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Rolf (Michael Cromer), a sex-advice columnist and a lecher, has affairs with numerous women, but never a permanent relationship. Suzanne, one of his ex-lovers, offers to bet that no woman can get Rolf to propose marriage, a bet her girlfriend Andrea (Sybil Danning) eagerly accepts. But there’s a catch: To win the bet, Andrea must get the womanizing Rolf to commit to marriage without first going to bed with him.Read More »
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Harald Berger and his Indian lover, the temple dancer Seetha, desperately flee from the shikaris (cavalry) of Eschanapur’s maharajah Chandra, who burn a whole village just for letting them pass invoking traditional hospitality. A spider weaves a web so the trackers won’t look for them in a Shiva temple, but she is caught outside, he left for dead after a steep fall into a crocodile-infested water. Meanwhile his sister Irene and brother-in-law Dr. Walter Rhode, the architect who refuses to build a tomb to bury Seetah alive for scorning the ruler’s love before the hospital he was asked for, guess the truth, and try to make their assigned Indian servant Asagara talk, who dreads incriminating his sovereign.Read More »
Actor Sterling Hayden found himself cooperating with the House Un-American Activities Committee in 40s and 50s Hollywood. This film tracks the restless actor’s search for meaning, his discomfort with Hollywood’s easy money and the circumstances that led to his naming names through re-enactments.Read More »
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Phantom is a 1922 silent film that was directed by F. W. Murnau the same year Murnau directed Nosferatu. It is an example of German Expressionist film and has a surreal, dreamlike quality.Read More »
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Ever wonder about the ancestors of the murderous jocks in Funny Games? In the Palme d’Or-winning The White Ribbon, Michael Haneke time travels to rural Germany on the cusp of WWI to find the answer—or, rather, to make the audience’s collective skin crawl at the question. The setting is the small village of Eichwald, a bucolic commune that, presided over by such stern patriarchs as the landowning baron (Ulrich Tukur) and the pastor (Burghart Klaussner), is presented as a 19th-century holdover inexorably giving way to the darkening modernity of new times. Not that Haneke displays much nostalgia for the town’s traditions: Life here is dismal, oppressive, and rigidly hierarchical, erected on puritanical morals and reinforced with ritualized punishment. Hitler—the “bitter flower of German irrationalism,” as Hans-Jürgen Syberberg once put it—may still lurk beyond the horizon, but the seeds of fascism have already been sown in society’s unquestioning adherence to power structures.Read More »
While Luchino Visconti’s “Ludwig” (1972) is regarded as a classic, it is little-known that Helmut Berger appeared a second time as Bavaria’s troubled king. “Ludwig 1881” (1993) by Donatello and Fosco Dubini focuses on Ludwig’s journey through Switzerland in summer 1881. Munich court actor Josef Kainz was hired to recite Schiller’s “Wilhelm Tell” in front of the alleged historical locations, to transport the King into a world of poetry and imagination. After a few days the trip had turned into a nightmare for Kainz, who was soon exhausted from the King’s eccentric demands and antics. Once again, the desire for the ideal was marred by the all-too-human.Read More »
In 1939, the author Annemarie Schwarzenbach and the ethnologist Ella Maillart travel together by car to Kabul, but each is in pursuit of her own project. Annemarie Schwarzenbach, who was among Erika and Klaus Mann’s circle of friends in the 30s, is searching for a place of refuge in the Near East to discover her own self. Ella Maillart justifies her restlessness, her need for movement and travel, with a scientific pretext: she would like to explore the mysterious Kafiristan Valley and make a name for herself with publications on the archaic life of the nomads living there. Both women are on the run, but political developments and their own biographies catch up with them again and again. Their mutual journey through the outside world, which runs from Geneva via the Balkans and Turkey to Persia, is compounded by the inner world of emotions with a tender love story.Read More »
PLOT: In the castle Vogeloed, a few aristocrats are awaiting baroness Safferstätt. But first count Oetsch invites himself.. Everyone thinks he murdered his brother, baroness Safferstat’s first husband, three years ago. So he is rather undesirable. But Oetsch stays; arguing he is not the murderer and will find the real one…Read More »
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A historical analysis of how groups such as the Nazi’s may use language, symbols, and religious connotation in order to come to power. It raises questions that deserve in depth analysis and consideration. Questions include: Where do legends expand our thinking and where do they bury it? When does spiritual pursuit suddenly turn into fanaticism and violence? Last, have we as a society learned from our past, and if so have forgotten the lessons of the 20th Century? Are we now embarking on a new level only to learn the same old lessons about humanity again? In addressing these questions we are taken into the back drop of the history of Germany beginning in the late 1800’s through the late 20th Century at the eve of the 21st. “A society that does not take archetypes, myths, and symbols seriously will possibly be jumped by them from behind.”Read More »