at once genre- and gender-subversive. Its chilling short, Pictures from Our Hometown, however, is more dyspeptic than comic. "Musician and performer Gabo in 1982 co-founded Film und Pfennig Produktion, which has completed about 23 short films. Einkriegezeck (the title refers to a children's hand game) was photographed from the fourth floor of a parking area with 135 parallel spaces." Notes by Laurence Kardish, condensed from "Berlin and Film," in BerlinArt, and Museum of Modern Art program notes.