German

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This is Michael Haneke’s first feature film, made for Österreichischer Rundfunk and Südwestfunk and broadcast in 1976. Like many of his later films for television and for the screen, it is an adaptation of a literary work; but viewers will probably notice moments in it that strangely anticipate later films — from The Seventh Continent and 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance, to Code Inconnu and Caché. The film, which is 97 minutes long, is based on a novella by the Austrian author Ingeborg Bachmann, published in 1972, a year before her death following a fire in her Rome apartment.Read More »

A young Jewish man pretends to be Iranian to avoid being executed in a concentration camp.
(imdb)Read More »

Labeled as an erotic thriller this is the third full feature by Alan Vydra.
Besides being producer, and director Vydra also edited the movie and did camera.

Poor Mario an orphan who had served in the foreign legion works for a night club owner and gangster boss who has a human trafficking operation running. Mario is in love with Cora the girlfriend of the boss. Our hero plans to take the girl and leave the city of Hamburg straight to the Bermudas. Trouble ahead?Read More »

From Amos Vogel’s Film as a Subversive Art:
An excellent example of a particularly interesting new genre of young German cinema; bizarre, deadly serious variations on the reactionary German “Heimat” films of yore – those insufferable, sentimental “kitsch” prosodies to Fatherland, Soil, and Family. This fully realized work effectively upsets this tradition by recounting a tale of oppressed 19th-century German peasants who become rebels against the state out of poverty, revealing (instead of romanticizing) the brutal degradation of German rural life at the time. Particularly audacious is the presence of an itinerant Jew peddler as mastermind (!) of the conspiracy, predictably leading to (unfounded) charges of anti-semitism against a young director who has dared to reintroduce the Jew into German dramaturgy.Read More »

Carl is having trouble writing. As the film progresses, his novelistic character develops into a real person who intervenes in his life with increasing menace. The lector Roy supports Carl but is marked by a severe illness. To escape his difficulties, Carl accompanies Jon and Liza on an architectural journey. Bela and Fred remain behind with Roy and are confronted with his approaching death. For his friends, his death becomes the motive to reconstruct their life spent together.Read More »

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Thirteen noted German filmmakers offer their impressions of the past, present and future of the land they call home in this anthology. Coordinated by Tom Tykwer, Deutschland 09, 13 kurze Filme zur Lage der Nation is comprised of thirteen twelve-minute films, each from a different director and each focusing on an individual aspect of Germany’s political and social reality, spanning the six decades that encompassed World War II, the post-war “Economic Miracle,” the tumult of the 1960’s, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the reunification of the two Germanys, and the new era of reform that emerged in the 21st Century.Read More »

Arnold Hohmann wrote:
Peter Lorre achieved international fame for his performance in the myth-making role in M. This character has held a peculiar fascination for generations of cinephiles. However, at the time, whilst such success meant recognition, it also weighed on the Hungarian actor as a constrictive burden. Using photographs and film extracts, Das doppelte Gesicht reconstructs the ups and downs of Lorre’s career, taking into consideration the economic imperatives and workings of the film industry at the time.Read More »

Clemens Brentano, an artist in his prime, no longer wants to be an artist. The poet and bon vivant goes to the bedside of the nun Anna Katharina Emmerich as a simple “scribe of God’s wonders” to write down her visions and views. Emmerich became famous for her stigmata of Christ, which appeared on her chest, forehead and hands. In order to receive comfort and encouragement, believers make pilgrimages to the sickbed of the weakened nun. Brentano places great hope in his encounter with her. But the meeting of the famous poet and the nun becomes a crossroads for both of them.Read More »

Don’t we all feel the same longing for German films that break ranks, that are wild and sensual, that possess a true physicality? Dominik Graf’s thrillers, the articles he’s written on cinema and his new documentary all tell of this longing. What happened to this section of our film tradition, which in the 1970s and 80s brought forth a genre cinema that showed a very different Germany, one looking into the abyss?
Even before Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, there were reflections of neon signs in nocturnal streets and a dark angel who wanted to rescue a prostitute in Roland Klick’s Supermarkt (1973). Klaus Lemke and Roland Klick sit before Graf’s camera as nonchalantly as their heroes and rave about how actors who make full use of their bodies. At first, post-war Germany did not want maimed bodies sweaty with exertion, until Mario Adorf and Klaus Kinski brought back the need for the physical. Suddenly, there was space for violent, bloody and dirty stories, with the RAF’s first department store bomb reverberating through films such as Blutiger Freitag (1972). This is another way of telling German history. [Berlinale.de]Read More »