Germany

From Jim’s Reviews:
Disclosure: I have written the liner notes for Fantoma’s DVD release of this film. With a few changes, that essay appears below.

Image”You hear the one about the guy goes into a bakery, orders a loaf of bread? ‘White or black?’ the baker asks. ‘Doesn’t matter,’ the guy says. ‘It’s for a blind person.'”

How do we move from these opening words of Why Does Herr R. Run Amok? – one of five rapid-fire jokes delivered by Herr R.’s co-workers – to its climactic killing spree? Like the title, that’s another gnawing, and resonant, question.Read More »

Germany in the early 1930s. Against the backdrop of the Nazis’ rise, Hermann Hermann, a Russian émigré and chocolate magnate, goes slowly mad. It begins with his seating himself in a chair to observe himself making love to his wife, Lydia, a zaftig empty-headed siren who is also sleeping with her cousin. Hermann is soon given to intemperate outbursts at his workers, other businessmen, and strangers. Then, he meets Felix, an itinerant laborer, whom he delusionally believes looks exactly like himself. Armed with a new life insurance policy, he hatches an elaborate plot in the belief it will free him of all his worries.Read More »

SYNOPSIS
Amidst the impersonal hubbub of Paris’ Orly Airport, strangers meet, secrets are revealed, and sudden intimacies develop in this beautifully observed mosaic of lives in transit.

REVIEW
Quote:
Loosely-linked scenes in the hall of Paris’ Orly airport. A man and a woman, both French but living abroad, meet each other by chance. He has just decided to move back to Paris and she longs to return there. A mother and her almost adult son are going to the funeral of her ex-husband, his father. A young couple is embarking on its first big trip. And a woman reads a letter from the man she has recently left. They are all waiting for their flight.Read More »

The final part of Heinz Emigholz’s “Streetscapes” series is a triptych. A prologue examines 3 buildings by Julio Vilamajó in Montevideo. The main part of the film is a cinematic documentation of 29 buildings by the Uruguayan architect and shell-construction master Eladio Dieste (1917-2000).Read More »

S y n o p s i s
A woman living in the Paris suburbs struggles with a loveless marriage and apathy toward her family and friends as she spends her days quietly wandering about her house. Austrian playwright and novelist Peter Handke contributed screenplays to a number of films by director Wim Wenders (Wings of Desire, The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick). Here (in a film that Wenders produced), he provides both the scenario (adapting his novel of the same name) and direction for this meditative examination of domestic ennui.Read More »

In “Mixwix”, a department store owner high above the rooftops of Munich reflects on the extent to which his current life, which mainly revolves around underpants and socks, makes sense.

He has long been the king of underpants and socks. He even has the largest selection of underpants ever. Mr. Mixwix is a department store owner and so successful with his underpants and socks that something new has to come, something that stimulates him again, lets him continue. Tennis clothing, for example! Or maybe not? While Mr. Mixwix, quiet as Buddha, sits high above the rooftops of Munich and waits for the building permit for the extension of his department store for tennis clothing, he ponders whether he is on the right track with tennis clothing, or whether he is on the right track at all, and what the right track is in the first place. This immersion in Far Eastern life wisdom, the questioning of his own existence as a big capitalist and of capitalism itself, lead Mr. Mixwix to all sorts of philosophical and peculiar games of thought, but also to statements such as: “How can one be as inspirited by one’s own stupidity as the Bavarian people”.Read More »

Quote:
R-1 (Ein Formspiel)

“The title R-1, EIN FORMSPIEL VON OSKAR FISCHINGER survives on two different films, one composed entirely of STAFFS … and one composed of small fragments of many different experiments – wax, model planets, atoms, etc. – including a great deal of STAFFS footage. For convenience, I will use the title R-1 to refer to this second, mixed film which appears to be a revised version of the first ….Read More »

From “Three Film Buffs”
Whity is a strange but beautiful movie. It is a German language western set in 1878. The only time any English is used is during the songs sung by the saloon whore who performs like she’s in a cabaret in Berlin in the early 1930’s. It was shot in Spain on the sets of Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns starring Clint Eastwood.

The bizarre story (believe me this is unlike any western you have ever seen) centers on the title character – real name Samuel King – the bastard son and slave to the wealthy Nicholson family. The father is a sadistic son of a bitch whose favorite form of punishment for his grown-up sons is a buggy whip. In one scene Whity willingly steps in for one of his brothers and takes the beating for him.Read More »

Here’s a film so rare and forgotten, it isn’t even listed the German Lexikon des Internationalen Films, so it’s unlikely that it ran anywhere after the war. The overly bright but quite good copy of unknown provenience has Dutch and French subtitles burned in.
The story is about a theater star (Olga Tschechowa) who finds herself suddenly a mother again after her daughter (Irene von Meyendorff) who lived with her father for 16 years got thrown out by him because she wants also to become an actress. Naturally the mother isn’t too pleased because she fears to be recognized as a mother losing some star appeal, so they present themselves as aunt and niece. However the young girl soon proves to be a competitor in love and career …Read More »