German

Synopsis
Things could hardly turn out worse for Katrin. In Corsica, her boss and lover of many years tells her that his wife is pregnant. In one abrupt instant, all hopes for a life together are dashed. Her plans for her future unraveled, her heart broken, Katrin breaks up with him. But all her attempts to start a new life simply toss her deeper into a maelstrom of aimlessness and pain.

She then happens to meet Malte, an adventure-hungry young man who lives on the edge and strictly for the moment. He overwhelms her with the honesty and clarity of his feelings – and suddenly, from one minute to the next, her life becomes a dangerous tightrope walk.Read More »

Boris, on the cusp of coming out, is smitten with Til. Upon leaving a club one night, just as they are about to kiss for the first time, an interloper joins them and much to Boris’ chagrin, Til is delighted. Boris doesn’t know how to deal with this and is jealous.

This is a well-made short that gives the audience a peek into the difficulties that arise when two boys look at love (and their relationship) differently.

IMDB user commentRead More »

“I was interested in whether it was possible to tell the inner life of a relationship, the things you can’t express to a third person. When Gitti and Chris come home after the holiday, and someone asks her, “How was it?” she probably wouldn’t be able to tell what happened.” Maren Ade.

Everyone Else is a subtle dissection of the truths and cracks of a relationship – a relationship that, like any other, embodies love as well as power, respect as well as moments of dissolution. Spending the first days of their vacation in Chris’ family home in Sardinia, Chris and Gitti are the ideal couple. They play, make love, talk and make love some more.Read More »

Second feature film by German-Turkish director Thomas Arslan (Ferien, Aus der Ferne), and a rough diamond of the first generation of the so-called ‘Berlin School’. Can is a young and smart upstart; he dreams of a small family but the money that fuels this dream comes from the streets. Can is a dealer, he works for Hakan who is supplying the kids in his neighbourhood with drugs. And while Can struggles to get control over his life he sees his girl friend, the mother of his kid, leaving and himself increasingly surrounded by false friends. On top of it, a cop (Birol Ünel, the male lead from Fatih Akin’s “Gegen die Wand) is on his back trying to persuade Can to work undercover for the police. The more Can attempts to free himself, the deeper he sinks into a life he never aspired to.Read More »

Quote:
It’s settled: we’re going to film CAPITAL on Marx’s scenario–the only logical solution.
–Sergei Eisenstein, Oct 12, 1927.

This is an English subtitled copy of the ‘theatrical’ or ‘cinema’ version of Alexander Kluge’s Nachrichten aus der ideologischen Antike: Marx – Eisenstein – Das Kapital or News From Ideological Antiquity: Marx – Eisenstein – Capital. The original work made for broadcast or DVD was finished in 2008 and ran 570 minutes long. This 84 minute cut prepared by Kluge for exhibition condenses this mammoth project into something like a digestible greatest hits or highlight reel. Kluge’s film is a discursive essay about and around Eisenstein’s notes on a film of Marx’s Capital–written shortly after the release of OCTOBER in 1927 and connected to his ideas for conceiving a film of Joyce’s ULYSSES. According to Helmet Merker writing on the 570 minute version, “Eighty years on, Alexander Kluge joins the party and takes up where Eisenstein failed, because neither Hollywood’s capitalists nor Moscow’s Communists were prepared to send the necessary funds his way… Scholarly stuff, wide and deep in scope, yet bold and playful. But even if your own study of Marx is no more than a faded memory, it is hugely enjoyable to watch and listen to these experts… Alexander Kluge is a great manipulator, an industrious loom, who weaves the most far-flung observations into his system. He is not filming “Das Kapital” but researching how one might find images to make Marx’s book filmable. The quest is the way is the destination… In Kluge’s hands this becomes a collage of documentary, essayistic and fictional scenes, interviews and still photos, archive images of smoking factory chimneys, time-lapse footage of pounding machines and mountains of products, diary entries and blackboards scribbled with quotes referencing constructivism and concrete poetry… Unlike Eisenstein, who was driven to desperation by the herculean task of cutting the 29 hours of “October” into a 90-minute film version and turned to drugs into the process which left him temporarily blind, Kluge cooly sticks to his guns and his nine hours. And it’s not a minute too long.”
Kluge may have stuck to his guns but he also offered another option.

Embedded in this film is a short film by Tom Tykwer called THE INSIDE OF THINGS
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Sterile practice
7 August 2010 | by oOgiandujaOo (United Kingdom)

My only previous experience of Farocki prior to watching Leben – BRD (How to live in the FRG) was Die Bewerbung (The Interview). The subject of that documentary film was the preparing of people who had difficulty finding work for job interviews. The movie highlighted how unnatural it was to be in a situation where you had to sell yourself (the training provides promotion of an unnatural self-awareness), where you have to project a compliant image for the Procrustean corporate scrutiniser. Leben – BRD expands on this limited scenario to provide a number of training scenarios. This includes training people to kill, provide obstetric care, separate those involved in domestic arguments etc. All this is interspersed with factory images of equipment being tested for longevity (for example a car door being opened and closed a thousand times by machine). It all comes off as quite banal and sterile programming. There is no room for personality, there is no room for personal connection. I’ve heard how feeling is something that has been outsourced to professionals (psychiatrists), here the psychiatrists are just as impersonal, running a child through a quick-march battery of standardised tests, getting a patient to draw a time series graph of the progression of their phobia, incapable of providing what the patient needs, a shoulder to cry on, someone to hug and understand.Read More »

Samuel Beckett’s German Television productions for Süddeutscher Rundfunk.

Berühmt wurde Samuel Beckett als Theaterinnovateur (Warten auf Godot) und Romancier (Der Namenlose), der Literaturnobelpreisträger schrieb jedoch auch Hörspiele und inszenierte Kurzfilme für das Fernsehen. 1966 produzierte er für den Süddeutschen Rundfunk (SDR) im Rahmen der Reihe »Der Autor als Regisseur« das Fernsehspiel He Joe und schuf damit ein revolutionäres Stück Medienkunst. Bis 1986 folgten sieben weitere »crazy inventions«, wie Beckett seine TV-Arbeiten nannte. Immer wieder erprobt er, von den technischen Möglichkeiten des Theaters zunehmend enttäuscht, neue Arrangements für Stimme und Schweigen, für Raum, Kamera und Musik. Damit erfand Beckett, so Gilles Deleuze in dem Essay Erschöpft, neben den Sprachen des Romans und der Theaterstücke eine »Sprache III«: »Das Entscheidende beim Bild ist nicht sein kläglicher Inhalt, sondern die wahnsinnige Energie, die jederzeit explodieren kann.«Read More »

In 1992, Wenders possibly bewildered a good portion of his fans by making a 30 minute short for children, titled Arisha, the Bear and the Stone Ring. It’s a fable about the Bear leaving Berlin (it’s the city’s emblem), featuring Wim Wenders dressed as Santa Claus…

SYNOPSIS
The story description posted on Wenders’ website reads as follows:
The bear leaves Berlin. He’s fed up. On the way, two Russian ladies – Anna and her daughter, Arisha – hire him as their driver. During the trip, a Santa Claus who cannot stand Christmas, and then a Vietnamese family, join the group whose destination is a spot by the sea. There, on the beach, lies a stone ring, which wants to be found.
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Quote:
A loose contemporary adaptation of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, the middle installment of Wim Wenders’ “road movie trilogy” opens with a scene that’s pure Wenders — a young man gazes out his window while American rock rollicks out of the LP player, until he suddenly puts both fists through the glass, quietly sobbing. That’s Wilhelm (Rudiger Vogler), who grudgingly accepts that, if he’s ever to become the writer he wants to be, he has to overcome his dislike for people and venture out to accumulate experiences. In place of inspiration, the journey hooks him up with a group of fellow loners, the “dead souls of Germany”: an apathetic actress (Hanna Schygulla), an aged ex-Nazi whose nose bleeds from “remembering” (Hans Christian Blech), his mute street-performer travelling companion (a teenage, almost tomboyish Nastassja Kinski), a pudgy poet (Peter Kern), and a suicidally bereft industrialist (Ivan Desny). Read More »