Quote:
An overflowing Sci Fi Opera as well as a nightmare about a society totally lost in consumption.
In the center of the action, a resistant woman fights against this system when her partner seems to disappear in a monsterous machine, that was chosen by the director as a metaphor for the ultimate consequences of TV as well as for the entertainment industry.
Helma Sanders-Brahms put a lot of her own experiences into the plot.
– from zweitausendeins film lexikon, original text in german

Die letzten Tage von Gomorrha.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 50 min
Size: 	1.10 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	342x560 ~> 746x560
Aspect ratio:  	4:3
Frame rate: 	24.000 fps
Bit rate: 	1 200 kb/s
BPP: 	0.261
Audio
#1:  	German 2.0ch AC-3 @ 224 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/EF78777934C24E0/Die_letzten_Tage_von_Gomorrha.mkv

Language(s):German
Subtitles:English

The post Helma Sanders-Brahms – Die letzten Tage von Gomorrha AKA The Last Days of Gomorra (1974) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
Ever wonder about the ancestors of the murderous jocks in Funny Games? In the Palme d’Or-winning The White Ribbon, Michael Haneke time travels to rural Germany on the cusp of WWI to find the answer—or, rather, to make the audience’s collective skin crawl at the question. The setting is the small village of Eichwald, a bucolic commune that, presided over by such stern patriarchs as the landowning baron (Ulrich Tukur) and the pastor (Burghart Klaussner), is presented as a 19th-century holdover inexorably giving way to the darkening modernity of new times. Not that Haneke displays much nostalgia for the town’s traditions: Life here is dismal, oppressive, and rigidly hierarchical, erected on puritanical morals and reinforced with ritualized punishment. Hitler—the “bitter flower of German irrationalism,” as Hans-Jürgen Syberberg once put it—may still lurk beyond the horizon, but the seeds of fascism have already been sown in society’s unquestioning adherence to power structures.

Haneke hints at horrors to come in the series of disturbing, mysteriously connected events that hits the town, from the horse-tripping trap that nearly kills the local doctor (Rainer Bock) to the burning of a family barn. Malice oozes beneath immaculate surfaces, dread fills the air. Parents mete out brutal whippings, kids are hectored, molested, and mutilated: The town schoolteacher (Christian Friedel) may narrate the happenings, but it’s the young generation that both bears silent witness to and is contaminated by the free-floating distrust and anxiety. (Not for nothing is the film subtitled “A German Children’s Story.”)

Though it opens with an abrupt bit of animal abuse and includes at least one interlude of risible faux-Strindbergisms (“My God, why won’t you just die,” the doctor sneers at his long-suffering mistress), the film is thankfully light on the Austrian auteur’s patented high-handed shocks. Instead, Haneke unfurls a tapestry of barren relationships and deforming conformity in which the greatest jolt comes not from a director arrogantly sucker-punching his audience, but from the dawning realization that the strange crimes aren’t so much polluting the village as merely crystallizing the hypocritical rot that was always there.

Something of a distant Teutonic cousin to Henri-Georges Clouzot’s caustic Le Corbeau, White Ribbon amply displays Haneke’s filmmaking mastery, with dozens of characters introduced and explored in a meticulous, detail-rich flow. (Shot by Christian Berger in monochromatic tones, it at times has some of the scrubbed chiaroscuro of Ingmar Bergman’s early films.) In its not-a-hair-out-of-place rigidity, however, it’s a mastery that often feels deadening and threatens to turn its sins-of-the-father inquiry into a static, academic thesis on the Children of the Corn series.

What saves the film from becoming a coldly analytical ant farm is Haneke’s respect for each character, the way he refuses to turn their pain into items on a diagram. It’s there in the way the pastor’s young son offers to replace his father’s beloved slain canary with his own pet bird, or in the shy courtship between the teacher and a nanny (Leonie Benesch), a tentative bond that offers a convincing portrayal of positive emotion in the filmmaker’s dour worldview. Nobody will ever mistake Haneke for Jean Renoir, but his grudging humanism here suggests for the first time a flicker of warmth behind cinema’s reigning Ice King.

	
Michael Haneke - (2009) The White Ribbon.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	2h 26mn
Size: 	3.02 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	1024x560 
Aspect ratio:  	1.85:1
Frame rate: 	23.976 fps
Bit rate: 	2 746 Kbps
BPP: 	0.200
Audio
#1:  	German 5.1ch AC-3 @ 256 Kbps

https://nitro.download/view/1E05ADA95C2BDD2/Michael_Haneke_-_(2009)_The_White_Ribbon.mkv
or
https://nitro.download/view/9840104E5E2E6EE/Michael_Haneke_-_(2009)_The_White_Ribbon.part1.rar
https://nitro.download/view/B48CCF581CB4984/Michael_Haneke_-_(2009)_The_White_Ribbon.part2.rar
https://nitro.download/view/FB602075D772D86/Michael_Haneke_-_(2009)_The_White_Ribbon.part3.rar

Language(s):German
Subtitles:English

The post Michael Haneke – Das weisse Band – Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte AKA The White Ribbon (2009) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
In her film Germany, Pale Mother Sanders-Brahms depicts her childhood in Germany during and after WWII. In order to survive, mother (Lene) and child (Anna) form a self-sufficient bond which excludes the father when he returns from war. The film portrays a child’s resilience in the face of such war trauma as death, and, especially for girls, fear of assault. Anna emulates Lene’s ability to transcend suffering through her will to survive and through narrative, the focus of this paper. Lene’s reciting of the Grimms’ “The Robber Bridegroom” fairy tale, in which the heroine flees and defeats her potential assailant by telling her story, enables them to overcome their suffering as war victims and inspires Anna, the filmmaker, to narrate their story, to become the subject not the object of her life story, and to transcend the past. Postwar scenes depict the difficulty of returning to traditional family roles because of the father’s wartime absence and the resulting abuse from a disillusioned, frustrated husband/father, the postwar “enemy”. There is a role reversal in which Anna becomes the mother’s caretaker which reaches its climax in the final scene

the Brech poem that gave the film its title:

O Germany, pale mother!
How soiled you are
As you sit among the peoples.
You flaunt yourself
Among the besmirched.

The poorest of your sons
Lies struck down.
When his hunger was great.
Your other sons
Raised their hands against him.
This is notorious.

With their hands thus raised,
Raised against their brother,
They march insolently around you
And laugh in your face.
This is well known.

In your house
Lies are roared aloud.
But the truth
Must be silent.
Is it so?

Why do the oppressors praise you everywhere,
The oppressed accuse you?
The plundered
Point to you with their fingers, but
The plunderer praises the system
That was invented in your house!

Whereupon everyone sees you
Hiding the hem of your mantle which is bloody
With the blood
Of your best sons.

Hearing the harangues which echo from your house,
men laugh.
But whoever sees you reaches for a knife
As at the approach of a robber.

O Germany, pale mother!
How have your sons arrayed you
That you sit among the peoples
A thing of scorn and fear!

https://nitro.download/view/A3043FED6A7E652/GERMANY_PALE_MOTHER.avi
https://nitro.download/view/55663345EE9BD5B/GERMANY_PALE_MOTHER_srt.rar
https://nitro.download/view/6A8F15A7ABD528D/GERMANY_PALE_MOTHER.idx
https://nitro.download/view/B6F75828C488924/GERMANY_PALE_MOTHER.rar
https://nitro.download/view/123B59AF8B0DF6E/Through_a_Daughter’s_Eyes_Helma_Sanders-Brahms’_Germany,_Pale_Mother.pdf

Language(s):German
Subtitles:english sub/idx,English srt

The post Helma Sanders-Brahms – Deutschland bleiche Mutter aka Germany, Pale Mother (1980) first appeared on Cinema of the World.