Invited by the Chelsea Theater Center in New York to direct plays at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1969, Schulz-Keil took up residence in New York City, forming a documentary film production company, WSK Productions. During the next ten years he produced over forty documentaries for the BBC and PBS, as well as for German, Canadian, and Japanese TV. During the early Seventies, Schulz-Keil published numerous essays on culture and the arts, organized art exhibitions, and in 1975 formed a book publishing firm in New York, Urizen Books, remaining a publisher until it was sold in 1983. In 1978 he founded the New York Center for Visual History, a non-profit organization that produces and collects films on historical subjects. He remained a director of the center until 1983.

Through his documentaries Schulz-Keil was introduced to theatrical motion pictures, and in 1977 produced his first flim. From then on Schulz-Keil worked on many films in many different capacities.Motion pictures produced by Wieland Schulz-Keil include: Under the Volcano (1983), directed by John Huston, which was an official entry at the 1984 Cannes Film Festival, and was nominated for three Academy Awards; The Dead (1987), directed by John Huston and opening that 1987 Tokyo and Venice festivals and receiving three Academy Award nominations; Twister (1989), directed by Michael Almereyda and nominated in the category Best First Feature for the 1991 Independent Feature Project Awards in Los Angeles. Wieland also produced The Innocent, directed by John Schlesinger, and Decadence, starring Joan Collins and Steven Berkoff, who also directed.

Since 1997 Wieland Schulz-Keil has devoted most of his time to the CyberCinema project, a network of public spaces throughout Europe, primarily located in rural regions and in culturally underprivileged urban neighbourhoods. By presenting a varied and up-to-date program of films, CyberCinema will return cinema to places and to people for whom it had seemed lost. Through interactive technology it will also provide an infrastructure for Europe-wide learning and multilingual group discussions and debates. ....

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The following exerpt from a talk on the Information Society & community

The image dominating the many debates on Information Society is the single, lonely user at his telephone or in front of his computer screen, potentially communicating with hundreds of millions other single, lonely users. I feel the public sphere of the future requires a technological and organizational infrastructure that will enable citizens as groups and collectives to make their voices heard, to learn together, and to enjoy themselves together. At the moment loneliness and isolation are a problem for many on-line users, but do they have to be a problem?

Many people ask the question: Can you have real communities online? This question is very biased because it looks at a face-to-face community and asks whether you can reproduce its features on-line. A less biased question would be: What are the criteria for a functioning community?

1. Communities are webs of affective relationships where people know each other not only one on one - that would be friendship - but where they know each other as a group and within a group. These relationships are not merely cognitive but they are affective.
2. Communities share a culture, they share a set of meanings and values and sometimes they create their own sets of rules.

In order to form a community people need to be able to access each other. If you ask this way you will find that certain prerequisites of community are better met on-line than off-line, and others are better met off-line than on-line. However, off-line communities have severe limitations as to how many people they can encompass. The advantage of on-line or computer-mediated systems is that they allow much larger groups of people to communicate regardless of geographical distance or of political borders. I tend to think in terms of six prerequisites of community, which may be met on-line and off-line.

1. To form a community we need interpersonal knowledge. We cannot form a community on the basis of anonymous log-ins. In face-to-face communities it is easy to know the other member. There is no systematic reason that would prevent authentication of participants in on-line systems.
2. There are many groups of scholars who share their knowledge on the Internet, and who wouldn't do this unless their authorship of the papers they make available was clearly established and protected.
3. Feedback. When making a point in a university seminar or over dinner or in a meeting I get constant non-verbal feedback. It seems a very long way until on-line systems will be able to match what face-to-face systems can do in this respect.
4. In public debates there is a severe limitation on the number of people who can speak. That's why throughout the history of democracies and republics many forms of representation and delegation have been devised. This is done in one way or the other by face-to-face groups but on-line it rarely exists.
5. Most people will find this point difficult to accept: we do need delay loops, cooling off periods. It is extremely dangerous to broadcast a message and ask people immediately to vote on it. We need periods for people to deliberate and enter into dialog with others. This works well in functioning off-line democratic groups. We don't want to have a technology that facilitates cheap rhetorical emotional politics.
6. Communities have memories, shared histories, and shared understandings. Certain events that happened in the past formed the bonds between the members of the community. There are many informal arrangements to keep this memory alive. How we can preserve this feature of a community on-line is an important question. We feel that here cinema can make an important contribution. Like no other medium it captures and preserves the images by which we live.

I hope these short sketchy points suffice to support three conclusions:

• As in machine supported learning, mixed, hybrid systems of community are very desirable - a combination of the rich personal face-to-face systems we know, with the reinforcement of on-line communication and meetings.
• There is no reason why we couldn't have strong affective communities on-line as long as they are not made up of isolated individuals in front of their monitors, but rather by off-line groups which are linked with each other and form part of a network.
• communal, and not merely collective forms of work and debate and entertainment are not only desirable but are a basic feature of the human species. It's a trivial point, but it needs to be made.

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