Germany

We already know just how wild, unpredictable, sensual, audacious and bursting with life German cinema can be from the film essay Verfluchte Liebe deutscher Film. Now Dominik Graf and Johannes Sievert continue their archaeological adventure tour to the margins, the underbelly, but also to the heart of German film and television, posing some valid questions along the way: why does public television no longer commission such prescient science fiction films as Smog (1973)? Why isn’t German cinema able to establish a more audacious relationship to genre? As in Carl Schenkel’s Abwärts (1984), for example, all it takes is a lift that gets stuck in an office building to make a claustrophobic psycho-thriller. Why do young directors not follow in the footsteps of the unruly Klaus Lemke, who simply shoots his films from the hip? And why do those who do get denied funding? The excerpts from these film and television marvels – such as Slavers – Die Sklavenjäger or Liebling – Ich muss dich erschießen – certainly make one want to run out and see them at once. Sadly, in many cases all that’s left of these lost treasures are the trailers or posters.[Berlinale.de]Read More »

A documentary film on the life and work of the great poet Paul Celan with interviews with his son, Eric Celan and his French editor, Bertrand Badiou.

It is in Czernowitz, in Bucovina, in the current Ukraine, that Paul Antschel was born on November 23, 1920. Of Jewish culture and German language, from a region attached to Romania and then to the Soviet Union, he will be uprooted all his life. After a romantic and anarchist adolescence, he studied medicine in Tours when the Second World War broke out. Both his parents died in deportation, and he himself survived the labor camps. Read More »

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The city today is as rationalised and regulated as a production process. The images which today determine the day of the city are operative images, control images. Representations of traffic regulation, by car, train or metro, representations determining the height at which mobile phone network transmitters are fixed, and where the holes in the networks are. Images from thermo-cameras to discover heat loss from buildings. And digital models of the city, portrayed with fewer shapes of buildings or roofs than were used in the 19th century when planned industrial cities arose, amongst them the Lille agglomeration. Despite their boulevards, promenades, market places, arcades and churches, these cities are already machines for living and working. I too want to “remake” the city films, but with different images. Limited time and means themselves demand concentration on just a few, archetypal chapters. Fragments, or preliminary studies. (Harun Farocki)Read More »

Synopsis
Evil genius Dr. Mabuse hypnotizes the director of an insane asylum in this remake of Fritz Lang’s 1933 cinematic landmark.Read More »

The films of pre-eminent documentary filmmaker Heinz Emigholz present the most important architects of the 20th century not through explanation or biography, but by using the camera to reveal the structures that define their art. From Bruce Goff’s churches to Gabriele D’Annunzio’s villas to Robert Maillart’s bridges, each exploratory and contemplative film is dedicated to the work of a single architect; taken together, the series shows us some of the most beautiful buildings of our time.Read More »

I am concerned with the cinematic recreation of the immediate experience of spaces, with the most accurate possible portrait of these spaces and its details in cinema.
Heinz EmigholzRead More »

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Four-generation story-saga dealing with the decline of a middle-class Lübeck family.
The first adaptation of a Thomas Mann book was also Gerhard Lamprecht’s first major film.Read More »

A young girl that regularly dresses as a boy falls in love and seduces a young girl that has no clue that her lover has the same sex. When the girl introduces ‘her boyfriend’ to her father he becomes skeptical and unmasks the fraud. Even though, strangely, the feelings of the girl persist without shifting, the father does not allow them to ever see the other again. Furious and delusional the ‘boy’ develops an adventurous plan to prove his true ‘masculinity’ to the father of his lover.Read More »

Wie ein Vogel auf dem Draht (1974)

“A pseudo variety show about the Aufbau-Era, the time of the German “economic miracle,” when Kondrad Adenauer was Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany (1949-63). Songs are sung and Brigitte Mira tells a few jokes.”Read More »