Germany

Synopsis: Spies (Spione) was the first independent production of German “thriller” director Fritz Lang. The years-ahead-of-its-time plotline involves Russian espionage activity in London. The mastermind is Haghi (Rudolph Klein-Rogge), a supposedly respectable carnival sideshow entertainer. Heading the good guys is Agent 326 (Willy Fritsch), with the help of defecting Russian spy Sonya (Gerda Maurus). The film moves swiftly to several potential climaxes, each one more exciting than its predecessor. Haghi’s ultimate demise is a superbly staged Pirandellian vignette. Anticipating Citizen Kane by a dozen years, director Lang dispenses with all transitional dissolves and fade-outs, flat-cutting territory from one scene to another. The film was co-scripted by Lang and his then-wife Thea Von Harbou. – Hal Erickson (AMG)Read More »

Last of a trilogy

“KEHRAUS, Again” was made in 2006, another ten years have passed since the last film and Stefan and Marlen are no longer alive. Gabi makes it through and her now grown-up children are faced with the realities of their own childhood. Henry and Marion have settled in. The grandchild generation has already been placed in foster families. “You live like this…”

“The film has become an “unintentional” – never actually planned – long-term observation, because I wished for a happy ending with every film. Reality has produced this stuff in 16 years.” G.K.Read More »

Detten Schleiermacher did not start making films until late in life. He was actually a typographer.
With “Trab Trab” he made an impish attempt to create a synthesis between Dadaism and New Objectivity. The film is a precise and elegant account of a racecourse. It does so without narration or images of either horses or patrons; everything we see has been captured either pre- or post-race.Read More »

A lonely man is taunted by the voice of a woman he once knew.Read More »

The second-to-last of the TV plays made by Beckett for the broadcaster Süddeutscher Rundfunk (SDR) in Stuttgart is a reduced black-and-white vision containing the following elements: evening light, dreamer (A), dreamed ego (B), dreamed hands R (right) and L (left). Again, Samuel Beckett is operating with minimalist variations and blurred grey tones. In the first shot, the camera is static. The dreamer hears from the wings the last notes of a ‘lied’ – Schubert’s identically titled ‘Night and Dreams’ – and then rests his head in his hands. His dreamed image drinks, a hand pats his forehead, another hand holds his hand, his head sinks down onto the table, a hand is placed on his head. This sequence is repeated, with Becket varying the dream sequences as full-size images.Read More »

A woman is walking alone through an abandoned city. She approaches the forbidden zone and tries to pass through. Everywhere the Morning Patrol and deceptive traps are watching. The city itself is alive but uncontrolled. Computer voices warn non-existing inhabitants to leave the city. The communication system works… cinemas show films… classic faces of a past era flash across TV screens. She is confronted by one of the few survivors guarding the city. They will come close to each other ; they will try to recall the past. Together they unravel their tangled memory – threads of this catastrophe and decide to penetrate the zone together ; They are linked by the bonds of violence and death since no other behaviour is possible in this kind of world. Is there an end? Is there hope and any future since no person that was allowed through ever returned to tell us whether the freedom of the sea exists. The fugitives encounter increasing dangers… A story of love in this unbearable world… what point can it have?Read More »

In the last completed work of the Irish playwright, we see five supposedly different faces on a TV screen that are gradually blended together.
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A man is waiting, reading a newspaper, looking out of the window, etc., seen first at distance, then again in close-up, and the close-up forces a very intense kind of intimacy. His face, gestures, little sounds. Tired of waiting he ends up getting into bed. The close-up enters into the bed. No words or very few. Perhaps just a few murmurs.Read More »

After putting on stage a dialogue between actor and tape recording in Krapp’s Last Tape in 1958, Beckett went one step further when aged over sixty and made plays for television. Between 1966 and 1985, he produced with Süddeutsche Rundfunk four television dramas which in their intensity and radical reduction are related with the video art of the period.Read More »