Sometime during the 19th century in Switzerland: After a delirious night of drinking, three herdsmen who are all alone in the alps with their kettle, create a female doll from cloth and a strangely formed wooden root. When their creation comes to life in form of an evil and beautiful female demon, they have to fear for their lives…
Tag: WEST GERMANY
Described as an answer to Fassbinder’s The Marriage of Maria Braun, Fraulein tells the story of a German woman and a former French prisoner of war living in 1950s Germany. Instead of playing a role in rebuilding her country, Haneke’s heroine remains preoccupied with her personal affairs. Shot predominantly in black and white (with a color sequence added toward the end), Fraulein asserts Haneke’s place alongside the masters of the New German Cinema.
Director Helmut Kautner retells William Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” in the context of postwar Germany. John H. Claudius returns from Harvard to find his mother married to his uncle after the death of his father, Paul. His father, an industrialist, owned a steel plant that is bustling due to Germany’s postwar boom. Although John’s father is said to have been killed in an air raid, John is convinced his mother and uncle plotted the death together.
SHADOW OF ANGELS is the film adaptation of R.W. Fassbinder’s last and most controversial play, “Garbage, the City, and Death,” which was banned in Germany. The story concerns Lily, a prostitute too beautiful to have clients and the real estate speculator she befriends. Lily is paid to listen to her customers’ despairing monologues about politics, power, corruption, and guilt. SHADOW OF ANGELS is quintessential Fassbinder, a fable about victims and victimizers and not so nascent neo-Nazi sympathies in post-war Germany.
In the form of a “small theater of the world”, a history of the world from its beginnings to our day, including the errors, the incompetence, the thirst for power, the fear, the madness, the cruelty and the commonplace, in a story of five episodes.
Dragon is a bloody dictator, who kills every opponent. People live hopelessly, until Lancelot comes to save the beautiful Elsa. Lancelot can only win, if all people become free from fear, that is feeding the Dragon’s power. Dragon’s multiple personalities, ranging from a “dragon” to a “samurai” to a “Nazi”, scare the hell out of all people, except Lancelot. Finally Dragon drops all his masks, to become the most dangerous of his incarnations – “himself”. And the battle begins.
Seven Women, Seven Sins represents a quintessential moment in film history. The women filmmakers invited to direct for the seven sins were amongst the world’s most renown: Helke Sander (Gluttony), Bette Gordon (Greed), Maxi Cohen (Anger), Chantal Akerman (Sloth), Valie Export (Lust), Laurence Gavron (Envy), and Ulrike Ottinger (Pride). Each filmmaker had the liberty of choosing a sin to interpret as they wished. The final film reflected this diversity, including traditional narrative fiction, experimental video, a musical, a radical documentary, and was delivered in multiple formats from 16, super 16, video and 35mm.
Klaus Lemke′s first feature-length film depicts the odyssey of society drop-out Frank Murnau from Schliersee to Rome and Acapulco. Actually, he could have led an easy life. Monika, the daughter of a rich factory owner is in love with him, hesitating at first, Frank finally opts for jet set beauty Laura: by choosing her, he also chooses independence, which he otherwise fears to lose. He is looking for adventure, attempts to get rich by revealing industry secrets and tries to secure a place among the rich by emulating the style he learned from American gangster movies. But soon he′s in over his head, since he can not escape his own past.