Germany

A series of interviews with living filmmakers about German film history.`Night of the filmmakers’ (1994, 52 mins., English commentary) directed by Edgar Reitz, was produced for BFI TV by Edgar Reitz Filmproduktions in association with ZDF, Arte and Premiere. Brings together an imaginary assembly of German filmmakers to explore German cinema of all periods. Contributors include Volker Schlöndorff, Helma Sanders-Brahms, Margarethe von Trotta, Frank Beyer, Wolfgang Kohlhasse, Peter Schamoni, Leni Reifenstahl, Wim Wenders and Werner Herzog.

p.s. part of the serie The Century Of Cinema for the BFIRead More »

Spider’s Web is a 1989 West German film directed by Bernhard Wicki. It is based on the eponymous 1923 novel by Joseph Roth. It was chosen as West Germany’s official submission to the 62nd Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film, but did not manage to receive a nomination. The film was the last ever submission by West Germany, due to German reunification in 1990, Germany competed at the 63rd Academy Awards as a single country.

The film was also entered into the 1989 Cannes Film Festival.Read More »

Quote:
The first of the road films that would come to define the career of Wim Wenders, the magnificent Alice in the Cities is an emotionally generous and luminously shot odyssey. A German journalist (Rüdiger Vogler) is driving across the United States to research an article; it’s a disappointing trip, in which he is unable to truly connect with what he sees. Things change, however, when he has no choice but to take a young girl named Alice (Yella Rottländer) with him on his return trip to Germany, after her mother (Lisa Kreuzer)—whom he has just met—leaves the child in his care. Though they initially find themselves at odds, the pair begin to form an unlikely friendship.Read More »

Katharina, a German journalist of Yugoslavian origin, comes to Podgorica to prepare a material for her TV-show. There she meets Peter, a young German, who came to Yugoslavia to make his own investigation about his father’s Nazi past.

Days to Remember (German: Die Verliebten) is a 1987 West German drama film directed by Jeanine Meerapfel. It was entered into the 37th Berlin International Film Festival.Read More »

Anna is the Jewish daughter of a Spanish mother and a Greek father. She has returned to her family’s house in Greece after many of her friends and family members have died over the years. Although she came back to the house in order to sell it, things begin to take a different direction: The house itself, the furniture and other equipment in it seem to become alive for Anna, recalling images of her past, her beloved parents and her friend Max, who once gave her shelter from the raging policemen when she took part as a photo journalist in a political demonstration in Berlin. Anna changes her mind: When some rich, ignorant American couple wondering about if they should buy the house asks for the swimming pool (while the Mediterranean is half a mile away), she simply doubles the charge, and finally puts the “For sale” plate into the garbage can. In the meantime, she has had a little love affair with a young man from the village, found a girlfriend from her childhood days, swum in the sea, and found a way to live in peace with her melancholic memories.Read More »

A series of cameras outside of a U-Bahn station record various pedestrians and storefronts.Read More »

Malou feels that the difficulties she is experiencing in her relationships lie in her past and so she searches out information about her mother. Her mother, a nightclub singer who lived in Germany, France and Argentina, becomes the focus of a series of flashbacks through which we learn of her mother’s stormy life and the difficulty she had in bringing her up. These insights enable Malou to sort out the difficulties in her own life.Read More »

Quote:
The contents of a black briefcase lead us into a superficially well-ordered life in West Germany in 1970, in a city that can be seen as representative of the entire country. In this briefcase: the meticulous documentation of an affair between the small business owner Hans and his secretary Monika.Read More »

from Hans-Bernhard Moeller and George Lellis, “Volker Schlöndorff’s Cinema”

Volker Schlöndorff based his film “Die Moral der Ruth Halbfass” on a rather spectacular murder case that involved a rich Düsseldorff industrialist’s wife, Minouche Schubert. The case was the stuff of tabloid newspaper exposés, and to some extent “The Morals of Ruth Halbfass” was a calculated attempt by Schlöndorff to win over a popular audience.Read More »