Commissioned by the ZDF (Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen), this is an experimental essay on the city of Paris shot in 16mm in Les Halles district with an entire section devoted to the construction of the Centre Pompidou in 1976. An urban hell, full of noise and fury.Read More »
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Fascinating and rich with wry humor, Exile Shanghai is an extraordinary cultural odyssey that affectionately conjures up the lost Jewish world of Shanghai. In the dark days of the 1930s, the Chinese metropolis was the last refuge for Europe’s persecuted Jews—a place that did not demand a visa. Those who managed to find refuge there brought with them the social and gastronomic delights of Vienna and Berlin. Ottinger’s four-and-a-half-hour mosaic features interviews with former members of the Shanghai expatriate Jewish community (many of whom relocated to Northern California), and her ever-curious camera cruises the city in search of its lost synagogues, schools, and salons.Read More »
The life of Jewish Expressionist poet and performance artist, Else Lasker-Schüler (1869-1945), told chronologically in vignettes given context by archival footage of turn-of-the-century Germany, World War I, and the ascent of the Third Reich. Her poetry often comprises the soundtrack. We see her in relation to men: her first husband, whom she leaves after her son is born; artists like Chagall and Franz Marc; an older muse and then a second husband; and, Gottfried Benn (1886 – 1956), physician and poet. Benn’s life is also chronicled: homosexual encounters, his attraction to Else and the Berlin scene, and his politics. Her poems addressed to him define this cultural moment.
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IMDB review by: Claudio Carvalho from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
In the unified Germany, the aspirant of singer Anna (Maria Schrader) drives her old Russian car to a small town trying to get the job of singer in a bar. Meanwhile, the twenty years old Lisa (Anna Thalbach), who is disturbed with the suicide of her father, arrives in the same town. They meet each other by chance in a bank, where they begin a successful career of bank thieves. A nasty detective from the former German Democratic Republic (East Germany) in charge of the investigation starts a touch chase trying to catch them and destroy the empathy of the population for them.Read More »
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William Klein goes on the hunt for Little Richard, the legendary “Architect of Rock and Roll”, who quit show business in 1957 at the height of his fame to become an evangelist. Richard was then lured back to secular music in the 1960s and 70s, but the excesses of stardom led him to a second retreat from the stage. For years he struggled to reconcile his religious calling with his flamboyant rock-and-roll persona, and at the time of filming, Klein finds Little Richard selling “Black Heritage Bibles” for a Nashville couple. Sensing that his image is being exploited, Richard quits his sales position and deserts the film. But Klein turns this into an opportunity to reconstruct Richard’s personality through the words of his family and friends in his native Macon, Georgia, and to celebrate his status as a cultural icon by filming scores of Little Richard impersonators and adoring fans in Hollywood.Read More »
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Husseyin (Parviz Sayyad), Turkish migrant workers, working in a factory in West Germany. Every day after work, he goes to his home with local subway, where he lives with workers from his country in a residential complex. They are not able to communicate with people and their environment, the have a monotonous life and time of sorrow. one days, Husseyin Roomate , who is tired of his situation, left the complex because of back to his country ….Read More »
Farocki frequently chooses a single news photo as his pretext. In his film he explains convincingly that ‘learning from images’ is not so much a question of having power over the image or a consistent subject-position towards the image, which would allow the filmmaker access to complete knowledge. Instead he insists on pursuing photography’s separation of reference and discourse, by proving this to be a separation of the subject as well as a separation within the subject itself. The modern notion of representation, at least that which we owe to cinema, is based on iconicity, similarity and probability.Read More »
Lara has just turned sixty; it’s a very special day that will culminate in a career-defining piano concert given by her son. Viktor remains elusive, however, and his mother’s repeated attempts to get through to him come to nothing. German acting legend Corinna Harfouch stars in this precisely crafted psychological study by one of the most successful German filmmakers of his generation, Jan-Ole Gerster, who here takes up the thread of his critically acclaimed debut Oh Boy.Read More »
Die Parallelstraße is one of the most mysterious pioneer films of the New German Cinema. It was produced by GBF, a production company for innovative industrial and promotional films and received awards in inter national film festivals. French critic Robert Benayoun called it “a philosophical thriller, a western of meditation which compensates for a whole year of inevitable manifestations of stupidity,” Jacques Rivette put it on his list of the most important films of 1968. The DVD presents for the very first time this “unjustly forgotten masterpiece of the New German Cinema” (Martin Brady) as well as several rare shorts by Ferdinand Khittl (1924-1976) which show his talent for innovative film experiments.Read More »