Judit Pogány

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Die Rebellion (The Rebellion). 1993. Austria. Directed by Michael Haneke. With its silent-era aesthetic of sepia tones and muted color tints, and its interweaving of realism and fantasy, Haneke’s haunting adaptation of Joseph Roth’s expressionistic 1924 novel is an homage to the great Weimar cinema of G. W. Pabst and F. W. Murnau. In a heartbreaking performance, Branko Samarovski plays Andreas Pum, a soldier who loses his leg during the Great War and becomes an organ-grinder to earn a few coins a day. To this loyal citizen of the State, the veterans and firebrands who march in protest against society’s neglect are lazy, insubordinate “heathens.” But when an ugly tram incident condemns Pum to a life of penury and loneliness, his soul is awakened to the bitter waste of a life spent in duty to God and Empire. In German; 90 minRead More »

A husband and wife, drifting apart, reflect on the events leading up to the worst argument of their marriage.

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“It’s the rawness of the film that makes us believe we are unquestionably seeing the truth.”
Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz

A heavy going realistic slice of life domestic drama that is filmed in black and white. It’s a followup to Béla Tarr’s other domestic strife tales Family Nest and The Outsider. This one keys in on marital strife. It’s about a struggling young couple’s confrontations and their own inability to freely communicate with each other. Tarr was evidently influenced by the works of Ranier Werner Fassbinder and John Cassavettes.Read More »

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Friedrich Dürrenmatt had written a film script entitled Es geschah am hellichten Tag (It Happened in Broad Daylight). Not happy with the ending he had devised for the first version, he decided to write a new one. This time he chose the novel format, completely changing the epilogue and the morals implied in the story as he had originally conceived it. In the first version, the events are resolved with sort of a conventional closure, with the main character proved successful, not leaving much space for any further reflection; in the subsequent novel (Das Versprechen, also known as The Pledge in English) the author exploits the story to explore the mechanics of detective fiction and the metaphysics of evil. In Das Versprechen, Dürrenmatt not only changed the ending of the story, he also moved the point of view on the events to another character.Read More »

A former inspector on his last day with the department is called in to investigate a child murder. A suspect soon confesses to the crime, but knowing that the confession came only after the man was browbeaten in a relentless, 20-hour interrogation, the inspector’s keen police instincts tell him that the man is not the real murderer and that there is a serial killer at work, with the girl’s murder being related to other child murders that occurred in the area. However, he is alone in his assessment and the police close the case.Read More »