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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.
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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
Heart of Glass
/ Herz aus Glas |
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Drama (1976)
Director: Werner Herzog
Starring: Josef Bierbichler, Stefan Güttler, Clemens Scheitz,
Sonja Skiba
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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 |
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Drama (1975)
Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Starring: Peter Chatel, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Karlheinz Böhm
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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 |
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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
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Drama (1974)
Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Starring: Hanna Schygulla, Wolfgang Schenck
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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 |
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Drama / Crime (1974)
Director: Werner Herzog
Starring: Bruno S., Walter Ladengast
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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 |
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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
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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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|
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