German

A documentary which looks at Heartfield primarily as a political activist working in a specific historical context. It demonstrates this relationship by the use of documentary material, such as archive footage of inter-war Germany, in juxtaposition with Heartfield’s works. (These are here frequently shown, as they are rarely reproduced, in their original format as magazine or book covers.) Far from manifesting an obsequious reverence for the works, the film takes the bold step, thoroughly justified by its results, of re-using the elements of Heartfield’s montages for short snippets of photo-animation. It also documents artistic influences on Heartfield’s work – Berlin Dada, which was in general more immediately political in nature than its Zurich counterpart, and George Grosz in particular – and includes a detailed demonstration of how the photomontages were produced and printed.Read More »

All of a sudden, 16-year-old Martha vanishes. Her father Lothar, who for years has had no contact with her or his ex-wife, sets off unwilling to find her. He soon realises other young people are also vanishing from the city inexplicably. Lothar follows their trail across the country. He meets the occasional young person but the trail goes cold. In the next city he encounters militia groups and a reinforced police presence. Children are forbidden to be on the streets unless accompanied by adults. The world has changed…Read More »

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The young, successful employee Alex knows finally, what he wants from life – actually, what he doesn’t want: Its life. It bores him to death. Each day the same, which is subjected to the capitalism of the local industry. In a violent fight against his own reason Alex floats now in a sump of the Nihilismus and the uncommon everyday life of a new life, which keeps something new ready behind each corner. In a world, in which one is squeezed into cages, only the egoist can survive…Read More »

A successful fashion designer abandons a sado-masochistic relationship with her female assistant in favor of a love affair with a beautiful young woman.Read More »

Article: from ~ by James Steffen
Immanuel Rath is a stuffy, disciplinarian professor who is shocked to discover his students passing around a postcard of Lola-Lola, a singer at The Blue Angel cabaret. Hoping to catch his students there, Professor Rath visits the nightclub and witnesses Lola-Lola’s performance. Entranced by her dissolute charms, he gets drunk on champagne and spends the night with her. The ensuing scandal causes him to lose control of his students and he is terminated from his position. Returning to Lola, he agrees to marry her and joins the troupe. His humiliation at having to play a clown onstage is compounded by Lola’s attraction to the strongman Mazeppa. To make matters worse, the troupe returns to the professor’s hometown, forcing him to acknowledge how far he has fallen.Read More »

This arresting European documentary chronicles the exploits of a radical journalist who joined Germany’s most notorious terrorist group in the 1970s. Through a combination of newsreel clips, television reports, and interviews with friends and colleagues, a complex portrait of the journalist, Ulrike Marie Meinhof emerges. While the media portrays the woman, who committed suicide in prison in 1976, as courageous and tremendously self-confident, her friends remember her much differently. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie GuideRead More »

On behalf of anonymous business clients, Philipp Keyser is trying to track down a missing painting. This is his chance to get back on his feet professionally. As a result, he has no qualms about using the young painter Alma in order to get closer to the painting’s owner. His search for the painting and the closeness to Alma, however, draw him into a vortex in which love and guilt are dangerously intermingled and at the center of which a picture shimmers – which might not even exist …Read More »

Africa. In the wild expanses, where bushbucks, impalas, zebras, gnus and other creatures graze by the thousands, they are on holiday. German and Austrian hunting tourists drive through the bush, lie in wait, stalk their prey. They shoot, sob with elation and pose before the animals they have bagged. A vacation movie about killing, a movie about human nature.Read More »

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The vanishing point of is the conceptual image of the ‘blind spot’ of the evaluators of aerial footage of the IG Farben industrial plant taken by the Americans in 1944. Commentaries and notes on the photographs show that it was only decades later that the CIA noticed what the Allies hadn’t wanted to see: that the Auschwitz concentration camp is depicted next to the industrial bombing target. (At one point during this later investigation, the image of an experimental wave pool – already visible at the beginning of the film – flashes across the screen, recognizably referring to the biding of the gaze: for one’s gaze and thoughts are not free when machines, in league with science and the military, dictate what is to be investigated.Read More »