Jean-Marie Straub’s 1967 film of the marriage between the widower Bach and Anna Magdalena. The film has a musical structure that is very much like Bach’s own St. Matthew Passion; and Straub uses the format of Bach’s music to etch a minimalist love story of enormous richness. ” Also, includes live performancesRead More »
Quote: From maverick director Bruce La Bruce comes the horrific and subversive smash of the Berlin and Sundance film festivals – Otto. A young zombie named Otto appears on a remote highway. He has no idea where he came from or where he is going. He hitches a ride to Berlin where he is discovered by underground filmmaker Medea Yarn. Fascinated, Medea decides to film a documentary with Otto as her subject. When Otto discovers that there is a wallet in his back pocket that contains information about his past, before he was dead, he begins to remember a few details, including memories of his ex-boyfriend, Rudolf. Otto arranges to meet him with devastating results. Savagely sexual and overtly gruesome Otto is a true original.Read More »
Synopsis: The unemployed electrician Juergen Potzkothen (Helge Schneider) lives with his mother (Andreas Kunze) and dreams of happiness as a pop singer. When he presents a demo tape to the artist agent Terrence Toi (also Andreas Kunze), he is -rather coincidentally- dedicated and gets the artist’s name Johnny Flash. But the music editor Cornelia Dom wants him for her music broadcast commitment too. Naive Juergen now stands inbetween the emerging rivalry of both music agents and their commercial interests. Ultimately, however, he gives the vocal performance in Tois broadcast and hits the big breakthrough to a large overnight star.Read More »
Werner Schroeter was one of the most significant proponents of New German Cinema. Schroeter was diagnosed with cancer in 2006. At the time, he was working for the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf gallery on a musical piece entitled ‘Schönheit der Schatten’ (The Beauty of Shadows) based on the works of Robert Schumann and Heinrich Heine. For Schroeter, oscillating between hope and trepidation, it marked the beginning of a race against time. In her film, Elfi Mikesch, who photographed a number of Schroeter’s films and who collaborated closely with him to create his vision, provides us with an intimate insight into Schroeter’s artistic output during the remaining four years of his life. Read More »
About the film: Imagine an airspace into which a bomb has been dropped. The bomb has not reached the site of its detonation, but there is no way to stop its speedy approach. The time between the bomb’s release and its explosion is neither the future (for the ineluctable destruction has not yet happened) nor the past (which is unavoidably about to be extinguished). The flight time of the bomb thus describes absolute nothingness, the zero hour, consisting of all the possibilities that in just a moment will no longer exist. Thus, this story will end before it has begun; here it is told in defiance: an architectural journey from Berlin through Arromanches, Rome, Wrocław, Görlitz, Paris, Bologna, Madrid, Buenos Aires, Atlántida, Montevideo, Mexico City, Brasilia, Tokyo, Saipan, Tinian, Tokyo, San Francisco, Dallas, Binz and Mexico City back to Berlin – into the abyss.Read More »
Synopsis: The film presents 17 extant buildings by Italian master-builder Pier Luigi Nervi in Italy and France and 10 examples of Ancient Roman architecture made of Opus caementitium.Read More »
This is a wonderful documentary movie about Butoh-dancer-legend Kazuo Ohno. It’s a German movie, so there will be some introductory talk and some voiceovers in German, but the other parts of the movies mostly consist of talks in English or in Japanese with an English interpreter sitting next to the people talking in Japanese – so you will be able to understand pretty much without knowing any German. And even if you dont understand anything, the film is just worth it for the wonderful material showing Kazuo Ohno.Read More »
The soldier Hansli Gyr returns 1523 to the “Zürcher Oberland”. The he reencounters the love of his youth Ursula, who is now part of a world renouncing sect, the Anabaptists…
Quote: Das TV-Historiendrama nach Gottfried Kellers Novelle galt 1978 als SkandalfilmRead More »
Quote: Maria is in her mid-20s and lives with her father, a widowed small greengrocer, in Haidhausen. Her friend Bärbel is madly in love with the charming Italian Pietro. His father is a vegetable wholesaler at the Munich wholesale market. Except Maria, who can’t stand him at first, all the girls are interested in the heartbreaker. When Pietro leaves Bärbel, Maria decides to take revenge on him. She makes him fall in love with her, which also makes her friend Franz, a Bundeswehr soldier, very jealous.Read More »