My Favorite Movies

The paths of Otto and Ana literally cross as children: Ana (Sara Valiente), running away from the news of her father's death; Otto (Peru Medem), running after a soccer ball. They are captivated by each other, but leave without saying a word. One day, Otto learns that his parents are divorcing, and to prove his devotion to his mother (Beate Jensen), he chooses to stay with her. In school, he begins to write notes on the nature of love, a question that has plagued him since his parents' divorce, and folds the notes into paper airplanes to send into the school yard. Ana retrieves one of the notes and shows it to her mother, Olga (Maru Valdivielso), who is intrigued by the emotional maturity of the message. Ana points to the nearest adult, Otto's father, Alvaro (Nancho Novo), as the author. On a rainy afternoon, Otto waits for Ana in the school yard with a specific introduction in mind: he would say that his name is a palindrome, that it is spelled the same way backwards and forwards, and that somehow, this revelation would endear him to her. But she does not appear. He opens the door to his father's car...and Ana is there. He begins to recite his rehearsed speech, but she interrupts. Her name is a palindrome too. Soon, Alvaro and Olga become involved, and the two children grow up as step siblings. Ana sees her father's soul reflected in Otto's eyes, and their profound connection makes them inseparable. But their love for each other proves more permanent than their parents' relationship. Now a young man, Otto (Fele Martinez), decides to move in with his father to be closer to Ana (Najwa Nirmi), and a tragedy results from his actions. Racked with guilt, Otto runs away from home. After a failed relationship, Ana also runs away, and moves to a remote cabin in Finland that straddles the Arctic Circle to await the "coincidence" of her life.

Julio Medem creates a hauntingly beautiful and intensely atmospheric story of fate and destiny in Lovers of the Arctic Circle. Similar to Krzysztof Kieslowski's The Double Life of Veronique and Red, near and chance encounters transcend the novelty of convenient plot device to expound on the film's circular themes and recurring patterns. In addition to the story unfolding in circular narrative, specific events also recur within the film, recounted from separate perspectives by Ana and Otto. Episodically, the film begins and ends with the image of Otto reflected in Ana's eyes. Their palindromic names, near collisions with the trolley car, and an encounter with Otto's namesake, Otto Midelman (Joost Siedhoff), further reflect the film's circular structure. In Ana's opening monologue, she asks: "Can you run back? A few hours back, a life back?" In the land of the midnight sun, in the surreality of the Arctic Circle, it is still not far enough to escape one's destiny.

Accepted to be one of Wenders' most poignant films and often compared to Chaplin's The Kid, Alice in the Cities was the first of Wim Wenders' films to be shot in part in the United States and subsequently won the 1974 German Critics Prize.


Phillip (Rüdiger Vogler) is a roving German reporter who, after a chance encounter with an elusive American woman, reluctantly accepts temporary custody of little Alice (Yella Rottländer).



Their friendship grows while traveling through various European cities on a search for the girl's grandmother. Inventive and witty, Wenders reflects on the influences of American pop culture on postwar Europe.

An early classic by Josef von Sternberg with Marlene Dietrich-1932.

Total HORROR up-to 1996.

Peter Mullan's life is very interesting. better check your-self.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Mullan

Magdalene Asylums were institutions for so-called "fallen" women, most of them operated by different orders of the Roman Catholic Church. In most asylums, the inmates were required to undertake hard physical labour such as laundry work. In Ireland, such asylums were known as Magdalene Laundries. It has been estimated that 30,000 women were admitted during the 150-year history of these institutions, often against their will. The last Magdalene Asylum in Ireland closed on September 25, 1996.

http://alsolikelife.com/shooting/?p=230

http://www.nuribilgeceylan.com/

N.B.Ceylan looks at a part of misery of human being. I found the subject rather universal. A life about lossers. Phography is very good. Cinematograpic language is so strong. Chossing place, using time and performance of players are perfect. I prefer DISTANT, but this film tells more than it. Don't miss it.

Présenté par Spike Jonze et David Fincher (y a pire comme soutien !), le nouveau film de Tarsem Singh rejoue la carte de l?extase visuelle au détriment d?une histoire vraiment consistante. Mais à défaut de visions parfois cauchemardesques dans The Cell (et je ne vous parle pas du jeu de Jennifer Lopez mais bien de l?univers dérangé du serial killer), The Fall propose cette fois des images somptueuses et un univers mélodramatique, voire romantique, plutôt qu?étrange et angoissant.


Dans The Fall, Tarsem Singh confronte à nouveau plusieurs univers : l?imaginaire et la réalité bien entendu, mais aussi le monde naïf de l?enfance à celui des adultes, et de façon un peu plus discrète, il oppose également les préoccupations de gens « normaux » à celles de personnes liées à l?industrie du Cinéma. Si certains trouveront la démarche du cinéaste pompeuse, force est de constater que l?idée de faire s?entremêler tout cela était plutôt bonne. Après, tout est question de sensibilité et d?affection. Ceux qui n?aimeront pas le long métrage pointeront du doigt sa naïveté, son histoire banale (dans le fond, l?intrigue pourrait se résumer aux conséquences d?une douloureuse rupture amoureuse), ses images esthétisantes ainsi que ses emprunts cinématographiques peu subtils (des films de Jodorowsky à Taxandria en passant par Le Labyrinthe de Pan).

Les autres, ceux qui adhèreront au récit et à son univers, seront charmés par l?esthétique très artistique du film. Les décors, les costumes, la photographie, la composition des cadres (le spectateur a parfois le sentiment d?assister davantage à une expo de photographie qu?à un long métrage), les transitions soignées,? tout est magnifié pour charmer la rétine des spectateurs. Si le récit n?est dans le fond pas transcendant (quoique), le très beau jeu des deux comédiens principaux nous aide toutefois à rentrer un peu plus dedans. La toute jeune Catinca Untaru est une petite révélation et Lee Pace est quant à lui parfaitement touchant. Leur relation dans le film
transpire l?authenticité.

Avec un casting composé d?illustres inconnus (Lee Pace a tenu de petits rôles dans Infamous et Raisons d?Etat, mais à part cela?), ses univers entrecroisés et sa magnificence visuelle, The Fall est un film osé qui risque de diviser. Non pas qu?il porte à polémique, pas du tout, mais trop d?esthétisme tue l?esthétisme, amenant paradoxalement certains spectateurs à une forme de dégoût. Par contre, si on apprécie le travail sur la forme, on passe un beau moment qui, mine de rien, fait rêver et s?avère déracinant.

The plot of The Return did not directly concern the boys' mother and grandmother and so was played out in their absence. The Banishment, however, is as much the story of Vera's anguish as it is of Alex's emotional blankness, yet neither the script nor the film's structure give Vera the chance to articulate the cause of her despair to her husband. Her lie to Alex about the paternity of her child is posthumously revealed to have been an attempt to melt his cold heart. It stretches credulity that a character who would take this risk would not dare to tell the truth. Vera's one big speech, to Robert, is heard only in flashback, giving the impression that Zvyagintsev is insufficiently interested in her. Her eventual reduction to a plot device, sacrificed so that Alex can repent, is both troubling and dramatically debilitating. And yet, for all this, The Banishment is a visually powerful and haunting film.

Terrence Malick's career is very rare and precious - if for no other reason than that rarity. He is 65 now and in his most active phase. He is an amiable recluse - you can meet him and have dinner and he is very good company - but he simply can't abide talking about his films. For him to maintain this stance a certain mystery needs to attend the works themselves. For me that mystery is there as surely in Badlands as it has turned into prettification or a kind of botanist's blind alley in the recent films. Days of Heaven (1978) is in-between, close to Badlands in narrative form and increasingly aware that the American West that Malick loves to see and show is one that hardly needs people. Meanwhile, Badlands is, at the very least, one of the great American debuts. And once you've got Kit's nagging voice in your head, there's no escape, no refuge.

Part thriller, part horror, part drama, this is a mysterious, surreal and beguiling effort from director Kirill Serebrennikov, which invites the audience to take on the role of detective in the mystery of a young man's disappearance from an isolated Russian community.

The film tells the story of a fateful visit by Liubov (Ksenia Rappaport), a world-renowned opera diva, and her son Andrei (Roman Shmakov) to her native town of Youriev-Polskii, as she attempts to show her spoilt son the reality of her own humble origins. However, this decision to revisit the isolated community of her birth proves an ill-fated one for Liubov as Andrei mysteriously disappears during a visit to the local Kremlin, sending her into a frantic search for her son, which will take her from police station to monastery and even to the local tuberculosis hospital.

A captivating performance from Rappaport is the driving force behind this film, as we experience her torture, uncertainty and pain over the disappearance of her son and the ensuing transformation of her character and identity, which this event provokes. She becomes increasingly drawn into the microcosm of this isolated town, losing both her connection with the outside world and her former identity and social status. This extremely convincing portrayal of a transformation of the self through suffering and loss is most potently displayed by the moving scene in which Liubov expresses the force and extent of her grief through song, singing until she can sing no more - a literal loss of voice which also represents a symbolic break with her former identity as an opera diva.

Indeed, music plays a significant role in this film as Rappaport's performance is complemented throughout by a haunting, melodic score, courtesy of Sergei Nevski, and an innovative use of silence which helps to build the tension and increasing desperation felt by Liubov as she searches for her son. The significance of the dynamic between sound and silence is established right at the beginning of the film in the sequence with mother and son travelling towards the isolated community of Youriev-Polskii, as the director playfully cuts between shots inside the car - which feature operatic music playing on the car radio - and shots taken from outside the car, in which we hear only the silence of the barren, isolated landscape.

At the time it is easy for the significance of this contrast between the sound of the car radio (representing culture, civilisation and Liubov's past) to pass the audience by, but, in the light of what is to come, this is an important statement about the nature of the environment into which mother and son are travelling. This is no longer the busy, pampered world of the city where fame and fortune can buy stability and security; this is the untamed, isolated wilderness in which familiar certainties disappear and where their fame and fortune make them vulnerable outsiders. Here, a person can literally disappear into thin air as though swallowed by the oppressive landscape into which the sound of the car radio - the sound of the outside world - does not penetrate.

"Every year 30-40,000 people disappear in Russia," we are told by Seryj, the investigating detective, when he warns Liubov of the difficulty of finding her son. This pessimism is symptomatic of the darkness at the heart of this film, not only in its macabre and mysterious depiction of Andrei's disappearance, but in its uncompromising presentation of this small-town society; from the greedy and materialistic representatives of the church through to the unfeeling callousness of the town's authority figures and the truly disturbing scenes of deprivation and inhumanity at the hospital.

This is a real chameleon of a film, genuinely elusive and difficult to pigeonhole into a particular genre. Due to the film's potent combination of hyperrealism, mysticism and spiritualism, the audience-cum-detectives are forced to adapt to a new sense of perspective based on a world in which identity is in a state of flux, coincidence is a matter of course, and mysterious uncertainly is an all-pervading truth.

As much as this sense of mystery, intrigue and unpredictability may be the film's greatest strength, this enigmatic ambiguity also serves to expose its biggest weakness which is an over-reliance on all of the above at the expense of coherent plot, realism and resolution. Those of you hoping to leave the cinema with a cathartic sense of fulfilment and well-being, be warned: this is a film with significantly more questions than answers.

To be together you need to be (at least) two. But here, no body becomes a couple. And certainly not with the camera. Filmic divorce. Isolated, the unique can only succeed in division, in the same way that filming can only be the fierce attempt to deny separation. If Mograbi?s cinema tirelessly undertakes to get involved with that which wants nothing to do with it, it is more and more difficult for him to film Israeli citizens who tolerate less and less being filmed. It remains to be asked if such is not the reason for his relentless pursuit to film them. The return of an undeniable malaise: malaise of the spectator; because there is something unbearable to see filmed what doesn?t want to be filmed, a fortiori if this reticence makes the movie. We see at work the naked violence of cinema, the gesture of bringing the film into the world, the narrative going uphill all the way, to the zero point of representation. The direct violence of a cinema that would begin by revealing how it can or cannot be made. The body of the film appears thus exhibited on the screen like a body (an organism) with a thwarted future. This is what I can expect as spectator. A film in suffering of which I suffer in my turn. All this rhetoric of orders and gestures that tries to prevent the filmmaker from filming, that jostles his camera, leads to a tearing of the spectator from the tranquility of a representation exposing itself ideally to him, if I dare to say, with no missteps. Here the cinema has become problematic.

Actor, sound engineer, cameraman, director, citizen: with each new film the figure of ?Mograbi? overdoes it, while at the same time the gesture of auto mise-en-scène proliferates. From the heart of the documentary approach comes an extraordinary fictional dimension. Tied to a story that is urgent (each of the films is attached to a historic moment, to a political present: something rare and painful), but that is also linked to the cardinal points of cinematographic ambivalence, this endless turnstile of ?true? and ?false,? of ?performance? and ?reality? (as in Lubitsch?s To Be or Not to Be). Documentary evidence and fictional strength are here embraced.
How? In August, Mograbi?s answer passes by two mechanisms of repetition: on the one hand, the insistence of a request (he doesn?t give up) and on the other, one a deconstruction of hysteria. How to be just in a world where all is false? Pain, anger, rage are simulated. And the feelings, false. To leave hysteria and go towards cinema, Mograbi returns to the true inscription of documentary. It is the series of trial takes with the actresses, filmed (they as well) very frontally, performing or repeating sufferance and rebellion. These sequences function like a laboratory of the experimental impossibility of sorting the true from the false, otherwise in referring them to the correctness of the performance.
Because hysteria here is not something private: the entire society has gone mad. This general disturbance doesn?t spare the body of the film: sped up, reversed editing (those who should come near move further away; those who were together pull apart; those who were headed somewhere now only retreat: anti-cinema), split screen, grotesques citations from archives... Mograbi enters into a rhetoric of rage. The film stock (here the strip) is a sensitive skin that bristles when what is shown doesn?t work. The symptom affects the film?s form, its surface, its breathing. The film as a sensitive organism displays something of the prevailing malaise.
In Avenge But One of My Two Eyes, Mograbi filmed by Mograbi is no longer exactly the same. When he telephones (again) about the film in progress, it is in a wider shot and with a sole interlocutor (whom we understand to be a Palestinian). A faceless voice insisting coldly that death is worth more than a thousand humiliations. Mograbi hears without flinching this external voice that becomes a dialogue with himself. The contrast is great with the violence that he meets at each confrontation with these Israeli soldiers filmed in spite of themselves. In these ferocious showdowns, the world filmed by Mograbi seems however to become again coherent, that is divided: the ordinary barriers resume their position, each in his bubble more or less armored, not in the shelter of the other but in the shelter of the menace that there would be to think the other. Just as the soldiers want neither to see nor to hear, the tourist guides comment on the collective suicide of Massada or of Samson?s heroic gesture killing himself with the Philistines, without comprehending how much these gestures rhyme, whether one likes it or not, with those of the suicide-bombers. It is truly a question of looking and hearing: to the guides who ask one of their flock to close their eyes in order to see, to blind Samson who asks god for the strength to kill again, Mograbi contrasts the logic of cinema - seeing in spite of everything which prevents seeing, hearing what one doesn?t want to hear.
On this point, and with a gentleness of which one wouldn?t have believed him to be capable, Mograbi doesn?t give up; it is the choice of life against death - the choice of cinema. He says it timidly to his Palestinian interlocutor. And his film says it strongly to those Israelis who teach the cult of death, obviously heroic, to their children. I don?t bring up haphazardly the question of heritage and of filiation. It is certainly the profound framework of Avenge But One of My Two Eyes. And the filmmaker Mograbi always appears as the son of his father, the director of Mograbi cinema, a name known all over Israel. Fathers, sons. Transmission will be accomplished by cinema rather than by war.


In November, l?ACRIF organizes on the Ile-de-France numerous screenings of Avi Mograbi?s films. For further information: call 33 (0)1 48 78 14 18.

NOTES

1. The title comes from the biblical passage where Samson addresses the Lord: ?Lord, God, remember me and strengthen me, only this once. So that I may avenge but one of my eyes, avenge upon the Philistines.? Tr. note.

2. This is the problematic of ?filming the enemy.? What Mograbi does with Sharon, Michel Samson and I refused to do with Jean-Marie Le Pen; we refused to continue accompanying him, to film him in the very fascination that he exerted (1992-1993) on the media.

3. In Happy Birthday, the identities divide the subjects and the film itself: with the producer Segal always elsewhere, Mograbi vacillates between all the positions and the film itself, divided into three films simultaneously underway. In August, the figure of Mograbi splits into three agencies. He is his wife (pink towel knotted into a turban), his troublesome sponsor, and himself. This triplicity results in a series of quarrels that irresistibly become the body of the film. When these three characters meet up in the same scene, a split screen tears the screen asunder, isolating the bodies in the interior of a same unity of time, of place, and of action. The torn screen redeems the solitudes. The quarrel is the center of the film become form.

4. The author here capitalizes on the double meaning of tourniquet in French as both turnstile and bandage. The former meaning exists in English, but has become rare. Tr. note.

5. Feelings attributed to the widow of the Israeli terrorist settler Baruch Goldstein, who killed 29 Muslims in the shooting attack in the Cave of the Patriarchs at Hebron, February 25th, 1994.

6. The Zealots, the last resistants to the Roman invader, decided to kill themselves rather than to surrender, in the year 73 AD.

Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919)




German revolutionary leader, journalist, and socialist theorist, who was killed in Berlin in 1919 during the German revolution. Rosa Luxemburg saw herself as a citizen of the proletariat. She lived the international life of a Socialist 'pilgrim', believing that only socialism could bring true freedom and social justice. Luxemburg was the advocate of mass action, spontaneity, and workers democracy, but her criticism of the "revisionists" and their ideological leader Edward Bernstein is considered her most important legacy to European political thought.
"Bourgeois class domination is undoubtedly an historical necessity, but, so too, the rising of the working class against it. Capital is an historical necessity, but, so too, its grave digger, the socialist proletariat." (from 'The Junius Pamphlet', 1916)

Rosa Luxemburg was born in Zamosc, in Russian Poland, into a Jewish middle-class family. At the age of five she became seriously ill. After recovering she walked with a limp; sciatic pain caused her much trouble for her whole life. Luxemburg was educated at the Warsaw Gimnazium. From the age of 16 she participated in revolutionary activities. during these years her favorite writer was the Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz, whose patriotism and life in political exile influenced her deeply. In 1889 Luxemburg moved to Switzerland to continue her studies. But she was also partly forced to flee from her home country because of her political activities.

Luxemburg entered the University of Zürich, where she studied natural sciences and political economy. In 1892 she changed to the faculty of law. Two years later she researched at the major Polish library in Paris. She started her career as a journalist and became one of the leaders of the Social Democratic Party of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania. In 1898 Luxemburg completed her doctorate. The dissertation was entitled The Industrial Development of Poland. Between the years 1892 and 1919 Luxemburg produced almost 700 articles, pamphlets, speeches, and books.

In 1899 appeared Luxemburg's Reform or Revolution, her defense of Marxism. It opposed Edward Bernstein's reformist position and criticized Bernstein's revisionist theories in Evolutionary Socialism (1898). Bernstein had published also in Neue Zeit a series of articles, in which he had attempted to disprove some of the basic doctrines of Marxism. He rejected Marx's theories of class struggle and concluded that revolution was unnecessary. Luxemburg believed that her work would make the "old guard" of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) to view her as a serious political thinker and leader. "Since the final goal of socialism constitutes the only decisive factor distinguishing the social democratic movement from bourgeois democracy and from bourgeois radicalism, the only factor transforming the entire labor movement from a vain effort to repair the capitalist order into a class struggle against this order, for the suppression of this order - the question: "Reform or revolution?" as it is posed by Bernstein, equals for the social democracy the question: "The be or not to be?" In the controversy with Bernstein and his followers, everybody in the party ought to understand clearly it is not a question of this or that method of struggle, or the use of this or that set of tactics, but the of the very existence of the social democratic movement." (from Reform or Revolution)

To obtain German citizen, Luxemburg married Gustav Lübeck, the youngest son of her friend. Luxemburg became in 1898 a leader of the left wing of the SPD and participated in the second International and in the 1905 revolution in Russian Poland. After insulting the Kaiser, she spend in 1904 a short period in prison in Zwickau. In the same year Luxemburg also drafted SDKPL (Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania) party programe What Do We Want?

During the 1905 Russian Revolution she developed the idea that socialism is a revolutionary process which transforms political and economic relations towards ever greater democratic control by the workers themselves. In 1906 she was arrested in Warsaw but released finally on health grounds. She returned to Germany where she taught at SPD party school in Berlin until 1914 and developed ideas about general strike as a political weapon. In 1912 appeared her major theoretical work, The Accumulation of Capital, in which she tried to prove that capitalism was doomed and would inevitably collapse on economic grounds. After differences with moderate German socialists, she founded with Karl Liebknecht the radical Spartacus League in 1916. She also drafted the Spartacists programme Leitsätze. Two years later the organization became the German Communist Party.

During World War I Luxemburg spent long times in prison, writing her Spartakusbriefe and Die Russisce Revolution, where she welcomed the October Revolution as a precursor of world revolution. In 'The Junius Pamphlet' (1916), written under the pseudonym of Junius, she argued that the choice of Socialism or Barbarism is a world-historical turning point which demands resolute action by the proletariat.

However, Luxemburg participated reluctantly in the Spartacist uprising in Berlin against the government. The uprising, which failed, was a defining moment among others for Adolf Hitler. Luxemburg and Liebknecht were arrested in 1919. While being transported to prison, she and Liebknecht were murdered on the night of 15/16 on January 1919 by German Freikorps soldiers. Luxemburg's body was thrown into the Landwehr canal and found on May. She was buried on June 13 in Friedrichsfeld cemetery, where the graves of Liebknecht and the other killed revolutionaries situated. Her burial became a mass demonstration, witnessed by a number of correspondents, including the American screenwriter Ben Hecht.

Luxemburg's lover Leo Jogiches was murdered in 1919. However, their affair had already ended in 1906 - Leo had gone too far in his infidelity. Just before his death, he had decided with Clara Zetkin and Mathild Jacob to publish Luxemburg's collected works. The project proceeded slowly because at that time Lenin's critical opinions of Luxemburg's thought were not easy to ignore. Lenin saw that she underestimated nationalist ideology, underrated the role of the Communist party, and emphasized to much the power of the mass action. Luxemburg was critical about Lenin's acceptance of the idea of national self-determination. In 'Organisationsfragen der russischen Sozialdemokraten' (1904) she criticized his theory of revolutionary vanguard centralism. Luxemburg argued that there could be no real socialism without democracy. Later Stalinist study was not very happy about her - her unorthodoxy was nearly as dangerous as Trotsky's. Luxemburg's collected works did not appear until 1970-75 in DDR.
"The list of people with whom Simone Weil was politically associated reads like an almanac of the French Left. Thévenon, Guérin, Battaille, Serret. Simone saw in Rosa Luxemburg (d. 1919) a kindred soul. 'Her life, her work, her letters affirm life and not death,' wrote Simone. 'Rosa aspired to action, not to sacrifice. In this sense, there is nothing Christian in her temperament.'" (from The Left Hand of God by Adolf Holl, 1997)

Thoroughful reevaluation of Luxemburg's work started in Germany in the 1970s. Her theories were considered as an alternative to Communism or Social Democracy. When Marxist study lost its attraction in the 1980s, Luxemburg arose still interest among feminist theorist. Luxemburg herself did not participate into women's rights movement; women's liberation was for her part of the liberation from the oppression of capitalism. However, she saw that socialist emancipation is incomplete without women's emancipation. Raya Dunayevskaya argues in her study Rosa Luxemburg, Women's Liberation, and Marx's Philosophy of Revolution (1981) that Luxemburg's years after the break-up with her lover Leo Jogiches were not "lost years," as J.P. Nettl presents in his large biography (1966). Dunayevskaya documents Luxemburg's myriad activities and theoretical work including Mass Strike. In the 1980s Margareta von Trotta's film Rosa Luxemburg (1986), starring Barbara Sukowa, gained commercial success. The film was partly based on Annelies Laschitza's studies. However, feminist critic objected Trotta's conventional (melo)dramatic narration.
For further reading: Rosa Luxemburg by Paul Frölich (1904); 'Some questions regarding the history of Bolshevism' by J. Stalin, in Stalin, Leninism (1933); Rosa Luxemburg. Gedanke und Tat by Paul Frölich (1939); Rosa Luxemburg by J.P. Nettl (1966, 2 vols.); 'Notes of a publicist' by V.I. Lenin, in Collected Works, vol. 33 (1966); 'The Marxism of Rosa Luxemburg' by G. Lukács, in History and Class Consciousness (1968); 'Hands off Rosa Luxemburg' by L. Trotsky, in Rosa Luxemburg Speaks (1970); The Legacy of Rosa Luxemburg by N. Geras (1976); Rosa Luxemburg, Woman Liberations and Marx's Philosophy of Revolution by Raya Dunayewskaja (1981); Rosa Luxemburg. Ein Leben für die Freiheit by Fredrich Hetman (1987); Rosa Luxemburg. A Life by Elzbieta Ettinger (1988); Rosa Luxemburg. A Life for the Internationale by Richard Abraham (1989); Rosa Luxemburg - Die Rote Demokratie by Peter Bierl (1991); Une Femme rebelle by Max Gallo (1992); Philosophia: The Thought of Rosa Luxemburg, Simone Weil, and Hannah Arendt by Andrea Nye (1994); Eine Leiche im Landwehrkanal. Die Ermordung der Rosa Luxemburg by Klaus Gietinger (1995); Im Lebensrausche trotz alledem by Annelies Laschitza (1996); Rosa Luxemburg and the Noble Dream by Donald E. Shepardson (1996); Sozialismus oder Barbarei by Virve Manninen (1996); Rosa Luxemburg: A Revolutionary for Our Times by Stephen Eric Bronner (1997); Rosa Luxemburg und Leo Jogiches by Maria Seideman (1998); Die Welt is so schön bei allem Graus by Annelies Laschitza (1998); Rosa und Karl by Manfred Scharrer (2002) - See also: Luxemburg and Mass Action ; Rosa Luxemburg and German Social Democracy by Ernest Mandel ; Rosa Luxemburg, Polish Marxist Revolutionary

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 substanti