Germany

Quote:
It’s settled: we’re going to film CAPITAL on Marx’s scenario–the only logical solution.
–Sergei Eisenstein, Oct 12, 1927.

This is an English subtitled copy of the ‘theatrical’ or ‘cinema’ version of Alexander Kluge’s Nachrichten aus der ideologischen Antike: Marx – Eisenstein – Das Kapital or News From Ideological Antiquity: Marx – Eisenstein – Capital. The original work made for broadcast or DVD was finished in 2008 and ran 570 minutes long. This 84 minute cut prepared by Kluge for exhibition condenses this mammoth project into something like a digestible greatest hits or highlight reel. Kluge’s film is a discursive essay about and around Eisenstein’s notes on a film of Marx’s Capital–written shortly after the release of OCTOBER in 1927 and connected to his ideas for conceiving a film of Joyce’s ULYSSES. According to Helmet Merker writing on the 570 minute version, “Eighty years on, Alexander Kluge joins the party and takes up where Eisenstein failed, because neither Hollywood’s capitalists nor Moscow’s Communists were prepared to send the necessary funds his way… Scholarly stuff, wide and deep in scope, yet bold and playful. But even if your own study of Marx is no more than a faded memory, it is hugely enjoyable to watch and listen to these experts… Alexander Kluge is a great manipulator, an industrious loom, who weaves the most far-flung observations into his system. He is not filming “Das Kapital” but researching how one might find images to make Marx’s book filmable. The quest is the way is the destination… In Kluge’s hands this becomes a collage of documentary, essayistic and fictional scenes, interviews and still photos, archive images of smoking factory chimneys, time-lapse footage of pounding machines and mountains of products, diary entries and blackboards scribbled with quotes referencing constructivism and concrete poetry… Unlike Eisenstein, who was driven to desperation by the herculean task of cutting the 29 hours of “October” into a 90-minute film version and turned to drugs into the process which left him temporarily blind, Kluge cooly sticks to his guns and his nine hours. And it’s not a minute too long.”
Kluge may have stuck to his guns but he also offered another option.

Embedded in this film is a short film by Tom Tykwer called THE INSIDE OF THINGS
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Sterile practice
7 August 2010 | by oOgiandujaOo (United Kingdom)

My only previous experience of Farocki prior to watching Leben – BRD (How to live in the FRG) was Die Bewerbung (The Interview). The subject of that documentary film was the preparing of people who had difficulty finding work for job interviews. The movie highlighted how unnatural it was to be in a situation where you had to sell yourself (the training provides promotion of an unnatural self-awareness), where you have to project a compliant image for the Procrustean corporate scrutiniser. Leben – BRD expands on this limited scenario to provide a number of training scenarios. This includes training people to kill, provide obstetric care, separate those involved in domestic arguments etc. All this is interspersed with factory images of equipment being tested for longevity (for example a car door being opened and closed a thousand times by machine). It all comes off as quite banal and sterile programming. There is no room for personality, there is no room for personal connection. I’ve heard how feeling is something that has been outsourced to professionals (psychiatrists), here the psychiatrists are just as impersonal, running a child through a quick-march battery of standardised tests, getting a patient to draw a time series graph of the progression of their phobia, incapable of providing what the patient needs, a shoulder to cry on, someone to hug and understand.Read More »

Samuel Beckett’s German Television productions for Süddeutscher Rundfunk.

Berühmt wurde Samuel Beckett als Theaterinnovateur (Warten auf Godot) und Romancier (Der Namenlose), der Literaturnobelpreisträger schrieb jedoch auch Hörspiele und inszenierte Kurzfilme für das Fernsehen. 1966 produzierte er für den Süddeutschen Rundfunk (SDR) im Rahmen der Reihe »Der Autor als Regisseur« das Fernsehspiel He Joe und schuf damit ein revolutionäres Stück Medienkunst. Bis 1986 folgten sieben weitere »crazy inventions«, wie Beckett seine TV-Arbeiten nannte. Immer wieder erprobt er, von den technischen Möglichkeiten des Theaters zunehmend enttäuscht, neue Arrangements für Stimme und Schweigen, für Raum, Kamera und Musik. Damit erfand Beckett, so Gilles Deleuze in dem Essay Erschöpft, neben den Sprachen des Romans und der Theaterstücke eine »Sprache III«: »Das Entscheidende beim Bild ist nicht sein kläglicher Inhalt, sondern die wahnsinnige Energie, die jederzeit explodieren kann.«Read More »

In 1992, Wenders possibly bewildered a good portion of his fans by making a 30 minute short for children, titled Arisha, the Bear and the Stone Ring. It’s a fable about the Bear leaving Berlin (it’s the city’s emblem), featuring Wim Wenders dressed as Santa Claus…

SYNOPSIS
The story description posted on Wenders’ website reads as follows:
The bear leaves Berlin. He’s fed up. On the way, two Russian ladies – Anna and her daughter, Arisha – hire him as their driver. During the trip, a Santa Claus who cannot stand Christmas, and then a Vietnamese family, join the group whose destination is a spot by the sea. There, on the beach, lies a stone ring, which wants to be found.
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Quote:
From its hazily Southwestern skyscraper surfaces to its barren, prickly bush and junk car-pocked bedrock, there’s something slightly off-kilter about the America of Paris, Texas. The central masculine cast is nothing if not indigenous—when the sun-punched Travis Henderson (Harry Dean Stanton) first stumbles into frame, his uncultivated, hirsute face and dusty red cap seem like natural geological formations that have been patiently waiting, cragged and craterous, for us to anticlimactically discover them—and the relationship-oriented, plot-shunning dialog by western playwright Sam Shepherd taps into dialectal heartbrokenness without a shred of disassociating local lingo. But there are tellingly alien factors: How did both Henderson brothers wind up with women who drip sophisticated European sex appeal from their ripe lips and honey hair? And why does every truck stop along highway 10 emit the same sickly green aura that glows like a clumsy, wistful metaphor against the ferociously red sunset? And how do aridly panoramic, sneeringly and smokily man-made L.A. skylines upstage the parched siltstone and yucca tree of God’s creation in a film with Texas in the title?Read More »

Quote:
Conceived as the ultimate road movie, this decades-in-the-making science-fiction epic from Wim Wenders follows the restless Claire Tourneur (Solveig Dommartin) across continents as she pursues a mysterious stranger (William Hurt) in possession of a device that can make the blind see and bring dream images to waking life. With an eclectic soundtrack that gathers a host of the director’s favorite musicians, along with gorgeous cinematography by Robby Müller, this breathless adventure in the shadow of Armageddon takes its heroes to the ends of the earth and into the oneiric depths of their own souls. Presented here in its triumphant 287-minute director’s cut, Until the End of the World assumes its rightful place as Wenders’ magnum opus, a cosmic ode to the pleasures and perils of the image and a prescient meditation on cinema’s digital future.Read More »

IMDB User Comments (Frank from Iceland):

The Goalie s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick is the first collaboration of
Wim Wenders and Peter Handke, a collaboration which produced Wings of
Desire in 1987. In The Goalie, Handke and Wenders explore patterns of
thought and their relation to reality.

The main action of the film occurs in the first minute, where we get
one view of how the Goalie misses blocking a penalty kick and loses
the game for his team.

Later, we get to hear him describe the action and we also get a view
of the way it really happened, the videotaped highlights on the tv
news. They are three wonderfully different plausible representations
which each explain the result just as well. While only one explains
the goalie’s anxiety before the penalty kick, all three allow for his
anxiety afterwards.Read More »

Prison discharges Hans into a freedom as inhospitable as the winter weather. As a stranger, he strays in familiar streets, bars, flies to a friend in Berlin.

Always fleeing from invisible enemies.
Always on the way to an indeterminate goal.

Wenders’ graduation film for the Academy of Film and Television marked out Wenders’ innovative and individual style, which was to become such a recognizable characteristic of his later films.

This is very rare VHS -rip.Low quality..Read More »

From tankmagazine
“Fashion, I’ll have nothing of it,” announces Wim Wenders in the opening to his 1990 fashion documentary Notebook on Cities and Clothes. It was the year after the Berlin Wall fell, and there is a sense in his introduction, of the German film-maker defending a subject his critics might view as superficial. In a voiceover, Wenders explains that he had been invited to make a short film about the fashion industry by the Centre Pompidou. And while initially dismissive, he found that the idea grew on him – “After all, why not examine fashion… Maybe fashion and cinema had something in common.”Read More »