D-AU-BENELUX-SWISS

A lumbering, full-grown pig, muzzled through a leash that has been tied around its snout, is led outside the barnyard doors of an unidentified farm and into a clearing where a group of apparent bystanders cavalierly await its slaughter. The skittish, herky-jerky video image taken from the handheld camera moves in relatively tight side view close-up to frame the head of the animal as the farmer places the barrel of a revolver onto its forehead between the eyes and, amidst its persistent (and disturbingly unnerving) suffocated grunts and squeals, pulls the trigger - the pig's body immediately collapsing to the ground, its limbs still involuntary twitching from the residual neurological response impulse to the bullet's fatal impact. The video image is then curiously paused and rewound in slow motion, the soundtrack audibly slowed to a cadent, monotonic bass to the point where the origin of the sound becomes strangely alien, disembodied, and haunted. The viewer of the amateur footage is revealed to be its unseen videographer, an adolescent named Benny (Arno Frisch), who shutters himself for hours in his dark, cluttered room perpetually immersed in the self-induced, often compounded stimuli of loud music, rented videos, and broadcast television, his view of the outside world paradoxically reduced to a live video feed onto a monitor from a camera that has been positioned to point out of his shade-drawn window and onto the street. His distracted, emotionally distant father (Ulrich Mühe) and equally disaffected, obliging mother (Angela Winkler) seem tolerant of Benny's hermeticism, even exploiting his estranged, sentinel-like omnipresence in the household and penchant for video surveillance to spy on their older daughter Evi's suspect activities after moving out of the family home, as she uses the well-appointed apartment to host a party designed to generate revenue through a pyramid scheme in her parents' absence. It is a convenient domestic arrangement of tacit mutualism (and mutual disregard) that soon reveals the moral crisis innate in their dysfunctional relationship when Benny befriends a seemingly bored and aimless young girl (Ingrid Stassner) who transfixedly watches the random features displayed from the shop window of a local video store each afternoon after school, and brings her home to share in his obsessive, alienated reviewing of the slaughter footage.

The second installment on the correlative effects of urban alienation and media violence in contemporary society in what would become known as Michael Haneke's trilogy of "emotional glaciation" (along with The Seventh Continent and 71 Fragments in a Chronology of Chance), Benny's Video is a provocative, confrontational, and indelibly haunting exposition on isolation, rootlessness, displaced turmoil, and human desolation. Using the opening sequence of the animal slaughter home video as Benny replays, hyperextends the moment of death through frame by frame pauses, or otherwise manipulates the resulting images captured on tape into increasingly indistinguishable resolution and textured, decontextualized audiovisual patterns of signal noise, Haneke illustrates the underlying process of cognitive abstraction - and consequently, systematic dissonance - that serve to not only dissociate the innate violence of the act with its logical consequence, but also blur the distinction between the experiential levels of fictional and real violence through the synthesis (and contextual anesthetization) of public information and entertainment in the creation of a commercially viable, commodified consumer media product. Moreover, through the narrative incorporation of Evi's pyramid scheme, Haneke also provides an intrinsic structural correlation to the collapse - and perversion - of the nuclear family in the absence of communication, trust, moral guidance, and emotional engagement as the ever-widening confidence game reveals an overarching socio-behavioral pattern of self-interest, a mindset that compels the individual to become progressively distanced from the initial source of the "investment" in order to realize profit, and the requirement of the participant's covert complicity (and cover-up) in the perpetuation of the scheme. It is this underlying disarticulation of moral responsibility and dissociation of cause and effect in the wake of media saturated infotainment and socially fostered, empty shell games of deflected accountability that is inevitably reflected in the film's eerie prescience on its examination of the consequence of desensitizing technology and the pervasiveness of media violence - a senseless and tragic portrait of empty privilege, alienated communication, and despiritualized bankruptcy.

Genius.

In Haneke's darkest fable?a vision of apocalypse, or a harrowing glimpse of the world beyond our protected borders?humanity stands at the crossroads of annihilation and salvation. Haneke hews to a palette of sputtering flame, gunmetal, and ash?like "the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world," as Cormac McCarthy writes in his echoing novel The Road?and makes allusion, in title, imagery, and theme, to Ingmar Bergman's Hour of the Wolf (1968). "The Hour of the Wolf is the time between night and dawn. It is the hour when most people die, when sleep is deepest, when nightmares are most palpable. It is the hour when the sleepless are pursued by their sharpest anxieties, when ghosts and demons hold sway. The Hour of the Wolf is also the hour when most children are born" (Bergman). Courtesy Palm Pictures. In French; English subtitles. 114 min.

On an ugly road in Kazakhstan, a middle-aged man abandons his car, which has run out of gas, and starts to walk across the vast steppes of Central Asia. He occasionally encounters people and the trappings of civilization, but he never lingers long or veers from the course that leads to his unknown destination. This is the intriguing beginning of one man?s journey within a journey in renowned German director Volker Schlöndorff?s Ulzhan.

We learn that the man?s name is Charles Simon (Philippe Torreton), and further pieces of his identity reveal themselves as he relentlessly walks the rugged terrain. Other than the mystery of his past, what compels the viewer most about Charles is the sheer drive that keeps him moving toward his target. Here is a man who wants to shed all the ephemera of his former life; he knows that when he reaches his journey?s end, he will not require any of it.

After a discussion with a fellow traveller, he realizes that a horse will navigate the steppes faster and more safely than he can on foot, so he buys one from a young female teacher named Ulzhan (Ayanat Ksenbai) in a small town. For reasons that soon become clear ? and despite Charles?s dogged determination to travel alone ? Ulzhan leaves everything behind and follows him into the mountains.

The pair, sometimes together, sometimes apart, meet with storms and privation along their arduous route. They also come across a shaman (David Bennent, the boy from Schlöndorff?s 1979 film, The Tin Drum) who feels a kinship with the travellers and does his best to help them on their way.

Schlöndorff places his tortured and enigmatic main character against a vast canvas. Stunningly photographed, Ulzhan intertwines myth, magic and mystery while taking us across the rawest terrain left on earth ? not merely Kazakhstan, but the human soul as well. By Jane Schoettle.


27th Istanbul Film Festival (5-20 April)is going on. I watched V.Schlondorff's last film ULZHAN-2007 the last night. Up dated info.

In an age of a borderless, new European economy, the volatile encounter of four people on an anonymous Parisian street underscores the underlying social disparity inherent in any increasingly multicultural, contemporary urban society. A brash, impatient young man named Jean (Alexandre Hamidi) accosts his older brother's girlfriend, an actress named Anne (Juliette Binoche), on the street after being unable to reach her on the telephone. Attempting to gain alliance against their father (Josef Bierbichler) from his brother Georges (Thierry Neuvic), a photojournalist on assignment in the Balkans, Jean, without solicitation, begins to complain to the polite, but hurried and preoccupied Anne, of his objection to his father's unconsented plans to renovate the family's farmhouse with the expectation of apprenticing him to assume eventual responsibility for the farm. Pressed for time and unprepared to appropriately address Jean's personal issues, Anne attempts to placate him with a snack purchased from a nearby vendor and gives him the keys to the apartment, providing a terse reminder that he cannot stay indefinitely. Jean's frustrated attempts to voice his grievance leads to a thoughtless act: discarding his crumpled paper bag into the lap of an undocumented immigrant from Romania named Maria (Luminita Gheorghiu) who is panhandling near the entrance of a cornershop. A principled and tenacious music teacher of African descent, Amadou (Ona Lu Yenke), witnesses the humiliating episode, and confronts Jean to demand an apology. The altercation soon draws the attention of the police who seem to quickly side with the young transgressor, duly noting Jean and an interfering, tangentially aggrieved shop owner's complaints. Eventually, the well-intentioned Amadou and inculpable Maria are officially detained.

Michael Haneke creates an intelligently constructed, compelling, provocative, and relevant observation on social inequity, the untenability of cultural assimilation, and the failure of communication in Code Inconnu. Presented as a series of dissociated (and intrinsically ethnographic) episodes on the lives of the principal characters following the fateful (though seemingly trivial) transection, Haneke examines the ingrained social divisiveness, moral complacency, and created bounds of human interaction. Chronologically indeterminate events, interrupted dialogues (often truncated in mid sentence), prolonged transitional fadeouts, and recurrent episodes of missed (and mis) communication (Jean's unsuccessful attempts to reach Georges and Anne; the mysterious letter left on Anne's door seeking help, perhaps written by an abused child living in a neighboring apartment; Georges' inability to unlock the front door of the apartment building after the access code is changed) pervade the film's fragmented narrative structure, exposing the flawed perception of cultural integration and social equality in the constantly evolving racial and socio-economic demography of a traditionally monoethnic society. The exquisitely wordless, extended final sequence, articulated solely through the consonant rhythm of an outdoor performance by Amadou's deaf music students, illustrates the innately human capacity to transcend the artificially imposed barriers of cultural perception and bias to communicate through the universal language of community and compassion. However, in the frenetic pace and ambient cacophony of a claustrophobic, modern existence, human expression is often only valued for its measured distance and tolerated silence.

http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/feature/49266

When upper-middle-class Parisian couple Georges and Anne (Auteuil and Binoche) begin to receive a series of increasingly disturbing videotapes that depict scenes and events collected from their lives, dread soon permeates every aspect of their existence. Eventually, Georges?s personal history is revealed to be influenced by France?s political history, particularly by its colonization of Algeria and its treatment of Algerian immigrants. A thriller that also touches upon issues of class and race, Caché leaves the viewer in a state of uneasy paranoia.

Inspired of Sylke Rene Meyers documentary film "who is Anna Walentynowicz?" (2002) tells Volker Schloendorff in "Strajk - the heroine of Danzig", to a BR Koproduktion, how the dismissal of the crane guide Angiezka releases first a strike on the Danziger Lenin-thrown and then a protest movement in completely Poland, which leads to the establishment of the first free trade union in the Eastern Bloc and which end of the communist arbitrary government introduces. It is well-known that the flapping of wings of a butterfly of the trips of a Tornado can be. Sometimes a small drop brings the barrel to overcrowded. So was it perhaps also, when in the 80's the Eastern Bloc broke down. In "Strajk - the heroine of Danzig" shows Volker Schloendorff, how in the year 1980 an individual courageous one provokes and to the wanken brings the communist system.

Volker Schlöndorff , one of the leading German film directors, pokes his noise into historiens' business, I assume.

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The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (1975) is one of those rare movies that has become more relevant with the passage of time. Set in West Germany during the early 1970s, the film deals with the potential political consequences of a one-night stand in a society where everyone is under observation. Katharina Blum (Angela Winkler), an average citizen who works as a housekeeper for a wealthy lawyer, attends a party where she becomes enchanted with a mysterious man, Ludwig Goetten (Jurgen Prochnow). At the end of the evening, she takes him back to her apartment.

The next morning, a squadron of police dressed in riot gear raids her apartment, searching for Goetten, a suspected terrorist. Blum is taken to police headquarters for a grueling interrogation session led by Kommissar Beizmenne (Mario Adorf). These scenes pack an unsettling power. An average, politically unaware citizen is subjected to an intense scrutiny over her possible motivations for sleeping with a terrorist. Her purely instinctual act ? and to Blum's way of thinking, a pure and honest response to a romantic scenario ? becomes perverted and denigrated. In the mindset of the police, where any citizen is a potential terrorist or collaborator with terrorists, there is no room for romance or "love at first sight" encounters like those found in fairy tales. There are no chance encounters or motive free decisions. Furthermore, in the eyes of society "good women don't invite strange men into their beds. Therefore, Blum has either known Goetten longer than she has let on, or she is a whore and sleeps with many men." There are no other alternatives, no shades of gray.

Katharina Blum's ultimate crime turns out to be that she doesn't play their game ? she doesn't submit meekly to their authority and doesn't allow them to set the parameters of her life as a single woman. When the interrogation group takes a break, she refuses to converse with them. In Blum's eyes, they have not only upset the order of her life, they have violated her. In the eyes of the police, they are "just doing their job, not making a personal attack." Ironically it is Beizmenne who takes her rebuff personally. When Blum refuses to converse with him over lunch, he orders her to be taken to a prison cell. He also sets out to destroy her credibility.

Beizmenne leaks "information" to a journalist, Werner Toetges (Dieter Laser), that he suspects Blum has been collaborating with Goetten for two years. Upon her release from the interrogation, Blum sees headlines in the paper proclaiming her as a terrorist collaborator. From here on, the press dogs her every step, interrogating employers and friends about her past. Even Blum's mother, hospitalized in an intensive care ward, is not off-limits from the press. Toetges, posing as a doctor, sneaks into the ward to ask her a few questions about her immoral daughter. His careless and callous disregard ultimately causes the mother's death.

When they don't get the answers they want, the press makes up the facts, creating a notorious public persona for Katharina Blum devoid of any connection to the real person. This very real campaign of terror breaks Blum down emotionally. It robs her of a private life and ultimately forces her down the only avenue she feels she has left to re-establish control in her life ? an act of murder. The government and media have warped her into a monster, no trace of which existed before. She is a creature of their making.

Based on an incident in the life of Heinrich Boll, who was accused by the press of being a terrorist sympathizer, The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum is a chilling depiction of unchecked power and a thought-provoking analysis of the responsibilities of the police and the press to the private lives of citizens. For co-directors and co-writers Schlöndorff and von Trotta, this sordid collaboration between the police and the media to publicly humiliate and destroy an individual poses more of a threat to democracy than any terrorist. The film espouses the idea that both the press and the police should be accountable for their actions, and that the unchecked power of these institutions cause greater violence to society and the individual in the long run than any terrorist threat. Because of the film's frightening parallels to the current political situation in the United States, The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum would do well to be required viewing for every U.S. citizen.

The Criterion DVD offers a generous selection of special features, including lengthy interviews with Volker Schlöndorff, Margarethe von Trotta, and cinematographer Jost Vacano. The highlight, though, is the half hour excerpt from the documentary, HEINRICH BOLL, which thoroughly covers the political situation in West Germany during the late 60s and early 70s, and covers the incident between Boll and the Springer press. Highly recommended.

Coup de Grace (1976) is a different affair altogether. For a number of years, Schlöndorff and von Trotta had wanted to adapt Marguerite Yourcenar's novel for the screen. The time never seemed right. The husband-and-wife team believed it was more important for them to focus on the current political situation rather than a story that felt remote or distant in time. After the success of The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, the team agreed it was time to finally bring Coup de Grace to the screen. The film was also to be a swan song, for von Trotta had decided to give up acting to pursue her directing career. She wanted her last role to be substantial, nuanced, and challenging. The character of Sophie fulfilled that demand.

Set in the Baltic Provinces near Riga amidst a civil war during the 1920s, Coup de Grace opens as Konrad von Revel (Rudiger Kirschstein) returns to his ancestral home, the castle Kratovice, now a stronghold for soldiers fighting against radical Bolsheviks. Accompanied by his childhood friend and fellow officer, Erich von Lhomond (Matthias Habich), Konrad receives a warm welcome from his sister Sophie (von Trotta) and his Aunt Praskovia (Valeska Gert). Unbeknownst to the soldiers, Sophie secretly sympathizes with the Bolsheviks, often crossing firing lines to visit with the collaborators.

One night, Sophie declares her love for Erich von Lhomond. He receives her declaration coolly, questioning whether he has time for love. Some time later, after Konrad and Lhomond return from a trip to headquarters, Sophie overhears gossip among the soldiers that Erich kept close quarters with a loose Parisian singer. This emotional bombshell ignites a twisted contest between Sophie and Lhomond to see who can probe deeper beneath the other's skin. Sophie begins a career of drinking and carousing with the boys, evolving into a regular party girl. She sleeps indiscriminately with many of the soldiers, even becoming engaged to several just to see the look on Lhomond's face. Lhomond cruelly taunts her, telling her that she could never be the woman for him. When Sophie learns from a jilted suitor that her brother Konrad and Lhomond were really the ones who kept close quarters during the trip to headquarters, she runs off into the night to join up with the Bolsheviks. The two are fated to meet one last time, when the dissident group has been captured. As she is sent to the firing squad, Sophie requests Lhomond as her executioner. Lhomond indifferently obliges.

Despite the high incidence of emotional mind games, Coup de Grace is a colder film than The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum. The emotional terrorist attacks launched by Sophie and Lhomond do not evoke the heat of outrage, as does Blum's abuse by the police and press. At times, Sophie and Lhomond's antics verge on annoying. Despite its cooler level of emotional engagement, Coup de Grace proves to be the more difficult film. Gaps of the narrative are left out or implied too subtly, causing disorienting jumps in the flow of the film. The motivations of Sophie and Erich are inscrutable. It's a mystery why one of them doesn't simply leave. Compounding the mysteries, the viewer never comes to a resolution whether Erich is using Sophie to get to her brother Konrad, or vice versa. What does keep the film's momentum flowing are the powerful performances by von Trotta, open and passionate, and Habich, detached and icy. Because of the solid performances and the prevalent ambiguity, Coup de Grace sticks in the mind long after the final scene.

Only one special feature is included with this Criterion DVD, a rather lengthy interview with Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta. Running about an hour, the interview is more of a documentary than a question-and-answer session. The questions are interspersed with clips from the film and archival photographs. Of special interest are the passages where Trotta talks about the changes she made in the screenplay ? in particular, increasing the presence of the war and enlarging Sophie's role in the story. The documentary also includes the alternate ending to Coup de Grace, which was shown only in France. In a voiceover, Lhomond ponders over Sophie's motivations for asking him to pull the trigger. Taken word for word from the last paragraph of Yourcenar's novel, this passage goes a long way towards clearing up some of the ambiguities of the film. The irony is that von Trotta, who fought against showing this ending outside of France, now concedes that the ending does work, and probably for the better. Coup de Grace is recommended for those who won't mind the challenge of working through several viewings to come to terms with an enigmatic film.

A farce, a family story, a road movie
Synopsis by Wim Wenders-2005

Howard Spence has seen better days. When he was younger he was a movie star, mostly in Westerns. At the age of sixty, Howard uses drugs, alcohol and young girls to avoid the painful truth that there are only supporting roles left for him to play. After yet another night of debauchery in his trailer, Howard awakens in disgust to find that he is still alive, but that nobody in the world would have missed him if he had died.

"It is a story of the United States, a grim portrait of a land where people like Travis and Jane cannot put down roots, a story of a sprawling, powerful, richly endowed land where people can get desperately lost."

NEWSWEEK

The last one by Wim Wenders, 1984.

Excellent. One of the most important works of Lars von Trier.

Changing destiny of her son from dark to light when there is no chance for her-self.

I see some people are not able to read this film when they have no-problem with their eyes.

Song of Childhood
By Peter Handke


When the child was a child
It walked with its arms swinging,
wanted the brook to be a river,
the river to be a torrent,
and this puddle to be the sea.

When the child was a child,
it didn?t know that it was a child,
everything was soulful,
and all souls were one.

When the child was a child,
it had no opinion about anything,
had no habits,
it often sat cross-legged,
took off running,
had a cowlick in its hair,
and made no faces when photographed.

When the child was a child,
It was the time for these questions:
Why am I me, and why not you?
Why am I here, and why not there?
When did time begin, and where does space end?
Is life under the sun not just a dream?
Is what I see and hear and smell
not just an illusion of a world before the world?
Given the facts of evil and people.
does evil really exist?
How can it be that I, who I am,
didn?t exist before I came to be,
and that, someday, I, who I am,
will no longer be who I am?

When the child was a child,
It choked on spinach, on peas, on rice pudding,
and on steamed cauliflower,
and eats all of those now, and not just because it has to.

When the child was a child,
it awoke once in a strange bed,
and now does so again and again.
Many people, then, seemed beautiful,
and now only a few do, by sheer luck.

It had visualized a clear image of Paradise,
and now can at most guess,
could not conceive of nothingness,
and shudders today at the thought.

When the child was a child,
It played with enthusiasm,
and, now, has just as much excitement as then,
but only when it concerns its work.

When the child was a child,
It was enough for it to eat an apple, ? bread,
And so it is even now.

When the child was a child,
Berries filled its hand as only berries do,
and do even now,
Fresh walnuts made its tongue raw,
and do even now,
it had, on every mountaintop,
the longing for a higher mountain yet,
and in every city,
the longing for an even greater city,
and that is still so,
It reached for cherries in topmost branches of trees
with an elation it still has today,
has a shyness in front of strangers,
and has that even now.
It awaited the first snow,
And waits that way even now.

When the child was a child,
It threw a stick like a lance against a tree,
And it quivers there still today.

http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/02/von_trotta.html

Rosenstrasse marks the return to film after nearly a decade in television of Margarethe von Trotta, the best-known woman director to emerge from the New German Cinema movement. It dramatizes a rarely documented moment of German protest against the Nazi regime that occurred in Berlin in 1943 when the Gestapo arrested Jewish men married to Aryan women and placed them in a holding area in a building on Rosenstrasse, a small street near Alexanderplatz. As the days passed, the wives gathered in increasing numbers to keep vigil and would not be driven away.

Here is the kernel for an unusual and wrenching Holocaust story. But von Trotta embalms it in a hokey and tedious framing device in a clumsy attempt to add an inspirational contemporary spin. Bumpily paced, it's overlong and freighted with a soppy, manipulative musical score. The movie kicks off in present-day New York, where a Jewish family in mourning for its patriarch is jolted when the widow chases her daughter's non-Jewish fiancé from the house and forbids her to marry the guy. Daughter Hannah (Maria Schrader) then discovers to her amazement that as a child, Mama had been saved and cared for by an Aryan woman during the war, after she lost her parents. Hannah hastens to Berlin and hunts down the noble nonagenarian, Lena (Doris Schade), who proves fecund with flashbacks. Lena (played as a young woman by Katja Riemann) had alienated her own aristocratic family by marrying a Jewish musician. In order to rescue him, she dons her sexiest party dress and makes out with Propaganda Minister Goebbels. Then, voilà!?doors open on Rosenstrasse and Jewish detainees are released, and von Trotta's sober chronicle devolves into just another kitschy-campy tall tale.

"For what possible end to these wastes where true light never was, nor any upright thing, nor any true foundation, but only these leaning things, forever lapsing and crumbling away, beneath a sky without memory of morning or hope of night." - Samuel Beckett

Lichter is situated on both sides of the German-Polish border. It portrays several citizens of both the German and the Polish side of the border and some illegal immigrants hoping to cross the border to the Promised Land. Several story lines are set up, but only some meet. After all stories are set up, some characters act out of love for someone, even make a brave and important decision to help someone in need. All are betrayed, so this makes a pretty depressing picture with little hope and redemption. Even the building project as a sign of hope and cooperation turns out to have a negative angle.From a cinema-point of view it would have been a better idea to connect all story lines and I found that a missed opportunity. But it succeeds in balancing the motives of all characters: Some act out of selfishness, some out of love, and others out of survival. At one moment in the movie immigrants are called fortune seekers, later they are called people in need.Hans-Christian Schmid's direction is average. This is made for little money and it shows. It looks a bit like an upgraded TV-movie, with relative few interesting camera shots. But my guess is he wants us to focus on the theme of the movie and he succeeds in that, because after a few minutes you stop thinking about the movie's obvious technical limitations.The tag line of the movie is Welcome to reality. But as cinema is all about manipulation this is a strange one. Every filmmaker has to start by making a choice where to place his or her movie in the movie universe, somewhere between the real world and the imagined world where a movie interacts with our imagination. So this is as manipulated as would be the reverse: Show a border town where everybody's happy. Show happy immigrants working happily on beautiful Berlin building projects. So here we still watch an imagined world being thoroughly manipulated by the director. And this certainly hasn't the realism of post-war Italian cinema.As for the real world: With Poland now a member of the EU, the movie is already somewhat out of date and Poland will within a few years reach the wealth of say the Portuguese. Illegal immigration will always exist and has always existed: People seeking asylum, people wanting a better existence. The whole debate in Europe is about where to draw lines. This gives some reflection on that process.

Jule is a waitress that can't make ends meet. She moves in with her boyfriend Peter and his friend Jan, two young men united by their passion to change the world. But Jule has a secret: A past auto accident has burdened her with lifetime payments to successful businessman, Hardenberg. Peter and Jan also have a secret: They are the notorious "Edukators," mysterious perpetrators who break into expensive homes of the local yacht club members as an act of political rebellion. They wreak havoc and leave notes that read, "Your days of plenty are numbered."

While Peter is away on holiday, secrets between Jan and Jules are disclosed and feelings between them intensify. They impulsively break into the home of the businessman to whom Jules is indebted. But their growing passion has made them careless and when they're forced to return to the villa the following night to retrieve a forgotten cell phone, Hardenberg surprises them.

They have no choice but to call Peter for help, even if it means his finding out about their betrayal.

The trio makes a rash decision and their futures (as well as Hardenberg's) are quaked. Ideals are tested as generations collide, passions rage, and loyalties shatter.

The Edukators is co-written and directed by Hans Weingartner and co-stars the rising international star Daniel Brühl of Goodbye Lenin. Fr. official web page.

P.S. I found this German film, 2004 more realistic than The Lives of Others, 2006. I believe that new German comers are not bad.

Fantastic adaptation.

http://www.bookrags.com/notes/ttd/

28th Int. Istanbul Flm Festival.

We learn something more everyday. Interesting point is where these Germans are now. Die out ????????????????

Set in 1984 East Germany, the movie splits its perspective between Georg Dreyman , a faithful socialist playwright, and Gerd Wiesler , the Stasi officer assigned to spy on him. The movie's most surprising aspect is how faithfully it adapts to Wiesler's perspective. Director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck wants to engage sympathies on both sides, but it feels more evasive than generous. In the wake of the movie's domestic success, the German press has spent months trying to dig up a real-life analogue to Wiesler without success, indicating that von Donnersmarck's creation is wishful thinking at best. That's not revisionist history: It's fantasy. By Sam Adams.

Of cource there is blood and action, BUT film based on honour and dignity.

And in Julia (1977), another of Zinnemann's crowning achievements, Vanessa Redgrave is a doomed American heiress who forsakes the safety and comfort of great wealth to devote her life to the anti-Nazi cause in Germany. (The film is also notable for being the screen debut of Meryl Streep.)

Historic work about Thomas More.

Fred Zinnemann's attention to detail in The Day of the Jackal seems very close to Frederick Forsyth's intricate novel, and pulls off the feat of sustaining suspense in this political thriller, even though we know the Jackal must eventually fail.

A secret underground terrorist group in France called the OAS decide to hire a professional killer to assassinate French President Charles De Gaulle (Adrien Cayla-Legrand) after their own attempts end in failure. The name recommended to them is the ?Jackal?, an anonymous hit man apparently responsible for a string of high profile killings. Charles Calthrop (Edward Fox) is the infamous Jackal, taking his name from the French spelling ? Chacal. Edward Fox is impassively effective as the cold-fish English assassin contracted to kill De Gaulle. The Jackal painstakingly puts his plan into action, involving gathering a new identity, a forged drivers license and French passport to enable him to travel without being detected. The forger Caron (Ronald Pickup) guesses the documents are for a special purpose and attempts to blackmail Fox into handing over money, and pays a heavy price for such a gamble. A special rifle is needed for the hit so a specialist gunsmith (Cyril Cusack) is approached to build a custom designed rifle with explosive bullets ? though once again his reward is not what he would have expected as Fox attempts to cover his tracks.

Chief Inspector Lebel (Michel Lonsdale) is the French detective assigned to hunting the Jackal down, through an informer he learns of the Jackal?s existence but a range of disguises by the Jackal hinder their attempts to capture him. Fox is by now in France making final preparations, to keep away from the French authorities he seeks sexual partners who will unknowingly provide him with refuge, both wealthy Colette (Delphine Seyrig) and homosexual Bernard (Anton Rodgers) fall into this category ? both are silenced by Fox once they are no longer needed. The tracking Lebel knows the Jackal is in Paris and preparing to strike, his only option is to flood the Liberation Day celebrations that De Gaule is attending with police officers in the hope of a lucky break. Fox this time disguises himself as a war veteran to pass unnoticed through his surroundings, then enters an overlooking flat to set up his rifle and assassinate the French president. At the very moment Fox has De Gaule in his sights, Lebel bursts into the flat and kills the cold-blooded assassin.

Though slow paced, with each passing moment the tension grips as the Jackal nears his target. The film was later remade starring Bruce Willis and Richard Gere under the title of The Jackal, but it had none of the originals finesse and only serves to make people want to see the original again

The two-in-one is the guys' war movie, and the womens' chick flick. Here we have Robert E. Lee Pruitt (Clift Montgomery), a man who life has ignored, but one who fails to ignore it back. He's overly dramatic, and while transferred to a brigade that he would fit much better into, he blows those chances by refusing to box. So the higher-ups make it hell for him. And even though he meets a woman who would make her world around him if he ever should the slightest interest in her, goes nowhere. I don't know which I would have rather had more of, the war story, or the love story, but director Fred Zinneman chose to go with the soaper story, that doesn't neglect to leave us with a sap-filled ending. Another bonus in the form of the chick flick is the excessively noticeable role of Burt Langcaster, who doesn't forget to bare his chest at least a couple times. Ironically, for a movie that I felt was so femininely oritented, it treated the women characters like dogs, making them acquiescent and promiscuous in suggestion. From Here to Eternity is sanctimonious in its choice of visuals (and the plane scene is obviously stock footage, played on repeat), but there is one really excellent bar scene brawl full of tension, and another strong fight scene that takes place in a dark alley. Regardless of all the feminism available, there is still a good amount of barbarianism treatment for those who are interested. 1941.

Crafted with a dedicated eye for detail by director Max Färberböck, A Woman in Berlin is adapted from a German woman's best-selling diaries, published anonymously in 1954. This film sees Färberböck return to the nightmarish vision of wartorn Berlin that provided the backdrop for forbidden love in his cinematic Aimée & Jaguar.

It is April 1945, and the Red Army is invading Berlin. A photographer and journalist (eloquently played by award-winning actor Nina Hoss) becomes the victim of a traumatic sexual assault at the hands of her purported liberators. She grows desperate to find someone who can protect and comfort her, and meets a Soviet officer named Andrej, with whom she soon develops a powerful relationship. However, their passion is forbidden. As enemies, how can they be lovers?

A Woman in Berlin is a stirring and visually striking experience providing insight into events that we can know only through textbooks. It is also a captivating love story about a ?deal with the devil? that is brilliantly portrayed by the leading actors, who ensure that the emotions at play are never reduced to simplistic terms.

Depicting the end of the Second World War ? and all the compromises it required ? with a decidedly lucid approach, the film offers a rare perspective on the women of Berlin who were left with nothing. Highly reminiscent of the rubble film cycle, which dealt with the impact of the war on European cities, the film is characterized by its evocative use of bombed urban spaces to convey the realities of the survivors' ravaged lives.

A Woman in Berlin blurs the lines between friend, lover and enemy. With echoes that resonate in more recent conflicts from Bosnia to Rwanda, this vital film shows the treacherous dilemmas that women must navigate in times of war.

Set in the Baltic Provinces near Riga amidst a civil war during the 1920s, Coup de Grace opens as Konrad von Revel (Rudiger Kirschstein) returns to his ancestral home, the castle Kratovice, now a stronghold for soldiers fighting against radical Bolsheviks. Accompanied by his childhood friend and fellow officer, Erich von Lhomond (Matthias Habich), Konrad receives a warm welcome from his sister Sophie (von Trotta) and his Aunt Praskovia (Valeska Gert). Unbeknownst to the soldiers, Sophie secretly sympathizes with the Bolsheviks, often crossing firing lines to visit with the collaborators.

Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. Here u are. WIM WENDERS. Auteur, director, creater, generator, accelarator, producor, art, mart, cinema, music. Everything.