German

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The simultaneously random and interconnected nature of modern existence comes into harrowing focus in the despairing final installment of Michael Haneke’s trilogy. Seventy-one intricate, puzzlelike scenes survey the routines of a handful of seemingly unrelated people—including an undocumented Romanian boy living on the streets of Vienna, a couple who are desperate to adopt a child, and a college student on the edge—whose stories collide in a devastating encounter at a bank. The omnipresent drone of television news broadcasts in 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance underscores Haneke’s vision of a numb, dehumanizing world in which emotional estrangement can be punctured only by the shock of sudden violence.Read More »

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Katja, Sascha, Benni, Laila and Schöller. These five young people have more in common than just the fact that they are living in provincial Germany free of parental interference. They have one last winter together before they finish school, then they are supposed to know what they want to do: stay or leave. In between homework and smoking dope, martial arts training and gossiping about deflowering people, they explore their feelings in all kinds of different relationships, searching for each other, hiding, kissing and fighting. They want to live, to conquer the world and find out who they really are. They are young and exude an enviable naturalness when it comes to gender identities and roles, above all Katja, played by Marie Tragousti with a lot of new female power. Melanie Waelde’s feature debut is tremendously intense and vibrant. Going beyond cuteness, she draws these “naked animals” with a raw, sensual and sensitive openness rarely seen in German cinema. On the cusp between the end of childhood and burgeoning maturity, body and soul are still more or less united. Just like loneliness and intimacy. We are vulnerable – and that’s a good thing.Read More »

In a small German village in the middle of large moors, there is an old legend of a young woman having sunk in the wetland after being raped by a Swedish intruder of the Thirty Years’ war. Now young Dorothee, falling in love with the architect Ludwig, is harassed by an obnoxious, rich farmer Eschmann. The brutal man is ready to do anything to get the maiden. The history is repeating itself, as Eschmann follows Dorothee to the moors after his crime.Read More »

Carolyn Grace has an older husband who insists she wear very old-fashioned night clothes and is obviously unexciting in bed. She has lots of fantasies, triggered by chance events and encounters.Read More »

Thomas Bernhard’s “Die Jagdgesellschaft”
Directed by Claus Peymann
Recorded in 1974 at Burgtheater Vienna

The bark-beetle has invaded the big forest of the general, just as a fatal illness has into the body of its owner. The general is suffering from eye cataract, preventing him from seeing the symptoms of the trees’ decline, just as he is unable to see his own rottening. His wife and the writer discuss these circumstances for two scenes, until the general discovers the fact himself in the third one. Now he is going to take appropriate action.
“The actors this evening were of peerless mastery. It’s impossible to imagine a better realization of this piece!” Frankfurter Allgemeine NewspaperRead More »

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The day-to-day routines of a seemingly ordinary Austrian family begin to take on a sinister complexion in Michael Haneke’s chilling portrait of bourgeois anomie giving way to shocking self-destruction. Inspired by a true story, the director’s first theatrical feature finds him fully in command of his style, observing with clinical detachment the spiritual emptiness of consumer culture—and the horror that lurks beneath its placid surfaces. The Seventh Continent builds to an annihilating encounter with the televisual void that powerfully synthesizes Haneke’s ideas about the link between violence and our culture of manufactured emotion.Read More »

This rare documentary, simply called “John Cage”, was made in 1966 for the German TV station NDR and is one of the earliest films devoted entirely to the work of Cage and his collaborators. It was made on the occasion of the Cage and Cunningham European tour in that year, and instead of fully explaining the music and philosophy of the composer, we get a fascinating glimpse at the work process of the dance troupe and of Cage himself. Most of the film is concerned with showing us how they set up a performance for the Nuits de la Fondation Maeght, and there is a lot of interview and everyday material with Cage, Merce Cunningham, David Tudor, Gordon Mumma and Carolyn Brown, to name just the best known artists here. It’s also nice to see a rather youthful looking Cage (though he was 54 at the time!), still wearing the famous tie that had been cut off by Nam June Paik a few years earlier. There’s also some archival footage from Tudor’s and Cage’s very first German performance in Darmstadt in 1954.Read More »

When the misanthropic tile salesman Lothar is diagnosed with a terminal disease, he sells his business and gives his dog and all his money to an animal shelter and checks into a hospice, where it turns out that he was misdiagnosed.Read More »

In 1914, Germany is arming itself for war. Karl Liebknecht, left-wing revolutionary Social Democrat and workers’ leader, a virulent antimilitarist, is one among 110 SPD members of Parliament who vote against approving war loans. From then on, he is considered un-German and a traitor to the fatherland, and his own party’s leadership turns against him. Despite threats, Liebknecht speaks up against the war and writes the manifesto “The Main Enemy Is at Home.” Even when he is arrested and charged with treason, he does not surrender.Read More »