The conceptual rigidity of Adamczewski’s film recalls the formal experiments of structural film in the 1970s. The care with which the film-maker handles her material has become rare in the digital age and for this reason deserves special attention. The tight cinematic framework into which Adamczewski forces the vigour of her research makes this film an extremely intense experience. It is the product of a generation determined to resist the right-wing movement in German society.Read More »
Synopsis:
‘In the conclusion of Axel Corti’s trilogy Freddy, a Viennese Jew who emigrated to New York after Hitler’s invasion, and Adler, a left-wing intellectual originally from Berlin, return to Austria in 1944 as soldiers in the U.S. Army. Freddy falls in love with the daughter of a Nazi, and Adler attempts to go over to the Communist Zone. But with the advent of the Cold War and continuing anti-semitism, the idealism of both characters is shattered as they find themselves surrounded by cynicism, opportunism, and universal self-deception.’
– National Center for Jewish FilmRead More »
An underage girl starts an affair with her much older employer. Then, her lover is sentenced for the seduction of a minor, and the young woman gets involved with his son, the junior head of the company. When his father is released from prison, father and son become rivals for their shared lover.Read More »
West German TV production by Bergman. This is a Recording from the Channel ZDF Theaterkanal from13.02.2008 in german Language only.
The original Recording was in 1984 at Bayerisches Staatsschauspiel München.
It is a french play based on the legend of Don Juan.Read More »
Richard Strauss’ opera is featured in a landmark collaboration by conductor Karl Boehm and director Goetz Friedrich. Boehm died shortly after the film was completed. Featured soloists include Astrid Varnay, Leonie Rysanek, Catarina Ligendza, Hans Beirer ad Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, among others. There is also a full-length documentary included in this program.
Filmed on location on the outskirts of Vienna, director Gotz Friedrich vividly creates the staggering impact of the tragedy of vengeance. Karl Boehm conducts the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra.Read More »
Synopsis:
Detective Harder takes on her first case after surviving a bomb attack during a police training mission in Afghanistan. The remains of a girl are discovered in a moor near the small German town of Friedland. But Harder’s investigation falters from the outset – not least due to the discovery of a live bomb dating to the Second World War, which throws the Friedlanders and Harder herself into turmoil.Read More »
Synopsis: During the Russian campaign, a military pastor was to assist Private Baranowski, who was sentenced to death for his desertion, on his last night. It is also the last night before the departure for Stalingrad that the soldiers know that it means certain death. The pastor leaves his room to a captain so that he can meet his fiancé again. He himself remains in Baranowski’s cell and struggles with his conscience and emotion – even more than when he learns that the young doomed man fled for love. But the execution is carried out, and a member of the firing squad finds only cynical words for the fate of the soldier.Read More »
In the countryside, somewhere in the Bavarian Nowhere. Kirchenwirt Alois is financially up to his neck. His restaurant runs extremely bad, and only the bailiff regularly looks at him.Read More »
Oskar Panizza’s The Council of Love (1895) is a blasphemous play set in 1495, during the first recorded outbreak of syphilis, which Panizza satirically presents as the punishment from Satan for sexually active humans. As a result, Panizza was imprisoned for obscenity. Schroeter alternates scenes from the Panizza’s work with a dramatization of his trial, presenting the play as an expressionist spectacle performed by actors wearing exaggerated makeup who gesture and grimace grotesquely. The film thus forms a bridge between Schroeter’s use of tableaux in his early experiments with the political urgency of his 1980s films. On the eve of the AIDS crisis, Schroeter is presciently worried about disease as an excuse for governmental repression and the oppression of sexuality.Read More »