Archive for February, 2012
Memories of Oberhausen
Tuesday, February 28th, 2012“The old film is dead. We believe in the new one.” On 28 February 1962, at the 8th West German Short Film Festival in Oberhausen, 26 West German filmmakers proclaimed the Oberhausen Manifesto. This moment marked a milestone in the development of German cinema – never before, and never again, would a break with existing […]
Vive le Jury!
Saturday, February 25th, 2012Als Ron mich im Jahre 1977 zum ersten Male mit nach Cannes nahm, sah ich Padre Padrone von Paolo und Vittorio Taviani. Es war beglückend, nie werde ich dieses Meisterwerk der Filmkunst vergessen. Die Taviani-Brüder gewannen die Goldene Palme in Cannes 1977. Wie sehr hätte es Ron gefreut, dass bei der 62. Berlinale 2012 die […]
Hell by Tim Fehlbaum
Thursday, February 23rd, 2012In photo: Scene from Hell by Tim Fehlbaum, courtes Filmfest München A postapocalyptic feature film from Germany. This almost sounds like a miracle. Actually, one rarely stumbles across film releases from this sort of genre over here. This fact in itself should have guaranteed director Tim Fehlbaum’s feature film debut a great deal of attention […]
GoEast Symposium April 2012: RealAvantGarde – With Lenfilm through the short 20th century
Monday, February 20th, 2012The 2012 goEast Symposium in Wiesbaden (April 19-22, 2012) departs from the pattern established in previous years: instead of covering a theme with general relevance for Central and Eastern Europe, this year’s Symposium focuses on a single national institution: Lenfilm, the first film studio to be set up in the USSR. Lenfilm recently returned to […]
“The Red Dream Factory” Berlinale Retrospective 2012
Tuesday, February 14th, 2012This year’s Berlinale retrospective sounds promising: The Red Dream Factory. What it is actually about is easy to explain – the most productive and avant-garde years in Soviet film history and its relation to the Weimar Republic – yet hard to describe. The word ›factory‹ relates to the common notion used in the early years […]
Hail the American Mustang!
Monday, February 13th, 2012Google the word »mustang« and the search engine produces an emotional account of a sleek, well engineered and stylish vehicle with a highly coveted hood emblem showing a racing steed, similar to the Mercedes-Benz star … Now add the word »Horse« and the list of sad refrains and government bureaucracy litters the page. Our civilization […]
Berlinale 2012 – Perspektive Deutsches Kino
Wednesday, February 8th, 2012With curiosity and while scratching my head a bit I watched the long documentary – 96 minutes – Man for a Day by Katarina Peters. The story revolves around a social lab experiment, a workshop by performance artist Diane Torr with a dozen women from Berlin. The question: »What makes a man a man – […]