German

Two barge skippers fall in love with the same woman.

“Under the Bridges”, made in the last year of the Third Reich, proves that artistic genius can flourish even under the most difficult circumstances. The film completely transcends its time and presents a simple love story, the themes of which are universal. Through both his settings and his actors, Kautner achieves a naturalism which has seldom been equaled. That he managed to do this in 1944-45 Germany is almost unbelievable. A fortunate and unexpected treasure from a most unfortunate time.Read More »

“Herakles” is a 1962 short film and the first film by the German director Werner Herzog, then 20 years old. The film relates to six of the twelve labors of Heracles. The film starts with shots of young male bodybuilders working out in a gym, posing on a stage and flexing their muscles. Each of the labors are then announced by on-screen text in the form of a question, followed by related scenes of modern challenges inter-cut with the bodybuilders.Read More »

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The film focuses on a boy, Martin, who is outcast from the other children at his school. The film was made with pre-school children in Munich, and is partially based on true stories which Herzog heard from the children themselves.Read More »

Michael Pilz’s 285-minute Himmel and Erde is an essay film or an ethnographic documentary about life in the Styrian mountain village of St. Anna. It contemplates the finite lot of individuals as part of a continuum of human experience in the natural world. Himmel und Erde, which translates to Heaven and Earth, was recorded between 1979 and 1982. The documentary invites the viewer to contemplate the disruptive effects of technology on economic and social ties through circumscribed vignettes of village life which are oft repeated either as recycled footage or variations on a theme. The film is a meditation on time, nature, and the struggles of man, as well as a record of a lifestyle ceasing to exist. “If you let it happen, the film will pull you into its cosmos; it is one of those works that teaches you to see and listen again.”Read More »

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The documentary follows Gene Scott, famous televangelist involved with constant fights against FCC, who tried to shut down his TV show during the 1970’s and 1980’s, and even argues with his viewers, complaining about their lack of support by not sending enough money to keep going with the show. Werner Herzog presents the man, his thoughts and also includes some of his uncharacteristic programs.Read More »

A young student seeks quiet and solitude to focus on an important work but ends up as the teacher of a peculiar boy who is home-schooled by his parents in an isolated bunker mansion. THE BUNKER is a dark, twisted, and funny tale about childhood, growing up and education.Read More »

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“…What sounds rather bookish and intimidating, in fact unfolds an enormous sensual stimulus on screen. In more than 20 sequences, based in part on work by Stifter and Camus, Hamburg’s experimental film director and a number of students from Braunschweig and Göttingen demonstrate a higher school of hearing and seeing. With manipulations of sight and sound, which are at times highly complex and mathematically precise, he shows the tension between optical and acoustic elements, inventing ever new combinations from which an abstract poetry issues forth. Nekes works with single frame mechanism and multiple copying of the images, thus defamiliarizing the sound at the same time. The title of the film pertains to Jonathan Swift’s ‘Gulliver’s Travels’. Lagado is the name of the academy in which scientists of the most diverse disciplines work at strange projects.” – Hans C. BlumenbergRead More »

Criterion wrote:

Revanche begins with a reflection of trees in a lake at twilight. They’re seen upside down—an image of nature reversed—yet the earth is eerily calm. This almost otherworldly illusion arouses a viewer’s awareness of perspective, which is then disturbed by the splash of an object tossed into the middle of the lake. Widening ripples shatter the impression of stillness, and a genuine sense of mystery sets in. Such an intimation of the supernatural typifies Austrian writer-director Götz Spielmann’s unique vision in this film.Read More »

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A story about the rise of Nazism based on a novel by a German-Jewish author who managed to survive by fleeing to the USA. The movie focuses on working class Berliner Lissy Schroeder who marries clerk Alfred Frohmeyer believing he can provide her with a better life. In 1932, however, his Jewish boss fires him. So Alfred turns to the Nazis, quickly rising in the SA, and acquiring wealth along the way. Lissy, however, discovers there is, as always, a price. The Nazis shoot her brother, a former Communist. And her parents and friends shun her. What is she to do?Read More »