Germany

“I was interested in whether it was possible to tell the inner life of a relationship, the things you can’t express to a third person. When Gitti and Chris come home after the holiday, and someone asks her, “How was it?” she probably wouldn’t be able to tell what happened.” Maren Ade.

Everyone Else is a subtle dissection of the truths and cracks of a relationship – a relationship that, like any other, embodies love as well as power, respect as well as moments of dissolution. Spending the first days of their vacation in Chris’ family home in Sardinia, Chris and Gitti are the ideal couple. They play, make love, talk and make love some more.Read More »

Clarke Fountain, allmovie.com wrote:
Rather than being just another exploitation documentary, designed to re-use footage from unprofitable porn films, this feature explores the social circumstances which gave rise to the legend of the “snuff” film, and the conditions present (in 1976) in the porn film industry in general. Sex performers and all the others involved in making such films are interviewed about their work and why they do it. The filmmaker, himself well-known for making “soft”-porn films, was so incensed by the snuff-film trend that he made this exposé of the hard-core pornography industry. The Evolution of Snuff includes a forward by Roman Polanski, who was experiencing legal difficulties in the U.S. at the time.Read More »

Second feature film by German-Turkish director Thomas Arslan (Ferien, Aus der Ferne), and a rough diamond of the first generation of the so-called ‘Berlin School’. Can is a young and smart upstart; he dreams of a small family but the money that fuels this dream comes from the streets. Can is a dealer, he works for Hakan who is supplying the kids in his neighbourhood with drugs. And while Can struggles to get control over his life he sees his girl friend, the mother of his kid, leaving and himself increasingly surrounded by false friends. On top of it, a cop (Birol Ünel, the male lead from Fatih Akin’s “Gegen die Wand) is on his back trying to persuade Can to work undercover for the police. The more Can attempts to free himself, the deeper he sinks into a life he never aspired to.Read More »

At an Austrian boys’ boarding school in the early 1900s, shy, intelligent Törless observes the sadistic behavior of his fellow students, doing nothing to help a victimized classmate—until the torture goes too far. Adapted from Robert Musil’s acclaimed novel, Young Törless launched the New German Cinema movement and garnered the 1966 Cannes Film Festival International Critics’ Prize for first-time director Volker Schlöndorff.

Quote:

Considered a classic film as it was the first film to put the then New German Film firmly on the (international) map. Also a classic because it was Schlöndorf’s first feature and it is still thought highly of. To be sure, this is a beautiful film to watch with its superb black-and-white cinematography; Schlondörf’s direction makes it into a well paced and staged, stylish film. But I never liked the film; recent re-viewing confirmed my feelings.Read More »

“Trojan is released from jail and goes straight back to his profession as a criminal. He gets hold of a weapon and looks out for new jobs. In just a few takes, Thomas Arslan sets up the anonymous world of his gangster protagonist by falling back on motifs and characters from the genre. The backroom of a car workshop, parking lots, furnished apartments. One meets men and women who distrust each other because they are all out to line their own pockets. The setting changes constantly, with surveillance and chase scenes providing a dynamic narrative rhythm. Since crime makes up Trojan’s daily existence, the film concentrates entirely on the technical nature of a life outside the law. The reduced and clear-cut images – shot with a Red camera 
– highlight the exact sequence of events. In the Shadows (Im Schatten) is a genre film that focuses consistently on the mechanics and external process of a crime. It develops a sense of great suspense, without burdening its figures with personal stories. Each hand movement has to be right.”
(From the Berlinale Forum catalogue – by Anke Leweke)Read More »

Imdb:
Extraordinary Soap Opera
12 August 2009 | by GManfred (Ramsey, NJ)

I am not a fan of Soaps. Too often they are predictable and boring and descend into bathos -‘Womens’ Pictures’. But this picture was so spectacular in all respects that I was taken aback by its sheer accomplishment. Critic Kenneth Tynan said that one must ‘suspend one’s disbelief’ to take part in the movie experience. If that is the case, this picture became real; it was not a play on the screen performed by mere actors.

The story is familiar but the production is not. Direction is skillful and the photography is perfect. The picture moves quickly and the acting is superb. Francis Lederer was good, Brigitte Helm was even better, and Warwick Ward, who plays Col. Beranoff, spit and polish and bent on revenge, was outstanding. He was the glue that held the cast together and was a riveting presence whenever he was on screen.Read More »

Quote:
It’s settled: we’re going to film CAPITAL on Marx’s scenario–the only logical solution.
–Sergei Eisenstein, Oct 12, 1927.

This is an English subtitled copy of the ‘theatrical’ or ‘cinema’ version of Alexander Kluge’s Nachrichten aus der ideologischen Antike: Marx – Eisenstein – Das Kapital or News From Ideological Antiquity: Marx – Eisenstein – Capital. The original work made for broadcast or DVD was finished in 2008 and ran 570 minutes long. This 84 minute cut prepared by Kluge for exhibition condenses this mammoth project into something like a digestible greatest hits or highlight reel. Kluge’s film is a discursive essay about and around Eisenstein’s notes on a film of Marx’s Capital–written shortly after the release of OCTOBER in 1927 and connected to his ideas for conceiving a film of Joyce’s ULYSSES. According to Helmet Merker writing on the 570 minute version, “Eighty years on, Alexander Kluge joins the party and takes up where Eisenstein failed, because neither Hollywood’s capitalists nor Moscow’s Communists were prepared to send the necessary funds his way… Scholarly stuff, wide and deep in scope, yet bold and playful. But even if your own study of Marx is no more than a faded memory, it is hugely enjoyable to watch and listen to these experts… Alexander Kluge is a great manipulator, an industrious loom, who weaves the most far-flung observations into his system. He is not filming “Das Kapital” but researching how one might find images to make Marx’s book filmable. The quest is the way is the destination… In Kluge’s hands this becomes a collage of documentary, essayistic and fictional scenes, interviews and still photos, archive images of smoking factory chimneys, time-lapse footage of pounding machines and mountains of products, diary entries and blackboards scribbled with quotes referencing constructivism and concrete poetry… Unlike Eisenstein, who was driven to desperation by the herculean task of cutting the 29 hours of “October” into a 90-minute film version and turned to drugs into the process which left him temporarily blind, Kluge cooly sticks to his guns and his nine hours. And it’s not a minute too long.”
Kluge may have stuck to his guns but he also offered another option.

Embedded in this film is a short film by Tom Tykwer called THE INSIDE OF THINGS
Read More »

Sterile practice
7 August 2010 | by oOgiandujaOo (United Kingdom)

My only previous experience of Farocki prior to watching Leben – BRD (How to live in the FRG) was Die Bewerbung (The Interview). The subject of that documentary film was the preparing of people who had difficulty finding work for job interviews. The movie highlighted how unnatural it was to be in a situation where you had to sell yourself (the training provides promotion of an unnatural self-awareness), where you have to project a compliant image for the Procrustean corporate scrutiniser. Leben – BRD expands on this limited scenario to provide a number of training scenarios. This includes training people to kill, provide obstetric care, separate those involved in domestic arguments etc. All this is interspersed with factory images of equipment being tested for longevity (for example a car door being opened and closed a thousand times by machine). It all comes off as quite banal and sterile programming. There is no room for personality, there is no room for personal connection. I’ve heard how feeling is something that has been outsourced to professionals (psychiatrists), here the psychiatrists are just as impersonal, running a child through a quick-march battery of standardised tests, getting a patient to draw a time series graph of the progression of their phobia, incapable of providing what the patient needs, a shoulder to cry on, someone to hug and understand.Read More »

Samuel Beckett’s German Television productions for Süddeutscher Rundfunk.

Berühmt wurde Samuel Beckett als Theaterinnovateur (Warten auf Godot) und Romancier (Der Namenlose), der Literaturnobelpreisträger schrieb jedoch auch Hörspiele und inszenierte Kurzfilme für das Fernsehen. 1966 produzierte er für den Süddeutschen Rundfunk (SDR) im Rahmen der Reihe »Der Autor als Regisseur« das Fernsehspiel He Joe und schuf damit ein revolutionäres Stück Medienkunst. Bis 1986 folgten sieben weitere »crazy inventions«, wie Beckett seine TV-Arbeiten nannte. Immer wieder erprobt er, von den technischen Möglichkeiten des Theaters zunehmend enttäuscht, neue Arrangements für Stimme und Schweigen, für Raum, Kamera und Musik. Damit erfand Beckett, so Gilles Deleuze in dem Essay Erschöpft, neben den Sprachen des Romans und der Theaterstücke eine »Sprache III«: »Das Entscheidende beim Bild ist nicht sein kläglicher Inhalt, sondern die wahnsinnige Energie, die jederzeit explodieren kann.«Read More »