Rüdiger Hacker

uote:
A film about a connection between love and death, which is different from ‘Till death do us part’: If love for each other is more important than life, then the common, voluntary death is a possibility to preserve this love. And if life dies inexorably, then death is an attempt to preserve life. A film about an amour fou between a young doctor and a former teacher. She, daughter of German Jews who emigrated to France, returns to Germany one day: she escapes from her external reality (life in France) into an internal past (the memory of her childhood). The locations of this ‘love and death film’: the Rhine, where it is not romantic, but productive: dirty banks, chemical factories, nuclear power plants and hopeless sadness. Shabby hotel rooms in crummy dosshouses; the view of industrial suburbs where one can only die, but not live. A film of a desolate beauty.Read More »

Description from the University of Massachussetts website:
This two-part drama examines the fate of Haneke’s own generation which came of age after World War II. The first part depicts the generational gap between 1950s teenagers and their parents while the second shows this same group of characters twenty years later as they have grown up to be dysfunctional and suicidal adults. Regarded as the most significant of Haneke’s early works, Lemmings contains incipient treatments of many of the themes he would later elaborate on in his theatrical features.Read More »