Das Neue Kino: Margarethe von Trotta and New German Cinema
November
6, 2003–January 19, 2004
The silver anniversary of MoMA’s annual
survey of recent films from Germany continues, with highlights
from years past celebrating the originality and strong social
consciousness of contemporary German cinema. January’s
installment features films that have become classics, including
Doris Dörrie’s Men (1985), Helke Sander’s Redupers—The
All-Around Reduced Personality (1978), Werner Schroeter’s
The Rose King (1986), Volker Schlöndorff’s Circle
of Deceit (1981), and Wim Wenders’s Wrong Move (1975).
Andreas Dresen, Roland Suso Richter, and Tom Tykwer are represented
by recent works: Grill Point (2002), A Handful of
Grass (1999),
and Wintersleepers (1997), respectively.
Organized by Laurence Kardish, Senior Curator. Presented in association
with the Export-Union of German Films, Munich (Christian Dorsch,
Managing Director; Nicole Kaufmann, Project Coordinator) and with
the special assistance of its East Coast representative, Oliver Mahrdt.
Thanks also go to the German Information Center, the German Consulate,
and Goethe House for their continued support.
. 1979. Germany. Directed by Margarethe von Trotta.
Screenplay by von Trotta, Luisa Francia, Martje Grohmann, Jutta Lampe.
With Lampe, Gudrun Gabriel, Jessica Frueh. Von Trotta’s second
feature film describes the relationship between two sisters who share
a life of mutual dependency until one commits suicide. The surviving
sister coolly goes about finding a replacement sister. In German,
English subtitles. 92 min.
. 1985. Germany. Written and
directed by Margarethe von Trotta. With Barbara Sukowa, Daniel
Olbrychski, Otto Sander.
Rosa Luxemburg was a revolutionary who believed in social justice
and change. Known both as a pacifist and a firebrand, “Red
Rosa” spent most of World War I in prison; when released she
immediately took part in the cataclysmic events that led to the abdication
of the Kaiser. She was murdered a year later. As Rosa Luxemburg,
Sukowa gives the performance of a lifetime. In German, English subtitles.
122 min.
. 2003. Germany. Directed by Margarethe von Trotta.
Screenplay by von Trotta and Pamela Katz. With Katja Riemann, Maria
Schrader, Martin Feifel. In Berlin in early 1943, Jewish husbands
of Aryan wives were rounded up and imprisoned in a building on Rosenstrasse
in preparation for their final deportation. Having already refused
to divorce their husbands, the women stood out on the street for
two weeks in icy winter demanding that the Nazis return their husbands
to them. Courtesy Samuel Goldwyn Films. In German and English, English
subtitles. 133 min.
.
1981. Germany. Written and directed by Margarethe von Trotta. With
Jutta Lampe, Barbara Sukowa, Rüdiger Vogler. “The details
and personalities of the two main characters…and their development
parallel the personal history of the Ensslin sisters: Gudrun, who
was imprisoned as a terrorist in Stammheim, where she died in 1977,
and Christiane, who worked as an editor of a women’s magazine….
At Gudrun’s funeral I met Christiane for the first time….
This woman, whom I befriended, is the inspiration of my film”
(von Trotta). In German, English subtitles. 106 min.
. 2002. Germany.
Written and directed by Oskar Roehler. With Marie Beumer, Andre
Hennicke, Vadim Glowna.
Roehler, whose Nowhere to Go was a highlight of New Directors/New
Films in 2001, expands what is essentially a chamber piece into a
feverish portrait of an explosive relationship. Robert, a film director,
and Marie, a pediatrician, thrive on fights and passion until the
illness of Robert’s father throws him into damaging despair.
In German, English subtitles. 91 min.
.
2003. Germany. Directed by Max Färberböck. Screenplay
by Färberböck, Johan von Dueffel, Sarah Khan, Matthias
Pacht, Moritz Rinke. With Catharina Schuchmann, Justus von Dohnany,
Joerg Schuettauf. Färberböck, best known in the United
States for Aimée and Jaguar (1999), depicts the emotional
reactions of eight urban adults—German and Muslim immigrants—to
the events of September 11. A wild and provocative mosaic of the
social tensions that both bind and alienate. In German, English
subtitles. 115 min.
. 2002. Germany. Ten short works
from German film schools: The Day Winston Ngakambe Came to Kiel
(Jasper Ahrens); Fetish (Richard Lehun); Cluck Cluck
(Olaf Encke); War on Stones (Andreas Teuchert); Nuts and
Bolts (Andreas Krein); Tricky Fingers (Andre Nebe); Last
Train (Tom Uhlenbruck); Knight Games (Sven Martin); Sofa
(Hyekung Jung); and Spring (Oliver Held). In German and Italian,
English subtitles.
Program 75 min.
. 2002. Germany. Directed by Oliver
Hirschbiegel. Screenplay by Bodo Kiirchloff. With Hannelore Elsner.
A departure for Hirschbiegel from his earlier thriller, The Experiment,
and a bravura solo piece for the inestimable Elsner, My Last Film describes a celebrated actress, betrayed by her husband yet again,
in the process of leaving her apartment for good. She asks a young
cameraman to record her packing up and discarding belongings as she
bitterly recounts her personal and professional life. In German,
English subtitles. 90 min.
. 2002. Germany.
Directed by Iain Dilthey. Screenplay by Dilthey, Silke Parzich.
With Susanne-Marie Wrage, Klaus
Gruenberg, Robert Lohr. Dilthey, whose I’ll Wait on You Hand
and Foot was shown in last year’s Kino program, here imagines
the sensual liberation of a minister’s wife. In a provincial
village in Germany rent by a savage murder, a wife dutifully attends
to her taciturn husband while unexpectedly becoming involved with
the town’s mechanic. Her growing passion leads to an uncharacteristic
but catastrophic act. In German, English subtitles. 90 min.
.
2002. Germany. Written and directed by Brend Fischer. With its
annual beetroot festival
and its gardens and beer halls, Dachau promotes itself as a fine
Bavarian town and a nice place to visit. Its name, however, will
be forever associated with the first Nazi concentration camp. Veteran
cameraman Fischer, who grew up in Dachau, depicts its citizens trying
to put a cheery face on a harrowing legacy. In German, English subtitles.
80 min.
. 2002. Germany. Directed by Winfried Bonengel. Screenplay
by Bonengel, Douglas Graham, Ingo Hasselbach. With Harry Baer, Dieter
Laser, Luci Van Org. Bonengel’s debut feature is a violent
melodrama about one downside of German reunification: the increasing
xenophobia among young men from the East unaccustomed to the ethnic
fluidity of the West. Two friends, released from prison years after
attempting to flee the East, discover a new country with its own
perplexing set of social coordinates. In German, English subtitles.
105 min.
. 2002. Germany. Directed by Fatih Akin. Screenplay by Ruth
Toma. With Moritz Bleibtreu, Barnaby Metschurat, Antonella Attili.
In this revealing chronicle of cultural adaptation, Akin (whose feature
In July was released nationally in 2001) charts the integration of
an Italian family into the social fabric of urban Germany. The father
establishes a restaurant, the mother cooks and longs for the sun,
and two brothers assimilate and become rivals in love. In German
and Italian, English subtitles. 120 min.
.
2003. Germany. Written and directed by Lothar Lambert. With Eva Ebner,
Michael Sittner. Lambert, a veteran of many seasons of New German
Cinema, returns with a charming documentary about an extraordinary
octogenarian. Ebner, unafraid and outspoken, grew up during the Third
Reich, and became a noted assistant film director and actress. Lambert
calls his film “a kind of homage—with the odd barb here
and there.” In German, English subtitles. 81 min.
. 2002. Germany. Written and directed by Felix
Fuchssteiner. With Frank Giering, Michael Schenk, Karl Heinz Geirke.
A black comedy about a treacherous mountain highway and the two enterprising
brothers who live underneath its curve. In German, English subtitles.
45 min.
.
2001. Germany. Written and directed by Bernd Bohlich. With Heiner
Lauterbach,
Susanna Simon, Sylvester
Groth. West Germany’s first media baron Axel Springer (1912–1985),
an early promoter of German reunification and a supporter of Israel,
was at once reviled by the left and held in suspicion by the right.
This two-part biography vividly charts Springer’s postwar ascent
and dramatically describes his later spiritual crisis. In German,
English subtitles. 180 min.
. 1981. Germany. Written and directed by Percy Adlon.
With Eva Mattes, Jürgen Arndt, Noberta Wartha, Wolf Euba. Adlon’s
first feature was based on the memoirs of Céleste Albaret,
who in 1922 was a provincial girl acting as housekeeper and nurse
to the fifty-year-old secluded, asthmatic writer Marcel Proust. Adlon
would go on to make such irreverent films as Sugarbaby (1984) and
Baghdad Café (1987) after this moving Proustian work. In German,
English subtitles. 107 min.
. 1991. Germany. Directed
by Peter Sehr. Screenplay by Sehr, based on the novel by Siegfried
Lenz. With Mirjana Jokovic, Ben Becker, Pascal Breuer, Vladimir Torbica.
Sehr’s debut feature is a tough film about a young Serbian
woman who is determined to reach Hamburg without money or a passport
in order to move in with a German boy who professed his love to her
while on summer vacation in Yugoslavia. In German, English subtitles.
90 min.
. 1980. Germany.
Written and directed by Helma Sanders-Brahms. With Eva Mattes, Ernst
Jacobi, Elisabeth Stepanck. This key film of New German Cinema was
made by a mother for her daughter to explain her wartime childhood.
Sanders-Brahms, born in 1940, quotes Brecht: O Germany, pale mother/What
have your sons done to you/That you sit among the people/A mockery
or a threat. In German, English subtitles. 145 min.
.
1981. West Germany. Written, directed, photographed, and designed
by Ulrike Ottinger. With Magdalena Montezuma,
Delphine Seyrig. A fantastical journey, as suggested by the film’s
reference to Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando, in which
a person changes sex and lives over the course of centuries. “The
film is a little … history of the world to our day, including
the errors … the madness … and the commonplace” (Ottinger).
In German, English subtitles. 126 min.
.
1982. West Germany. Written and directed by Werner Herzog. With Klaus
Kinski, Claudia Cardinale,
José Lewgoy. “A
friend told me a story of a rubber baron…a banal story of colonial
exploitation …. I wasn’t interested. Then he mentioned
that the guy dismantled a boat and carried it from one river to another ….
Now I had my story, not about rubber, but about Grand Opera in the
jungle” (Herzog). In German, English subtitles. 157 min.
. 1994. Germany. Written,
directed, photographed, and edited by Fred Kelemen. With Sanja
Spengler, Valerij Fedorenko.
Over one delirious night, a group of refugees, each speaking a different
language and lost in the middle of Europe, attempt to make human
contact but find humiliation instead. Shot in long takes on Hi-8
videotape and transferred to 16mm film, Fate is an astonishing and
disturbing work. In German, English subtitles. 76 min.
. 1978. West Germany.
Written, directed, photographed, art directed, and co-edited
by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. With Volker Spengler, Ingrid Caven,
Karl Scheydt. In one of Fassbinder’s most deeply felt films,
a young husband, Erwin, becomes a woman, Elvira, to please the man
with whom he falls in love. After experiencing rejection after rejection,
Elvira revisits the stations of her life as a man. In German, English
subtitles. 124 min.
.
2001. Germany. Written and directed by Caroline Link. With Juliane
Köhler, Merab Ninidze,
Sidede Onyulo. A Jewish man summons his wife and daughter to flee
Nazi Germany and join him in Kenya. Based on the autobiography of
Stefanie Zweig, this Academy Award–winning film describes
the family’s hardscrabble existence through the eyes of the
child, who sees their new life as wondrous. In German, English subtitles.
141 min.
.
2000. Germany. Directed by Romuald Karmakar. Screenplay by Stefan
Eberlein, Karmakar. Author
Joachim C. Fest called the three-hour speech that Nazi SS Reichsführer
Heinrich Himmler gave in 1943 to SS generals in Poland “one
of the most terrifying documents of the German language.” The
film, which uses original recordings from that speech, was shot in
one day on videotape with four cameras. As simple as it is, it chills
the blood. In German, English subtitles. 182 min.
. 1981. West Germany. Directed
by Volker Schlöndorff. Screenplay by Schlöndorff, Jean-Claude
Carrière, Margarethe von Trotta. With Bruno Ganz, Hanna Schygulla,
Jean Carmet. Schlöndorff’s multilayered melodrama about
the Lebanese civil war imagines a German journalist negotiating his
perilous way among warring factions in Beirut and out of a troubled
marriage at home. In German, English subtitles. 108 min.
. 1985. West Germany. Written and directed by Doris
Dörrie. With Ulrike Kriener, Heiner Lauterbach, Uwe Ochsenknecht.
It took forty postwar years for Germany to make a comedy that was
a popular success both at home and abroad. Dörrie’s deft
observation of the battle of the sexes remains sly and lighthearted
but mildly caustic and oh-so-true. In German, English subtitles.
99 min.
. 1997. Germany. Directed by
Tom Tykwer. Screenplay by Anne-Françoise Pyszora, Tykwer.
With Floriane Daniel, Heino Ferch, Ulrich Matthes, Marie-Lou Sellem.
In a wintry landscape, two couples test the boundaries of love and
passion. Tykwer’s award-winning meditation on emotional responsibility
gives no clue that his next feature would be the clever and frenetic
Run Lola Run (1998). In German, English subtitles. 134 min.
. 2002. Germany.
Written and directed by Andreas Dresen. With Steffi Kühnert,
Thorsten Merten, Axel Prahl, Gabriela Maria Schmeide. Grill
Point is a modern comedy about
four ordinary friends from an ordinary town in the former East Germany,
who jump-start their lives almost to the point of electrocution.
In German, English subtitles. 105 min.
. 1982. West Germany. Written
and directed by Rosa von Praunheim. With Eddie Constantine, Olga
Demetriescu, Mark Eins. The works of Von Praunheim, Germany’s
indefatigable, radical, independent filmmaker, fall somewhere between
documentary and fiction. In Red Love he takes Soviet Communism’s
puritanical stance to task, contrasting it with the “liberation”
of a modern woman about to quit the “sexual prison”
of a thirty-year marriage. In German, English subtitles. 80 min.
.
1994. Germany. Directed by Jan Schütte. Screenplay by Schütte,
Thomas Strittmatter. With Otto Tausig, Jakov Bodo, Zofia Merle.
Schütte begins his
amiable and rueful comedy in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, where two
Poles, a cleaning lady, her Jewish husband, and a German Jew are
determined to make it back to the Old Country. They do get there….
In German, Polish and English, English subtitles. 85 min. Free admission.
. 1978. West
Germany. Written and directed by Helke Sander. With Sander, Frank
Burckner, Eva Gagel. A critical
and defining work of New German Cinema, Sander’s chiaroscuro
portrait of a single mother working as a freelance photographer while
caring for her daughter in a schizophrenic and “reduced” Berlin
is at once brittle and rousing. In German, English subtitles. 98
min.
. 1986.
West Germany. Directed by Werner Schroeter. Screenplay by Schroeter,
Magdalena Montezuma,
based on the poem by Edgar Allan Poe. With Montezuma, Mostefa Djadjam,
Antonio Orlando. Schroeter, one of the birth figures of New German
Cinema, is perhaps its most operatic. This celebrated but infrequently
shown work imagines a gardener, his perfect rose, and the young man
who becomes his prisoner. In German, no subtitles. 106 min.
. 1988. West Germany. Directed by
Jeanine Meerapfel. Screenplay by Meerapfel, Osvaldo Bayer, Alcides
Chiesa, Agnieszka Holland. With
Liv Ullmann, Cipe Lincovsky, Federico Luppi. The daughter of refugees
from Nazi Germany, Meerapfel grew up in Argentina, where she returned
to make this affecting melodrama about the friendship between two
girls from different backgrounds. As adults in the 1970s, they experience
the loss of loved ones in Argentina’s “dirty war.” In
German, English subtitles. 110 min.
. 1999. Germany. Directed
by Roland Suso Richter. Screenplay by Uwe Timm. With Yasmin Asadi,
Ercan Durmaz, Oliver Korittke. A young Kurdish boy is uprooted from
his native village by an uncle to be brought to Germany as a drug
courier. The uncle is soon arrested and the boy must face Hamburg
on his own. In German, English subtitles. 100 min.
. 1989. West Germany.
Directed by Dominik Graf. Screenplay by Sherry Horman. With Natja
Brunckhorst, Martina Gedeck, Sabine Kaack. In this modern urban comedy,
three women (the eponymous felines) experience significant changes
in their relationships—first with the men in their lives, and
then in their friendships with one another. In German, English subtitles.
93 min.
. 1982. West Germany.
Directed by Reinhard Hauff. Screenplay by Peter Schneider. With Karin
Baal, Wolfgang Bahro, Julie Carmen. In this satiric account of a
divided nation, a man from the East wins his freedom to the West
by acting crazy. Once at liberty, however, he begins to regret his
defection. In German, English subtitles. 105 min.
. 1975. West
Germany. Directed by Wim Wenders. Screenplay by Peter Handke, based
on a novel by Goethe.
With Rüdiger Vogler, Hanna Schygulla, Nastassja Kinski. A rare
screening of an early Wenders film, about a young author who, in
search of truth, takes a journey through the compromised landscape
of contemporary Germany, finding much to question. In German, English
subtitles. 104 min.
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