German

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 »

In a deserted mining town at the end of nowhere three desperate men fight over a suitcase full of cash.Read More »

Synopsis:
An attempt to illuminate the basic relationship between man and woman. A series of individual examples show how they get to know each other, how they fall in love, how they have their first arguments, how they discover difficulties in communication, and how they end up living together. The snapshots from everyday life are ciphers for the entire lack of contact of those who are closest to each other, whose only desired goal is to remain silent together. Because words destroy feeling, sensation, relationship, substance. The phrase has become the real, it replaces the lost ego. Understanding without understanding, routine instead of togetherness. What still takes place is the monologue, the soliloquy, the idiom. The anxious question will be: and what comes after that? Probably the same thing, over and over again.Read More »

A mix of social classes and characters mingle at the Eoksutang, a popular public sauna, every afternoon. Wan-ki, a wannabe movie director, a monk with VD, nude photograhper searching for the perfect body, a Russian model and a peeping Tom are among the clientsRead More »

Quote:
Retired filmmaker Abraham Rabenthal (Vadim Glowna) is producing the directorial début feature (titled Ins Blaue) for his daughter Nike (Alice Dwyer), and they film around Neapolitan locales with their cast and crew. Nike’s film is about three young women travelling in a camper van through Italy and having individual adventures with men along the way. Eva hooks up with a monk, Josephine with a mute fisherman, and Laura, an old philosopher. After a bank rejects Abraham’s application for further funding, costs need to be cut, so two of the male characters – the monk and the fisherman, are played by the same cast member Wilhelm, and the old philosopher, by Abraham himself. But that’s when things get more complicated…Read More »

Fritz Kortner performs a monologue.Read More »

Quote:
A hitchhiker, carrying a suitcase full of toys, is given a ride by a wealthy businessman in his 1965 Ford Galaxie 500 Convertible. The two first talk about the businessman’s life and the hitchhiker’s hobby of collecting toys. Then everything gets out of hand.Read More »

Here we have a fascinating documentary on the Communist musicals that strove to be ideologically correct and entertaining at the same time. The focus is on musicals from East-Germany and the Soviet Union but there are also references to musicals from Czechoslovakia and Romania.

Interviewees: Erich Gusko, Karin Schröder, Brigitte Ulbrich, Helmut Hanke, Hans-Joachim Wallstein, Maya Turovskaya, Chris Doerk, Frank Schöbel & Margarita Andrushkevitch.Read More »