Christine Kaufmann

In his earliest work, German director Werner Schroeter was inspired by opera, and made several short 8mm films about the prima donna Maria Callas. This film focuses on Maria Malibran, a legendary Spanish-French opera singer who died in 1836 at the age of 28. She forms the starting point for a series of stylised tableaux introducing variations on different levels, including in the form of musical phrases. The spectator is thrown into fragments of stories that take place in a non-existent country, in which the characters do not have any clear identity and are mutually interchangeable. The film, a reflection on the 19th century cult for geniuses and divas, was regarded by Schroeter, who died last year, as his most important work. It focuses on acting, including that of Magdalena Montezuma (regular Schroeter actress), Candy Darling (from the Warhol stable) and Ingrid Caven.

Werner Schroeter mixes Stravinsky, Beethoven, Brahms, Maria Callas and Janis Joplin in this delirious biography of the doomed nineteenth-century mezzo-soprano.Read More »

Roberto La Rocca (Jean-Paul Belmondo) is an ex-gangster whose friend Xavier (Pierre Vaneck) has been unjustly thrown in prison. Indeed, local gang leader Villanova is the one who framed Xavier. La Rocca confronts the mobster and kills him. Later, while helping his mistress (Beatrice Altariba) to fight off an American gang of racketeers, Roberto is caught by the police and is put in the same prison with Xavier. Then the two volunteer to clear land mines left from the last war, hoping to receive a pardon and to buy a quiet farm.Read More »

Plot Synopsis
from IMDB
The film opens with Karl Schroeder (Don Murray), chauffeur to an East German Major, seeing a friend killed as he tried to drive his truck through the wall, He is persuaded by the friend’s sister, Erika Jurgens (Christine Kaufmann), and his own family to engineer an attempt to make an escape to the Western sector of the city by digging a tunnel under the wall which is close to their home…
Based on a true story.Read More »

Schroeter set out to make a film about Marilyn Monroe ten years after her death as a meditation on the new feminism in America. The result was this bizarre chamber melodrama about three women who turn an abandoned shack in the Mojave Desert into a kind of Charles Manson commune. The three lure men to their lair, force them to have sex, then rob and murder them. With a music track that includes Bizet, Yugoslavian folk tunes, the Andrews Sisters and the Blue Ridge Rangers, Schroeter fashions a spectacle of female power which critics have compared to Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant and Altman’s Three Women.

– San Francisco CinemathequeRead More »

Plot synopsis:
The spectacular hordes of Cossack horsemen flying across the steppes to do battle with first one enemy and then another are the highlights of this otherwise thinly scripted costume drama set in the 16th century in the Ukraine. After the Cossack leader Taras Bulba (Yul Brynner) makes a pact with the Poles to join forces against the Turks and drive them from the European steppes, victory brings betrayal as the Poles then turn on their ally and force the Cossacks into the hills. From there, Taras Bulba decides that one of his sons, Andrei (Tony Curtis), will be sent to Polish schools to better learn the nature of their enemy. While away from home and hearth, the adult Andrei falls in love with a Polish noblewoman, Natalia (Christine Kaufmann, who would become the second Mrs. Curtis). As time progresses, the tensions between father and son, loyalty and love, ethnic identity and assimilation steadily increase until they end in tragedy. Taras Bulba was nominated for a 1963 Academy Award for “Best Music”, scored by Franz Waxman (By Eleanor Mannika, from Allmovie).Read More »