New technologies are transforming a 19th-century watchmaking town in Switzerland. Josephine, a young factory worker, produces the unrest wheel, swinging in the heart of the mechanical watch. Exposed to new ways of organizing money, time and labour, she gets involved with the local movement of the anarchist watchmakers, where she meets Russian traveller Pyotr Kropotkin.Read More »
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In the last decades of the 19th century, Karl May (1842-1912) was the most successful author in Germany. For 30 years he turned out 40 pages a day, constructing a staggering body of kitsch adventure-fiction that may originally have owed a certain debt to James Fenimore Cooper but that, finally, created a mythology quintessentially German.
In his most popular stories, written in the first person, May recalled his adventures in the American West with his idealized white blood-brother, Old Shatterhand, and the equally idealized Indian warrior, Winnetou. Seeking a change of locale, May also wrote similar first-person tales about adventures in the Near and Far East.Read More »
Nursing homes in Holland have a long waiting list. It has become customary to register as early as possible to ensure future placement.
Impressive is Rob Houwer’s film which casts its eye on an old peoples’ home. Filmed in colour, it contains the haunting image: an eerie, disquieting shot of numerous residents all peering out of their windows simultaneously, all silent, all looking heartbreakingly lonely. Were this a horror film it would be terrifying, as it is it strikes a more melancholy chord.Read More »
This documentary explores the life and work of the Austrian novelist, playwright and political activist, Peter Handke. The director managed to meet and stay with Handke in his house in the country side near Paris. Director Corinna Belz also did a portrait on the artist Gerhard Richter.Read More »
Gertie, called Flo by her friends, sees her big chance of a model carreer, when she manages to get the business card of successful model Chantal at a fashion show in her sleepy village. She goes to Berlin and nests in the flat share of Chantal and Freddie. Whereas country girl Flo is still busy to find herself, Chantal is about to lose herself more and more in the depths of stardom. The story of a very unusual female friendship.Read More »
A collision with a sheep on a country road initiates a whole series of weird and unsettling experiences for Anna and Nick which ultimately leave them both incapable of being certain exactly where they are: in the real world, in their own imaginations – or in someone else’s imagination.
1 win, 8 nominations.Read More »
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In 1919, before Ernst Lubitsch was known for his famous “touch,” the master director made something like nine films–a perfect opportunity for an artist to really practice his craft. Even he had to start somewhere.
Madame du Barry was retitled Passion to avoid the anti-German sentiment after World War I. Even though it was a French title and a French story, in Europe the movie was connected to the German director Ernst Lubitsch. Lubitsch’s name appeared nowhere in the American posters or movie titles so the movie wouldn’t bomb in America.Read More »
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In THE BETRUCTION OF THE BLUE SAILORS, Tabea Blumenschein “plays four different roles in changing appearances and in fantastic costumes that structure the film: a mythical figure that permeates the film on desert sand with siren song; a bird that is killed; a Hawaiian girl and a Sailors. While the siren, accompanied by Asian music, strides along the desert, sailors and birds become the victims of perverted naturalness in the form of the wild Hawaiian girl.” (Claudia Hoff) In the collage principle, areas and quotations from commercialized everyday life and the music, which ranges from noises, sacred gongs, Hawaiian music, Schuricke melodies, musette waltzes to Burmese songs and cultic Ketchak rhythms, and the language – literary texts by Apollinaire, which already use the quotation method, phrases from the world of American show business (Hollywood veteran star), lamentations of a Russian silent film mother […], come satire, the grotesque, the caricature, the clown and the doll up; and it is the deep meaning of these forms of expression, through the demonstration of the marionette-ness, the mechanization of life, through the apparent and real torpor, to let us imagine a different life. (Raoul Hausman). (From the conversation between Ulrike Ottinger/ Tabea Blumenschein and Hanne Bergius)Read More »
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Recording of the annual Christmas folklore street ritual Krampus in Austria, in which people dressed up as hairy monsters scare the wits out of the population. The accompanying metal soundtrack by The Melvins provides a curious American perspective.Read More »