Walter Heynowski – Cinema of the World

Walter Heynowski & Gerhard Scheumann – I Was, I Am, I Shall Be (1974)

admin — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 02:05:00 +0000

Quote:
In the spring of 1974, a camera team from Studio H&S succeeded against the explicit orders of the Chilean Junta’s Chancellery, entered into two large concentration camps in the north of the country — Chacabuco and Pisagua — leaving with filmed sequences and sound recordings.

1974 Special Jury Prize, Leipzig Documentary and Short Film Week
1974 Jury Prize, Grenoble International Documentary Film Festival
1974 Silver Sestertius, Nyon International Documentary Film Festival

I.Was.I.Am.And.I.Shall.Be.1974.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 16 min
Size: 	1.02 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	1280x720 ~> 1365x720
Aspect ratio:  	1.897
Frame rate: 	25.000 fps
Bit rate: 	1 785 kb/s
BPP: 	0.077
Audio
#1:  	English 2.0ch AAC LC @ 130 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/BD0D3B3496976A1/I.Was.I.Am.And.I.Shall.Be.1974.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:English muxed

The post Walter Heynowski & Gerhard Scheumann – I Was, I Am, I Shall Be (1974) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Walter Heynowski & Gerhard Scheumann – Piloten im Pyjama (1968)

admin — Sat, 17 Jan 2026 02:05:00 +0000

“This film, actually several feature films combined into one, consists entirely of interviews with American POWs in North Vietnam. The Americans talk at great length about their lives, values, and Vietnam experiences, in consistently fascinating exchanges with the invisible interviewers. In the process, more is revealed than intended, on both sides. The American testimonies should be published in the West for light they throw on the new impersonal, ‘remote-control’ killers of our day: ‘honourable men’, all of them. But the East German revelation is equally fascinating; for the obscene but quite serious premise of this film, in their eyes, is that these were freely conducted interviews among equals. The filmmakers do not seem to realize that some of the prisoners sweat profusely while talking, that all make pro-Vietcong statements, and that there is fear in the back of their eyes; Heynowski, at a press conference, expressed surprise that the pilots addressed him with ‘Yes, Sir’ – ‘I don’t know why they did that…’ They did it because, given the circumstances of its production, such a film, far from being ‘cinema verité’, is a particularly pernicious (since unacknowledged) kind of courtroom interrogation without the usual safeguards and with the prisoner already under lock and key, imagining that good behaviour before the camera may in some way improve his condition.”
Amos Vogel, Film as a Subversive Art

Piloten im Pyjama-1.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1h 1mn
Size: 	942 MiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	720x556 
Aspect ratio:  	1.295
Frame rate: 	25.000 fps
Bit rate: 	1 800 Kbps
BPP: 	0.180
Audio
#1:  	German 1.0ch MP3
#2:  	English 1.0ch AAC

Language(s):German and English audio tracks
Subtitles:English

The post Walter Heynowski & Gerhard Scheumann – Piloten im Pyjama (1968) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Walter Heynowski & Gerhard Scheumann – Der lachende Mann – Bekenntnisse eines Mörders (1966)

admin — Mon, 13 Apr 2020 08:30:00 +0000

Amos Vogel, Film as a Subversive Art:
Posing as a West German TV production crew, the two East German directors of this film persuaded a former leading German mercenary of the Congo civil war (one of many!) to discuss his activities and heroic achievements in what is surely one of the most sensational exposés of its kind. Continually smiling or laughing, this man, a self-acknowledged Nazi, proudly reveals that he went to the Congo to save Western civilization from Bolshevism – to complete the work of the Nazis. Dressed in his military jungle uniform (with his Second World War decorations) he waxes eloquent about the ‘colours’ of South Africa, ‘explains’ apartheid, and freely discusses his ‘adventures’. Shots of corpses, tortures, and executions of Blacks are intercut. It is not often that one can see and hear a real, ‘live’ Nazi in action, talking (more or less) freely because he presumed himself to be among friends instead of with two of the most clever political propagandists of our time, working for the other side.

976MB | 1h 2mn | 762×572 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/3C7E0876430C09E/Der_lachende_Mann.mkv

Language:German
Subtitles:English

The post Walter Heynowski & Gerhard Scheumann – Der lachende Mann – Bekenntnisse eines Mörders (1966) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Walter Heynowski – O.K. (1964)

admin — Sun, 28 Apr 2019 07:30:46 +0000

Quote:
This fascinating and unique film is unfortunately almost entirely unknown in the West. The girl Doris S. leaves East Germany in 1961 to join her father in West Germany. Three years later, she returns and tells the camera why she returned. The reason is simple: West Germany is a country or moral and sexual corruption, full of bars, American soldiers, American cars, alcohol, and prostitution. Doris S. succumbed to both commercial sex and drinking, but finally decided to return to clean living in East Germany. Clearly designed to discourage actual or potential emigration from East into West Germany, the film nevertheless operates on a second, unintended level as well. For in this lengthy interview, Doris reveals non-verbal and unmistakable signs of fear and coercion, reinforced by the stentorian, Prussian style of the interviewer (rather, cross-examiner). Hesitation on her part is met with a sharp ‘Out with it!’ and one suddenly realizes that the girl’s freedom is at stake and that she was in fact subtly coerced into making this film. (‘We have had access to your diary… tell us about it….’) Worse still, there is continued emphasis on sexual matters, with close-ups of this pretty, fearful girl: her relations with American soldiers are emphasized and, in a sensational aberration from ‘Communist’ ideology, the old German-Nazi bogeyman of ‘Rassenschande’ is trotted out in reference to her even having slept with Black soldiers. The result is sexual titillation for the East German petty-bourgeois audience, otherwise carefully protected from eroticism. The strenuous, lecherous, transparent attempts of the invisible interviewer successfully to elicit sexually titillating (‘Of course, you had to show your American clients your personal charms?’) and politically damning information from the coolly controlled, yet obviously tense girl are frightening, as nervous gestures of the victim quite clearly reveal her simply as having exchanged her presumable sexual bondage to the Americans with another, possibly more dangerous dependence. At the end, the invisible man truly becomes a pornographic Big Brother as, satisfied with her performance on camera, he magnanimously ladles out a (small) drink to this obviously alcoholic girl – to drink on camera. The implicit obscenity of this unfair interview is staggering. Though the social problem raised is real enough – the presence of large numbers of women-less and well-paid (by German standards) American soldiers – there has rarely been as effective an unintentional self-indictment as this film.

– Amos Vogel, Film as a Subversive Art

483MB | 30mn 50s | 768×576| mkv

https://nitro.download/view/C8D6E385F2D12FF/OK.mkv

Language:German
Subtitles:English

The post Walter Heynowski – O.K. (1964) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Walter Heynowski – Aktion J (1961)

admin — Sat, 29 Dec 2018 09:28:47 +0000

Quote:
Compilation film, tracing the political career of Dr. Hans Globke, allegedly a former Nazi, now Secretary of State in West Germany.

Included in Amos Vogel’s classic book Film as a Subversive Art.

1.42GB | 1h 38mn | 1280×720 | mkv
https://nitro.download/view/8B2BEDF1F2F1DA2/Aktion_J_(Heynowski,_1961).mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:None

The post Walter Heynowski – Aktion J (1961) first appeared on Cinema of the World.