The life story of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, born Lothar Berflede. Miss Charlotte survived the Nazi reign and the repression of the Communists as a transvestite and helped start the German gay liberation movement. Documentary with some dramatized scenes. Two actors play the young and middle aged Charlotte and she plays herself in the later years.
Tag: GERMANY
Evidently shot over a decade, this documentary portrait of Lithuanian-born filmmaker-poet Jonas Mekas examines his life and career as a director (The Brig, Guns of the Trees), film critic, film historian, magazine editor, teacher (NYU), film distributor (Film-Makers’ Cooperative), and founder of Manhattan’s leading avant-garde film showcase (Anthology Film Archives). Mekas had a significant influence on the New York avant-garde, as indicated in interview segments with Yoko Ono, Andy Warhol, Martin Scorsese, Allen Ginsberg, and others. Past films made by Mekas are seen in clips. German filmmaker Peter Sempel has chosen to assemble this profile in an oblique and elliptical manner not inappropriate for his unique subject.
This Weimar Germany film classic uses an avant-garde, fragmented narrative to tell the story of a working-class family in Berlin in 1931. Survival is difficult, with massive unemployment in the wake of the Great Depression. After Anni’s brother commits suicide in despair, her family finds itself forced to move to Kuhle Wampe, a lakeside camp on the outskirts of Berlin, now home to increasing numbers of unemployed. When Anni’s relationship with Franz ends, she moves back to Berlin and gets involved in the workers’ youth movement. Already censored in March 1932, the film was then banned by the Nazis in 1933 for having “communist tendencies.”
Comedy shot without a script on Super-8mm as a silent film, with intertitles later inserted between scenes. What unfolds is a familiar Achternbusch tale in which the protagonist (here his alter-ego, Hick) is driven by a mad longing and becomes irretrievably lost. Unable to meet the demands of the workaday world, Hick wanders alone through the city and, as in many of Achternbusch’s films, enters an intermediate realm in which the dead interact with the living: he encounters and falls in love with a mummy, searches for an Egyptian queen, and stalks the inner regions of the hereafter, which lie in the middle of Munich.
Extending his fascination with genre cinema, Petzold’s second feature is a made-for-television variation on the 1945 noir Detour, transposing Ulmer’s Poverty Row classic from the gloomy backroads of postwar America to the drab railway stations and sunlit autobahns of 1990s Europe. Across this colorless landscape, homeless drifter Tom tracks ex-lover-turned-prostitute Tina with the questionable assistance of a slick rich guy named Jimmy, pursuing parallel paths on a desperate odyssey westward that just might lead all the way to Cuba.
An adaptation of Bedřich Smetana’s opera The Bartered Bride. Set in 19th century Bohemia, the matchmaker Kezal wants to bring the mayor’s daughter Marie and the rich landowner’s son Wenzel together. Both of them, however, have already fallen in love with someone else. The endearing characters, a whimsical storyline and quiet humor combine with catchy tunes, a pastoral setting and fluid camera work. A last hurrah in the wanning days of Weimar cinema.
The paths of people from various countries cross during the course of one night. They speak different languages, but they are fatefully bound together by the solitary quest for happiness and deliverance. Sloping paths are all that’s left for them in an age of lost perspectives, lost refuges and lost homelands. They sink deeper with every movement that should be liberating them. Every gesture of love becomes a gesture of humiliation. The desperate dance of their life has become a passionate dance of death.
Doctor Gesellius travels to China to research the effects of opium. There, he frees a young woman named Sin from a mafia led by Nun Chiang, who swears vengeance. On the way back to his home, Gesellius discovers that Sin is the illegitimate daughter of one of his colleagues, whose son is having an affair with the doctor’s wife. After the revealing discovery, his colleague’s son turns up poisoned, making Gesellius the prime suspect.