Synopsis: During the Russian campaign, a military pastor was to assist Private Baranowski, who was sentenced to death for his desertion, on his last night. It is also the last night before the departure for Stalingrad that the soldiers know that it means certain death. The pastor leaves his room to a captain so that he can meet his fiancé again. He himself remains in Baranowski’s cell and struggles with his conscience and emotion – even more than when he learns that the young doomed man fled for love. But the execution is carried out, and a member of the firing squad finds only cynical words for the fate of the soldier.Read More »
Bernhard Wicki
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Falk Harnack – Unruhige Nacht AKA The Restless Night (1958)
Falk Harnack1951-1960DramaGermanyWar -
Bernhard Wicki – Das Spinnennetz AKA Spider’s Web (1989)
1981-1990Bernhard WickiDramaGermanyQueer Cinema(s)Spider’s Web is a 1989 West German film directed by Bernhard Wicki. It is based on the eponymous 1923 novel by Joseph Roth. It was chosen as West Germany’s official submission to the 62nd Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film, but did not manage to receive a nomination. The film was the last ever submission by West Germany, due to German reunification in 1990, Germany competed at the 63rd Academy Awards as a single country.
The film was also entered into the 1989 Cannes Film Festival.Read More »
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Henri Decoin – La chatte aka The Cat (1958)
1951-1960CrimeDramaFranceHenri DecoinSynopsis: Paris 1943. After her husband’s death, killed by the Germans, Cora joins the résistance under the pseudonym “La Chatte” (the she-cat). Very skillfully she succeeds in a dangerous mission. The same evening she meets a Swiss journalist, Bernard, and falls in love with him. Bernard is a German officer who now has to decide between his love for Cora and his mission.Read More »
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Wim Wenders – Paris, Texas [+Extras] (1984)
Drama1981-1990ArthouseGermanyWim WendersQuote:
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 »