MOMA PRESENTS THIRTEEN FEATURE FILMS AND DOCUMENTARIES IN TWENTY-FIRST ANNUAL SURVEY OF RECENT GERMAN CINEMA
Series Opens with Aimée & Jaguar,
World War II Lesbian Romance Based on a True Story;
Also Includes Newly Restored Print of East German Classic Jacob the Liar
New Films from Germany
November 4–16, 1999
The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 1
From November 4 to 16, The Museum of Modern Art will present twelve new feature films and documentaries, many of them in their U.S. premieres, in its twenty-first annual survey of contemporary German cinema, New Films from Germany. The 1999 edition of the series coincides with two important events in German history: the tenth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, and the sixty-first anniversary of the Kristallnacht, on November 9, 1938, the Nazis’ first nationwide pogrom. Marking this occasion, the Department of Film and Video will also screen a newly restored copy of the now-classic East German film Jakob der Lügner (Jacob the Liar, Frank Beyer, 1974), adapted from a screenplay by Jurek Becker, who spent his childhood in a ghetto and concentration camps.
Several of the recent films included in the program also deal with life in the Third Reich: Aimée & Jaguar (Max Färberböck, 1999), based on the astounding true story of a love affair between two Berlin women, a Jew and a Nazi officer’s wife, during the War; Didi Danquart’s Viehud Levi (Jew-Boy Levi, 1999), set in the Black Forest in 1935; and the home movie documentary Das Phänomen Hitler—Schein und Wirklichkeit (The Hitler Phenomenon—Deception and Reality) in which Irmgard von zur Mühlen compares the footage Hitler’s mistress Eva Braun shot of him with that of the Nazi propaganda machine.
The program also features several films that reflect on the long Cold War period, including Laila Pakalnina’s virtually wordless The Shoe (1998), set in Latvia; Hans-Christian Schmid’s 23 (1998), about hackers in Hanover getting into trouble with the Soviets; and Andreas Kleinert’s Paths in the Night (Wege in der Nacht, 1999), about one man’s difficulty adjusting to life in a reunified and Western Germany.
One other film that examines the past in the light of the present is Jan Schmidt-Garre’s documentary Opera Fanatic (1998), about the New York tenor Stefan Zucker and his voyage to Italy to meet the leading sopranos of the 1950s, including Anita Cerquetti, Giuletta Simonato, and Carla Gavazzi.
Three of the five films set in the present are written and directed by women: Connie Walther’s drama Hauptsache Leben (Life is the Main Thing, 1999), about a single mother with breast cancer; Petra Katharina Wagner’s Oskar und Leni (Oscar and Leni, 1998), a quirky comedy of ill-matched lovers; and Angela Shanelec’s studied portrait of a teenager who becomes pregnant, Plätze in Städten (Places in the City, 1998).
The survey is rounded out by Yilmaz Arslan’s Yara (1998), about a young Turkish woman who wants more than anything to return to Germany, and killer.berlin.doc (1999), made by Tina Ellerkamp and Jörg Heitman, a film set in contemporary Berlin that poses as a documentary just as The Blair Witch Project does.
New Films from Germany was organized by Laurence Kardish, Senior Curator, Department of Film and Video, and is presented in cooperation with the Export-Union of German Cinema, New York/Munich, and the DEFA Archive (Amherst, Mass.).
