The Castle is a philosophical novel by Franz Kafka. In it a protagonist, known only as K., strives to gain access to the mysterious authorities of a castle that governs the village where K. has arrived to work as a land surveyor. Dark and at times surreal, The Castle is about alienation, bureaucracy, and the seemingly endless frustrations of man’s attempts to stand against the system.Read More »
Introduced separately, the protagonists are clustered into three groups. In the first, college-aged, cheerful Merdad and more serious-minded friend Ali are sneaking two pint-size cousins out of Iran to reunite them with refugee parents already in Austria.
In the second group, Lale and Hussan travel over the mountains by foot with their own young son, hoping to find European asylum from political persecution. After some tense moments, these first two groups find themselves safely –for the moment — across the border, in the same car driven by a kindly coyote.
In Ankara, they soon discover such friends are hard to find. Turkish cops and Iranian secret police are on the prowl for illegals; even the manager at the hotel where the protags are housed turns out to be an informant.Read More »
This is one of the best opera films ever, one of the few to intelligently juxtapose image and music. S and H’s minimal visual style allows Schoenberg’s maximal musical style to flourish, and there are even spots where we have a black screen, with music only. Filmed outdoors, in natural locations.
Schoenberg’s opera is one of the landmarks of 20th century music, and is heard and seen at its best in this performance.
‘With Moses und Aron, I have tried to destroy Stravinsky’s quote
saying that music was powerless to express the most abstract, the
most ordinary, the most concrete things.’ (Jean-Marie Straub)Read More »
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Roman, played by Thomas Schubert, is a 19-year-old man who has known little else than prison walls. He is serving time for murder, but is at the end of his sentence. Parole may be offered if he can hold down a job in the real world. He has tried many different vocations, but has never lasted longer than a day. With one last attempt before his hearing Roman takes on a job at an undertakers. Could this be the one that helps him find his place in society?Read More »
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Wer war Edgar Allan? (Who Was Edgar Allan?). 1984. Austria/West Germany. Directed by Michael Haneke. With Paulus Manker, Rolf Hoppe. Based on the novel by noted Austrian writer Peter Rosei, who draws on Poe’s themes of doubling, shadowing, and the uncanny, this atmospheric mystery, set in Venice over four distinct seasons, follows a German art student suffering from some unnamed illness, existential or otherwise. He is befriended by a shady and secretive German American gentleman, “Edgar Allan,” who seems intent on driving him mad by dogging his every move. Haneke’s Venice is a figment of the (paranoid) imagination, where strange characters make unwanted intrusions and clues are laid out like pieces of an incomplete jigsaw puzzle. In German; 83 minRead More »
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Described as an answer to Fassbinder’s The Marriage of Maria Braun, Fraulein tells the story of a German woman and a former French prisoner of war living in 1950s Germany. Instead of playing a role in rebuilding her country, Haneke’s heroine remains preoccupied with her personal affairs. Shot predominantly in black and white (with a color sequence added toward the end), Fraulein asserts Haneke’s place alongside the masters of the New German Cinema.Read More »