German

  • Fritz Lang – Das Indische Grabmal AKA The Indian Tomb (1959)

    1951-1960AdventureClassicsFritz LangGermany

    Synopsis:
    Harald Berger and his Indian lover, the temple dancer Seetha, desperately flee from the shikaris (cavalry) of Eschanapur’s maharajah Chandra, who burn a whole village just for letting them pass invoking traditional hospitality. A spider weaves a web so the trackers won’t look for them in a Shiva temple, but she is caught outside, he left for dead after a steep fall into a crocodile-infested water. Meanwhile his sister Irene and brother-in-law Dr. Walter Rhode, the architect who refuses to build a tomb to bury Seetah alive for scorning the ruler’s love before the hospital he was asked for, guess the truth, and try to make their assigned Indian servant Asagara talk, who dreads incriminating his sovereign.Read More »

  • Wolf-Eckart Bühler – Der Havarist AKA The Shipwrecker (1984)

    Drama1981-1990GermanyWolf-Eckart Bühler

    Actor Sterling Hayden found himself cooperating with the House Un-American Activities Committee in 40s and 50s Hollywood. This film tracks the restless actor’s search for meaning, his discomfort with Hollywood’s easy money and the circumstances that led to his naming names through re-enactments.Read More »

  • F.W. Murnau – Phantom (1922) (HD)

    1921-1930F.W. MurnauGermanySilent

    Quote:
    Phantom is a 1922 silent film that was directed by F. W. Murnau the same year Murnau directed Nosferatu. It is an example of German Expressionist film and has a surreal, dreamlike quality.Read More »

  • Michael Haneke – Das weisse Band – Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte AKA The White Ribbon (2009)

    2001-2010DramaGermanyMichael HanekeMystery

    Quote:
    Ever wonder about the ancestors of the murderous jocks in Funny Games? In the Palme d’Or-winning The White Ribbon, Michael Haneke time travels to rural Germany on the cusp of WWI to find the answer—or, rather, to make the audience’s collective skin crawl at the question. The setting is the small village of Eichwald, a bucolic commune that, presided over by such stern patriarchs as the landowning baron (Ulrich Tukur) and the pastor (Burghart Klaussner), is presented as a 19th-century holdover inexorably giving way to the darkening modernity of new times. Not that Haneke displays much nostalgia for the town’s traditions: Life here is dismal, oppressive, and rigidly hierarchical, erected on puritanical morals and reinforced with ritualized punishment. Hitler—the “bitter flower of German irrationalism,” as Hans-Jürgen Syberberg once put it—may still lurk beyond the horizon, but the seeds of fascism have already been sown in society’s unquestioning adherence to power structures.Read More »

  • Donatello Dubini & Fosco Dubini – Ludwig 1881 (1993)

    1991-2000Donatello DubiniDramaFosco DubiniGermany

    While Luchino Visconti’s “Ludwig” (1972) is regarded as a classic, it is little-known that Helmut Berger appeared a second time as Bavaria’s troubled king. “Ludwig 1881” (1993) by Donatello and Fosco Dubini focuses on Ludwig’s journey through Switzerland in summer 1881. Munich court actor Josef Kainz was hired to recite Schiller’s “Wilhelm Tell” in front of the alleged historical locations, to transport the King into a world of poetry and imagination. After a few days the trip had turned into a nightmare for Kainz, who was soon exhausted from the King’s eccentric demands and antics. Once again, the desire for the ideal was marred by the all-too-human.Read More »

  • Karl Hartl – Mozart AKA The Life and Loves of Mozart (1955)

    1951-1960AustraliaDramaKarl HartlMusical

    If you agonized through “Amadeus”, cringing at the depiction of a giggling buffoon and his featherbrained Constanze, shuddering at the underlying premise that God gave the gift to the wrong man for reasons we just can’t understand, then this film may provide you with a pleasant antidote. Filmed in 1955, probably in anticipation of the bicentenary of his birth, it gives a totally different view of the composer, and recreates the last year of his life on a more intimate anti-blockbuster scale. But though it is an engaging effort with many fine points, it doesn’t succeed in redeeming Mozart from the fictions of Milos Forman’s travesty, because it is itself a fictionalization that distorts in its own way the character of the composer.Read More »

  • Donatello Dubini & Fosco Dubini – Die Reise Nach Kafiristan AKA The Journey to Kafiristan (2001)

    2001-2010ArthouseDocumentaryDonatello DubiniFosco DubiniGermany

    In 1939, the author Annemarie Schwarzenbach and the ethnologist Ella Maillart travel together by car to Kabul, but each is in pursuit of her own project. Annemarie Schwarzenbach, who was among Erika and Klaus Mann’s circle of friends in the 30s, is searching for a place of refuge in the Near East to discover her own self. Ella Maillart justifies her restlessness, her need for movement and travel, with a scientific pretext: she would like to explore the mysterious Kafiristan Valley and make a name for herself with publications on the archaic life of the nomads living there. Both women are on the run, but political developments and their own biographies catch up with them again and again. Their mutual journey through the outside world, which runs from Geneva via the Balkans and Turkey to Persia, is compounded by the inner world of emotions with a tender love story.Read More »

  • Alan Vydra – The Pleasure Shoppe (1980)

    1971-1980Alan VydraEroticaUSA

    Women who enter into the Pleasure Shop that is owned by Hoffman and his sons have the time of their livesRead More »

  • Christian Braad Thomsen – Fassbinder: at elske uden at kræve AKA Fassbinder: To Love Without Demands (2015)

    2011-2020Christian Braad ThomsenDenmarkDocumentary

    Quote:
    Based on the personal recollections of Danish film journalist Christian Braad Thomsen, Fassbinder: To Love Without Demands is an episodic but thorough examination of the man and his works. Starting with the terrible reception of his first feature film Love Is Colder Than Death at the 1969 Berlin Film Festival, the bio-doc builds through photographs, stills, audio recordings and filmed interviews a portrait of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, his loose but consuming relationships with his family and the extended families he created around him. [MARK WILSHIN, Dog and Wolf]Read More »

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