German

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 »

We already know just how wild, unpredictable, sensual, audacious and bursting with life German cinema can be from the film essay Verfluchte Liebe deutscher Film. Now Dominik Graf and Johannes Sievert continue their archaeological adventure tour to the margins, the underbelly, but also to the heart of German film and television, posing some valid questions along the way: why does public television no longer commission such prescient science fiction films as Smog (1973)? Why isn’t German cinema able to establish a more audacious relationship to genre? As in Carl Schenkel’s Abwärts (1984), for example, all it takes is a lift that gets stuck in an office building to make a claustrophobic psycho-thriller. Why do young directors not follow in the footsteps of the unruly Klaus Lemke, who simply shoots his films from the hip? And why do those who do get denied funding? The excerpts from these film and television marvels – such as Slavers – Die Sklavenjäger or Liebling – Ich muss dich erschießen – certainly make one want to run out and see them at once. Sadly, in many cases all that’s left of these lost treasures are the trailers or posters.[Berlinale.de]Read More »

A documentary film on the life and work of the great poet Paul Celan with interviews with his son, Eric Celan and his French editor, Bertrand Badiou.

It is in Czernowitz, in Bucovina, in the current Ukraine, that Paul Antschel was born on November 23, 1920. Of Jewish culture and German language, from a region attached to Romania and then to the Soviet Union, he will be uprooted all his life. After a romantic and anarchist adolescence, he studied medicine in Tours when the Second World War broke out. Both his parents died in deportation, and he himself survived the labor camps. Read More »

Quote:
The city today is as rationalised and regulated as a production process. The images which today determine the day of the city are operative images, control images. Representations of traffic regulation, by car, train or metro, representations determining the height at which mobile phone network transmitters are fixed, and where the holes in the networks are. Images from thermo-cameras to discover heat loss from buildings. And digital models of the city, portrayed with fewer shapes of buildings or roofs than were used in the 19th century when planned industrial cities arose, amongst them the Lille agglomeration. Despite their boulevards, promenades, market places, arcades and churches, these cities are already machines for living and working. I too want to “remake” the city films, but with different images. Limited time and means themselves demand concentration on just a few, archetypal chapters. Fragments, or preliminary studies. (Harun Farocki)Read More »

Synopsis
Evil genius Dr. Mabuse hypnotizes the director of an insane asylum in this remake of Fritz Lang’s 1933 cinematic landmark.Read More »

ARTE wrote:
Afghan security forces are non-existent, a president has fled to Tajikistan, and the fundamentalists have settled in an empty place.

Last May, when the Taliban were already in control of a large part of the country, our filmmakers followed the “masters of the countryside” on their land, whose public stonings had struck fear into the hearts of the whole world.

Twenty years after being driven out of power by the American military intervention, the Taliban entered Kabul, without resistance, to the astonishment of the international community.
With Afghan security forces non-existent and a president on the run in Tajikistan, the fundamentalists have settled into an empty place.Read More »

A young girl that regularly dresses as a boy falls in love and seduces a young girl that has no clue that her lover has the same sex. When the girl introduces ‘her boyfriend’ to her father he becomes skeptical and unmasks the fraud. Even though, strangely, the feelings of the girl persist without shifting, the father does not allow them to ever see the other again. Furious and delusional the ‘boy’ develops an adventurous plan to prove his true ‘masculinity’ to the father of his lover.Read More »

Wie ein Vogel auf dem Draht (1974)

“A pseudo variety show about the Aufbau-Era, the time of the German “economic miracle,” when Kondrad Adenauer was Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany (1949-63). Songs are sung and Brigitte Mira tells a few jokes.”Read More »

KAFFEEHAUS, DAS
(nach Carlo Goldoni)

“In Ridolfo’s coffeehouse, citizens meet to talk about money, friendship, love, and honor. This is a modernistic staging for television of a play by Carlo Goldoni (1707-1793), the Venetian playwright whose many works preserve in scripted form the improvisational productions of the Italian commedia dell’arte.”Read More »