Hans-Jürgen Syberberg

Fritz Kortner performs a monologue.Read More »

“This surrealistic experimental film finds the son of a young nobleman staying with hash-smoking hippies in a seamy section of Munich. He falls for a hippie girl who is involved in shaking down the young man’s parents for money. She falls in love with the young man but the group continues to extract money from the parents in return for their wayward son. When he discovers the shakedown, his rage leads to tragedy for the star-crossed lovers.”
by Dan PavlidesRead More »

monologue
Kleist’s Penthesilea is certainly one of the most extraordinary plays in the German of the German dramatic repertoire. It is about the the wild and destructive passion that seizes the Queen of the Amazons and Achilles, the Achilles, the Greek hero, under the walls of Troy. Revulsed by its violence and strangeness -only in the 20th century did people realise the extent of this work – Goethe was and condemned it. Edith Clever brings out the full power of this of this feverish text.Read More »

Quote:
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 »

Quote:
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 »

Quote:
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 »