Germany

Synopsis
A largely plotless, fado-scored journey through the gloomy cobblestone streets, zombie bars, and fetid basements of a sordid harbor town populated by German-speaking sots and Portuguese guest workers, Nightfall is Kelemen’s most polished despair-fest. An unhappy young couple, Leni and Anton, quarrel and split separately into the rat’s ass of the evening. Everyone is looking for love, but no one finds any—although Leni does pick up a trick. With perfect bad timing, Anton wanders by the parked car where she is engaged, and in a frenzy of depression, carves her name on his knuckles. A sympathetic hooker bandages his hand and even gets him to dance before she lets her wig slip and passes out on the bar. Then it’s on through an after-hours club of sodden depravity to the bleary dawn.Read More »

Quote:

I wasn’t satisfied with the first two versions of the script which I had commissioned in Warsaw.

Luckily for me, at that time Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita was first published in Poland. I was thrilled by it. I realized that I would not find a better text for the film than the story of Pilate. Everything was there: Christ, Pilate’s dark intrigue, Judas’ betrayal and the desperate loneliness of the single disciple and Evangelist.Read More »

A group of fishermen on a precariously balanced platform fight over a trunk.Read More »

History and stories of Brest station on the border between Poland and Belarus, 1941 starting point of the National Socialist war against the Soviet Union. An oppressive study, enriched with archive material, which reports with partly bizarre, partly moving snapshots of the disintegration of a society. Private and history are skillfully interwoven into a fascinating kaleidoscope. (Russian with German subtitles; TV and video title: “Bahnhof Brest”)Read More »

Film by Hellmuth Costard, BRD, 1967, 3 min., 35mm

with Barbara Rieck and Peter Dahl

Cinema is also parodied in Warum hast du mich wachgeküsst: in the bombastic title announcement in beautiful colours and at the end in a …Read More »

IMDB:
Yuri is a young musician. He is very afraid of death. For this reason, he hardly leaves his apartment. One day he meets a mysterious man who claims to be death. He takes him on an extraordinary journey.Read More »

At the end of 1970, the Filmmuseum in the City Museum of Munich showed a small Sirk retrospective (six productions from All That Heaven Allows to Imitation of Life). Fassbinder watched all of the films in this showcase and was deeply moved: “That really breaks you up in the movie theater. You understand something about the world and what it is doing to you.” This cinematic experience must have been a revelation for him. He described his impressions vividly in an extensive essay, and came to the conclusion: “I have seen six films by Douglas Sirk. Among them are the finest films in the world.” The young filmmaker went to visit the Hollywood veteran, who was now living in the Swiss canton of Ticino. And when the almost eighty-year-old director was teaching at the Munich Academy of Television and Film (HFF/M), Fassbinder took on one of the parts in an academic production that Sirk was supervising. (He played in Bourbon Street Blues, the film adaptation of a one-act play by the well-known writer Tennessee Williams). Sirk’s work experienced a renaissance, not least of all thanks to Fassbinder’s essay, but the influence Sirk exerted on him has nevertheless been somewhat exaggerated.Read More »

Berlin, the Prenzlauer Berg district. When this summer day is over, nothing will ever be the same again. Only Daniel doesn’t know that yet. The protagonist of this tragicomic scenario is as unsuspecting as he is accustomed to success. His loft apartment is stylish and so is his wife, and nanny has the children under control. Everything is tip-top, bilingual and ready for him to jet off to an audition where a role in a superhero film awaits the celebrated German-Spanish actor. Popping into the bar on the corner, he finds Bruno sitting there. As transpires by the minute, Bruno has been waiting for this moment for a long time. And so this eternally overlooked man – one of reunification’s losers and a victim of the gentrification of what was once East Berlin – takes his revenge. With Daniel as his target.Read More »

Encouraged by Fassbinder, with whom he became friendly after the then-enfant terrible of the German cinema visited him in Lugano, Sirk also did some teaching during the late 1970s at the film school in Munich, where he made three short films with his students. Sprich zu mir wie der Regen was the first of these films supervised by Sirk.Read More »