Volker Schlöndorff

  • Volker Schlöndorff – Die Stille nach dem Schuß AKA The Legend of Rita (2000)

    Volker Schlöndorff1991-2000DramaGermanyQueer Cinema(s)Romance
    Die Stille nach dem Schuß (2000)
    Die Stille nach dem Schuß (2000)

    Die Stille nach dem Schuss or The Silence after the Shot, known in English as The Legend of Rita, is a 2000 German film about fictionalised exiled West German radical left Red Army Faction members, though the fictional characters all have close parallels to several real-life RAF members. After a brief overview of the initial bank robberies of the 2nd of June Movement with the distribution of chocolate kisses as well as a disastrous prison break at the Westberliner Prison, the group flees, via the Friedrichstraße train station, into the German Democratic Republic.Read More »

  • Jean-Daniel Pollet & Volker Schlöndorff – Méditerranée (1963)

    1961-1970ExperimentalFranceJean-Daniel PolletShort FilmVolker Schlöndorff

    Méditerranée is a 1963 French experimental film directed by Jean-Daniel Pollet with assistance from Volker Schlöndorff. It was written by Philippe Sollers and produced by Barbet Schroeder, with music by Antione Duhamel. The 45 minute film is cited as one of Pollet’s most influential films, which according to Jonathan Rosenbaum directly influenced Jean-Luc Goddard’s Contempt, released later the same year.[1] Footage for the film was shot around the Mediterranean, including at a Greek temple, a Sicilian garden, the sea, and also features a fisherman, a bullfighter, and a girl on an operating table.Read More »

  • Volker Schlöndorff – Der Unhold aka The Ogre (1996)

    1991-2000DramaGermanyVolker SchlöndorffWar

    By STEPHEN HOLDEN
    In its most unsettling scenes, set at a castle being used as a military training school for Hitler youth, Volker Schlondorff’s film “The Ogre” suggests the stirring cinematic equivalent of a Wagner opera.

    As you watch hundreds of adolescent boys being hyped with a messianic blend of heroic German mythology and Nazi ideology and participating in torch-lit rituals and athletic contests, you sense of the thrill of being a boy swept up in the demented pageantry and passion of the Nazi cause.Read More »

  • Volker Schlöndorff – Der Namenlose Tag AKA The Nameless Day (2017)

    Volker Schlöndorff2011-2020CrimeDramaGermany

    Der namenlose Tag is Volker Schlöndorff’s first-ever TV crime drama…Read More »

  • Volker Schlöndorff – Die Moral der Ruth Halbfass AKA The Morals of Ruth Halbfass (1972)

    Volker Schlöndorff1971-1980CrimeDramaGermany

    from Hans-Bernhard Moeller and George Lellis, “Volker Schlöndorff’s Cinema”

    Volker Schlöndorff based his film “Die Moral der Ruth Halbfass” on a rather spectacular murder case that involved a rich Düsseldorff industrialist’s wife, Minouche Schubert. The case was the stuff of tabloid newspaper exposés, and to some extent “The Morals of Ruth Halbfass” was a calculated attempt by Schlöndorff to win over a popular audience.Read More »

  • Volker Schlöndorff – Der plötzliche Reichtum der armen Leute von Kombach AKA The Sudden Wealth of Poor People of Kombach (1971)

    Volker Schlöndorff1971-1980Amos Vogel: Film as a Subversive ArtArthouseDramaGermany

    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 »

  • Volker Schlöndorff – Ulzhan (2007)

    2001-2010ArthouseDramaKazakhstanVolker Schlöndorff

    Somewhere in the endless steppes of Central Asia lies a treasure. One man holds the key to it, a fragment of an ancient map. But in his restless quest, Charles isn’t looking for fame or glory. He’s looking for a way to heal his wounded soul. He’s looking for love. Ulzhan felt it the first time she laid eyes on him.Read More »

  • Volker Schlöndorff – Return to Montauk (2017)

    2011-2020DramaGermanyVolker Schlöndorff

    29f7c043f76a2bde437fd0d52a185152

    Quote:
    The author Max Zorn, now in his early 60s, is on a promotional book tour in New York when he meets up again with the woman he could never forget. They spend a weekend together. 17 years have passed. Can there be a future for their past?Read More »

  • Volker Schlöndorff – Die Blechtrommel AKA The Tin Drum [Director’s Cut] (1979)

    1971-1980DramaGermanyVolker SchlöndorffWar

    29f7c043f76a2bde437fd0d52a185152

    Quote:
    “A country unable to mourn,” Volker Schlöndorff wrote in his journal as he adapted Günter Grass’ novel, The Tin Drum. “Germany, to this day, is the poisoned heart of Europe.” When the film premiered in West German cinemas in early May 1979, it figured within a country’s larger (and, in many minds, long overdue) reckoning with a legacy of shame and violence. Indeed, the Nazi past haunted the nation’s screens, more so than it ever had since the end of World War II. The American miniseries Holocaust aired that year on public television in February and catalyzed wide discussion about Germany’s responsibility for the Shoah. Later that month, Peter Lilienthal’s David gained accolades at the Berlin Film Festival for its stirring depiction of a young Jewish boy living underground in the Reich’s capital during the deportations to the camps. History returned as film; retrospective readings of the Third Reich by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Alexander Kluge, Edgar Reitz, Helma Sanders-Brahms, and Hans-Jürgen Syberberg (among others) would become the calling card of the New German Cinema and bring this group of critical filmmakers an extraordinary international renown. In 1979, The Tin Drum won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. A year later, it would become the first feature from the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) to receive an Oscar for best foreign film.Read More »

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