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Culture fact

For the making of Wings of
Desire
(Der Himmel über
Berlin
, 1987), a replica of the
Berlin Wall had to be built
because filming the Wall itself
was prohibited. Just two years
after the release of the film, East
Germany collapsed and the
Berlin Wall was torn down.






German Film (7)

BROWSE GERMAN FILMS: Contemporary German films 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - 7 | New releases | East German films
German film classics & collections 1 - 2 | German directors &actors | Documentaries | German movie soundtracks

GERMAN FILM INDEX (alphabetical)
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(West) German Films Since 1970 on DVD and Video 7


Heart of Glass / Herz aus Glas



Drama (1976)
Director: Werner Herzog
Starring: Josef Bierbichler, Stefan Güttler, Clemens Scheitz, Sonja Skiba
REVIEW: In his tireless crusade to expand the vocabulary of cinema, Werner Herzog turned Heart of Glass into a bold and challenging experiment. By placing all but one of his actors under hypnosis, Herzog achieved his desired effect, eliciting performances that seem oddly detached and trancelike, perfectly appropriate to a story about 19th-century Bavarian villagers who have lost their collective vision, cast adrift and descending into madness. They've lost the life-sustaining secret to the magical ruby-red glass that was once made in the local glassworks, and their predicament cannot be solved by the mystic (Josef Bierbichler, the only actor not hypnotized) who appears with premonitions of the fate of all humankind. All of this is mere pretense for Herzog's loftier (and not altogether successful) ambition: to present haunting, mysterious images that seem directly drawn from our collective subconscious. In his visionary defiance of conventional narrative, Herzog crafted a timeless, mesmerizing allegory, and one of the most eerily beautiful films ever made.
Review by Jeff Shannon
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Fox and His Friends / Faustrecht der Freiheit




Drama (1975)
Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Starring: Peter Chatel, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Karlheinz Böhm
REVIEW: The original German title, Faustrecht der Freiheit, which roughly translates as "Might Makes Right," describes rather bluntly the crux of this compelling drama, one of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's most acclaimed films. Fassbinder takes a rare starring role as Franz--"Fox" to his friends--a gay carny thrown out of work when the cops close a fairground sideshow. Introduced to a group of cultivated homosexuals by an antique and art dealer (Karlheinz Böhm of Peeping Tom fame), he becomes involved with high-class dandy Eugen (Peter Chatel), who finds the naive, uneducated innocent easy prey when he unexpectedly wins 500 thousand marks in the lottery. Eugen alternately flatters and humiliates Fox, ridiculing his working-class manners and tastes while sponging off his fast-disappearing fortune. The story is partially autobiographical, inspired by Fassbinder's own relationship with an illiterate butcher, but the director casts himself as the victim in the cinematic incarnation and turns his tormentor into a veritable vampire. Biographical considerations aside, it remains one of Fassbinder's most affecting, accomplished, and personal films, and he delivers a sweet, wounded performance as the proletariat Fox in a den of cultured, upper-class hounds. His evocation of the affluent gay community is catty and brittle, but ultimately this powerful drama is less about sexual orientation than class, power, and sexual control.
Review by Sean Axmaker
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Ali - Fear Eats the Soul / Angst essen Seele auf



Drama / Romance (1974)
Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Starring: Brigitte Mira, El Hedi ben Salem
REVIEW: Rainer Werner Fassbinder paid tribute to his mentor, Douglas Sirk, with this loose adaptation of All That Heaven Allows, the classic American soaper of a widow falling for younger man to the disapproval of family and friends. Fassbinder combines the Sirk melodrama with the story told in his own The American Soldier. An aging, lonely charwoman (sweet old Brigitte Mira) befriends a Moroccan guest worker (El Hedi ben Salem) at least 20 years her junior. Finding comfort and happiness in one another's company, they suddenly marry. Her kids are aghast, his friends appalled, and the neighborhood turns its back, so the two pull together for support. Their relationship ironically begins to unravel when the pressure of community prejudice eases and they must confront the gulf between them. Combining melodrama with social commentary, Fassbinder offers a sharp, incisive portrait of prejudice in modern Germany grounded in contemporary social conditions. Mira delivers a tender, vulnerable performance and Fassbinder molds Salem's stiffness into a distinctive character trait of a man ill at ease in German society. It's an assured and beautiful film, full of gliding camerawork and evocative images, and invested with intimacy and gentleness. Even Fassbinder's characteristically grim conclusion defies tragedy for a glimmer of hope, a welcome and affecting rarity in his career.
Review by Sean Axmaker
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Effi Briest




Drama (1974)
Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Starring: Hanna Schygulla, Wolfgang Schenck

REVIEW: Rainer Werner Fassbinder's film begins with young Effi Briest (Hanna Schygulla) recounting how her mother, though in love with a young man, married an older one with an established position. That young man--now older and well-off--comes back to their town and asks for Effi's hand in marriage, which her parents grant. But gradually her husband's aloof behavior leads her into an affair with a handsome soldier--a brief affair, but one that comes back to haunt Effi when she thinks she's left it far behind. The gorgeous black-and-white cinematography of Effi Briest captures the stark, stratified world of Effi's life; Schygulla's delicate performance expresses her sad and tender heart. Though the movie is perhaps too tied to the slow rhythms of the novel from which it was adapted, its elegant style and meticulous analysis of a rigid and hypocritical society has won great acclaim.
Review by Bret Fetzer
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The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser / Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle



Drama / Crime (1974)
Director: Werner Herzog
Starring: Bruno S., Walter Ladengast

REVIEW: In his widely acclaimed attempt to fathom The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, director Werner Herzog probes a real-life mystery that has puzzled German society for nearly two centuries. In the title role, Herzog ingeniously cast the equally mysterious street musician Bruno S., whose mesmerizing performance is unique in the history of film. Isolated since infancy in a dank cellar, the now-adult Kaspar is abandoned in 1820s Nuremburg by his unknown custodian; townsfolk futilely speculate on his origins, and he's shaped by a bourgeois villager who places rigid, conflicting restraints on his new and peculiar perspective on the world around him. It's telling that Herzog's preferred title is "Every Man for Himself and God Against All", for this is an eerily effective cautionary tale about an innocent man of nature who moves from one prison to another in a cruelly fateful universe. The mystery lingers, making The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser a deep, resonant reflection on the nature of humanity.
Review by Jeff Shannon
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Aguirre, The Wrath of God / Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes



Adventure / Drama (1972)
Director: Werner Herzog
Starring: Klaus Kinski, Daniel Ades
REVIEW: Quite simply a great movie, one whose implacable portrait of ruthless greed and insane ambition becomes more pertinent every year. The astonishing Klaus Kinski plays Don Lope de Aguirre, a brutal conquistador who leads his soldiers into the Amazon jungle in an obsessive quest for gold. The story is of the expedition's relentless degeneration into brutality and despair, but the movie is much more than its plot. Director Werner Herzog strove, whenever possible, to replicate the historical circumstances of the conquistadors, and the sheer human effort of traveling through the dense mountains and valleys of Brazil in armor creates a palpable sense of struggle and derangement. This sense of reality, combined with Kinski's intensely furious performance, makes Aguirre, the Wrath of God a riveting film. Its unique emotional power is matched only by other Herzog-Kinski collaborations like Fitzcarraldo and Woyzek.
Review by Bret Fetzer
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The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant / Die bittren Tränen der Petra von Kant


Drama (1972)
Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Starring: Margit Carstensen, Hanna Schygulla
REVIEW: Rainer Werner Fassbinder adapted his own play for this modern twist on The Women, the great all-female Hollywood classic of sex and social conventions in high society. Margit Carstensen is successful dress designer Petra, Irm Hermann her silent, obedient secretary/servant/Girl Friday Marlene (whom she alternately abuses and ignores), and Hanna Schygulla the callow, shallow young Karin, a seemingly naive blond beauty Petra treats as part protegée, part pet, until the calculating kitten turns on Petra. Michael Ballhaus's prowling camera finds Marlene silently hovering on the borders of Petra's dramas, looking on through doors and windows like an adoring lover from afar. Bouncing between catty melodrama and naked emotional need, it's a quintessentially Fassbinder portrait of doomed love, jealousy, and social taboos. The DVD features commentary by Fassbinder scholar Jane Shattuc, the early 1966 Fassbinder short films The City Tramp and The Little Chaos, the bonus documentary Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and filmographies.
Review by Sean Axmaker
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GERMAN FILM INDEX (alphabetical)
<< BACK | BROWSE GERMAN FILMS (chronological): | NEXT>>


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