Hans-Jürgen Syberberg

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Die Nacht – a gigantic dramatic monologue in four parts like Wagner’s Ring – was produced as a film after first performances at the Theâtre des Amandiers in Paris in autumn 1984. Throughout six hours, Edith Clever plays poems, prose texts, letters, speeches, and dramatic roles invoking grief and farewell, doom and the nearness of death. The montage of poetic subject matter spans from Goethe and Kleist, Platon and Hölderlin, Novalis and Jean Paul to the Indian chief Seattle’s speech and texts by Hans Jürgen Syberberg.Read More »

In 1975, the West German filmmaker, Hans-Jurgen Syberberg directed an astounding documentary called The Confessions of Winifred Wagner (Winifred Wagner Und Die Geschichte Des Hauses Wahnfried Von 1914-1975). Throughout the film, Winifred, the geriatric daughter-in-law of the famed composer Richard Wagner, talks about her cultural and political influence during the Third Reich. Yet in contradiction to the films’s title, Winifred confesses nothing. The contradictions within her discourse do, however, reveal the extent of her delusions and political commitment as an unrepentant fascist. She paradoxically describes herself as a completely apolitical being, adamant that her classification as a grade three Nazi at the end of the war was a grave injustice. Read More »

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In the last decades of the 19th century, Karl May (1842-1912) was the most successful author in Germany. For 30 years he turned out 40 pages a day, constructing a staggering body of kitsch adventure-fiction that may originally have owed a certain debt to James Fenimore Cooper but that, finally, created a mythology quintessentially German.
In his most popular stories, written in the first person, May recalled his adventures in the American West with his idealized white blood-brother, Old Shatterhand, and the equally idealized Indian warrior, Winnetou. Seeking a change of locale, May also wrote similar first-person tales about adventures in the Near and Far East.Read More »

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The topic of the film is Alois Brummer, a likeable and inoffensive man from Lower Bavaria, a sex film producer. A man, small and round in stature, unusually active, with a nose for the market, dealing in films and girls in his own special manner in Bavaria – as another man would deal in used cars. There are worse things in our market-oriented society and in film as well. The film describes a forgotten or neglected form of triviality.Read More »

Synopsis:
The story of the legendary King Ludwig II of Bavaria (1845-1886), his opera interest and friendship with theatre personalities such as Richard Wagner and Joseph Kainz, and at the same time a reflection of the German 1800s.Read More »

Synopsis:
Richard Wagner’s last opera has remained controversial since its first performance for its unique, and, for some, unsavory blending of religious and erotic themes and imagery. Based on one of the medieval epic romances of King Arthur and the search for the holy grail (the chalice touched by the lips of Christ at the last supper), it recounts over three long acts how a “wild child” unwittingly invades the sacred precincts of the grail, fulfilling a prophecy that only such a one can save the grail’s protectors from a curse fallen upon them. Interpreters of the work have found everything from mystical revelation to proto-fascist propaganda in it.Read More »

Director Hans-Jurgen Syberberg examines the rise and fall of the Third Reich in this brooding seven-hour masterpiece, which incorporates puppetry, rear-screen projection, and a Wagnerian score into a singular epic vision. Syberberg, who grew up under Nazi tyranny, ruminates on good and evil and the rest of humanity’s complicity in the horrors of the holocaust.Read More »