FILM SCREENINGS

Palermo oder Wolfsburg

1980. West Germany. Directed by Werner Schroeter. Screenplay by Schroeter, Giuseppe Fava. With Nicola Zarbo, Brigitte Tilg, Magdalena Montezuma, Antonio Orlando, Harry Baer. An impoverished young Sicilian, working at a Volkswagen plant in the industrial German city of Wolfsburg, finds himself isolated and shamed and decides to take revenge. Schroeter, who justly won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, contrasts the poetry of Sicily with soul-sickened Germany, “this land without light, without sun, without song.” Olaf Moller writes, “Palermo oder Wolfsburg is Schroeter at his artistically most complex, all-embracing and all-encompassing—just marvel at the way the film begins on a quasi-early Viscontian note to end like Sirk at his most tempestuously mournful and Bene at his most somber…. With a meditation on choices and attitudes, positions political and aesthetic, it quite befits its subject: the Passion of the Sicilian migrant worker in the holy land of capitalism, West Germany at its most social democratic.” 35mm print from Deutsche Kinemathek, courtesy Thomas Mauch. In Italian, German; English subtitles. 175 min.