by ·Comments Off on Everyone Else (2009, Maren Ade)

Watched because Ade is one of Cinema Scope’s 50 Under 50, and this movie in their top ten of 2009. I didn’t love her previous feature The Forest for the Trees, but CS insisted that it gets better – and they’re right.

Gitti works in the music business and boyfriend Chris in architecture/renovation. They’re on vacation, unsuccessfully trying to avoid Chris’s frenemy/colleage Hans with his celebrity clothing designer wife Sana. Constants with Chris and Gitti seem to be social blunders around others (and sometimes worse, like when Gitti threatens Sana with a knife) and shitty, selfish behavior towards each other (this is usually Chris), culminating in Gitti leaving him and flying home early.

Shot handheld but nicely, with no incidental music, just a study of a few days with a couple who might not be meant for each other. Chris is Lars Eidinger of the new Peter Greenaway movie and Gitti is Birgit Minichmayr of Downfall and The White Ribbon.

E. Hynes in Reverse Shot: “Ade’s film is a perfectly complete portrait of romantic entanglement. Being on the inside can be brutal, but few things are as worthy of the trouble.” His appreciation of the movie is essential reading, made me reconsider it and realize what greatness people have been seeing in this unassuming character drama.

Kent Jones (who also reveals that Claire Denis loved it):

Where did she summon such a taut balance between tenderness and absolute ruthlessness, the kind of ruthlessness every filmmaker needs and few have the courage to exercise, the kind of tenderness few allow themselves the ability to summon on the set? … Everyone Else is a film of terrible power and absolute freedom, and it’s obvious that it’s only the beginning of the exploration.

Summer Without Gitti (2009, Maren Ade)

Chris is bored, makes dolls out of bits of ginger root, finally finds Hans. They climb trees. Hans goes away and Chris is bored and sad again. I watched this before the feature, but it’s obviously more clever in hindsight, Ade having re-edited scenes and outtakes from the feature to remove all presence of Gitti.

by ·Comments Off on Dreileben trilogy (2011)

A different kind of trilogy, three filmmakers born in different decades each makes his own feature film set in the same town at the same time, rotating around a central event: a convicted murderer escapes from a hospital and kills again.

Quotes in italics below are from Dennis Lim’s great article in Cinema Scope, which is what got me watching the trilogy in the first place.

Beats Being Dead (Christian Petzold)

Clean-looking picture. Follows young hospital flunky Johannes. Broken up with Sara, a hospital director’s daughter, he picks up a girl he sees getting dumped by a band of motorcycle thugs and takes her home. Johannes proves to be a bit of a stalker, and Ana sees him following her everywhere, which is why I keep thinking this movie was the chapter entitled Don’t Follow Me Around, but no, that’s the next one. Hard to tell Johannes’s intentions – he seems entranced with Ana, but at the end I wonder if he was using her to get back with Sara. She’s not a good match for him – makes lots of bad decisions then cries about them. Either way, he does end up with Sara after Ana attacks her at a company party, and they go off to Berlin together. Johannes never realizes that the door he clumsily left open at the hospital last week allowed the killer to get free, nor that the killer eventually stalks Ana (just like Johannes has been doing) and kills her as he’s driving out of town.

Petzold inscribes cold, hard truths of class and money into almost every scene, fusing erotic tensions with socioeconomic ones.

Don’t Follow Me Around (Dominik Graf)

A deceptive story with a grainier look and a less driven feel than the first movie. Psychiatrist Jo (Jeanette Hain of that Kate Winslet movie The Reader) is dispatched to Dreileben to assist the police with the manhunt. Jo arrives, stays with old friend Vera and her husband Bruno, who seem to be having relationship trouble. The escaped-killer plot is mostly dropped as she sets her investigative skills towards her friend, discovering that they both dated the same man shortly before they met. Meanwhile, Jo’s work in town is cryptic until halfway through the movie it’s revealed that she never came to work on the killer case, but to investigate corruption, leading to the arrest of six local officers. Once this is wrapped up, Jo does work on the other case, enlisting an artist to bait the killer. Meanwhile, Vera leaves home suddenly, paying a visit to the mutual unseen ex, returning having learned more secrets as the movie reveals that he’s the father of Jo’s daughter. Despite (or because of) its sidetracks, it’s the most richly engrossing of the three movies.

Talky and witty, packed with revealing tangents and glancing micro-observations. Shot by Michael Wiesweg in soft-toned Super 16 – a striking contrast to the crisp, controlled visuals of the other two entries – Graf’s film makes a virtue of skittishness. The distractable camera snoops, wanders, lingers on odd details, and the narrative likewise keeps shifting its attention.

One Minute of Darkness (Christoph Hochhausler)

This one suffers from having nothing much to say. It follows the killer, Molesch (Stefan Kurt, who got to play Albert Speer in a Hitler movie), whose history, escape, various sightings, then capture have already been addressed in the other two movies. Here we see the escape in greater details – Molesch wandering through a back door (left open by Johannes) while in hospital to see his just-deceased mother. Then it’s on to narrow escapes (movie briefly becomes The Fugitive during a bridge scene), police incompetence, and Molesch’s unlikely (but quite typically movie-likely) truce with a runaway girl. And just as inspector Marcus (I love that the music has ringing tones, in tune with his tinnitis) figures out that Molesch was innocent of his original crime, Molesch of course kills Ana from the first movie (after stopping to burn down his dead mum’s house).

[the titular piece of missing surveillance footage] speaks to the impossibility of certainty in the absence of observable evidence, the danger of imposing stories onto what we cannot know for sure. This conundrum is, of course, intimately linked to the de-dramatized cinema of the Berlin School: the fear of narrative as, to quote Hochhausler, something that “contaminates the picture,” a lie, and what’s more, a lie that could become the truth.

Petzold has made at least two films I’ve read about: Barbara and Jerichow. Graf has done a lot of television, including something called Doktor Knock, which is what I’m going to name my metal band. Hochhausler made a few films I’ve never heard of.

Graf was born in 1952, Petzold in 1960, Hochhausler in 1972, and each has a distinct relationship to the now decade-old “new German cinema” that has come to be imprecisely known as the Berlin School. Graf, a respected senior figure and a stalwart of German television, predates the Berlin School’s emergence, and has criticized what he sees as the reticence and passivity of many of the films. Petzold is often identified as one of the movement’s de facto founders, part of the pioneering wave that studied at the dffb in the ’80s and ’90s. Hochhausler belongs (with Benjamin Heisenberg and Ulrich Kohler) to the Revolver-aligned second generation, whose careers have progressed and diverged in ways that reflect the constant sense of flux, born of habitual self-examination, that defines this loose group.

Indiewire:

Dreileben is not an epic story. A term like that is generally saved for adventures that are years long or involve arduous journeying. Instead of offering something like that, these three German filmmakers have given us a very dense, abstruse, enclosed saga; full of knotty liaisons and unsolved conflicts … Coincidences are played with often (some big, some small, some even unnoticeable) and certain elements/traits, such as deafness, carry over to different characters and situations. Rather than composing a grand narrative, the directors went above and beyond to provide a wealth of substance and meaning.

by ·Comments Off on Forest for the Trees (2003, Maren Ade)

Not all mumblecore comedies of young-adult awkwardness come from the States, apparently. This one is from German filmmaker Ade, one of Cinema Scope’s 50 Under 50.

Melanie moves to a new town where she knows nobody, starting work as a teacher, breaking up with her boyfriend (who helps her move). She is enthusiastic to the point of desperation – gives all her neighbors gifts to introduce herself. She dodges a fellow teacher who wants to hang out with her, manages to make friends with a woman named Tina across the courtyard instead. But Tina has friends, throws parties, is in a relationship, deals with personal problems, and doesn’t want to hang out with Melanie 100% of the time – so Melanie becomes more and more desperate and stalkerish.

Adult life isn’t going too well. She even goes to a petting zoo and gets pushed around by little horses. Nothing intensely interesting happens until the final scene, where Melanie goes for a drive alone listening to Grandaddy and decides to crawl into the backseat and stare out the side window while the car is still going.

Pretty good little indie movie – I don’t get all the excitement, but I’ll take Cinema Scope’s word for it and watch her next movie. She’s also recently worked on Ulrich Kohler and Miguel Gomes movies I wanted to see. M. Peranson in Cinema Scope says this was her “DV student-film debut” and mentions that Melanie’s accent is a source of humor for native Germans.

by ·1 Comment

Lang’s final film finds him back in Germany, making a cheap-looking b-movie callback to one of his largest silent features and his pioneering second sound film. Immediately following his Indian Epic, another serials-inspired adventure flick, it seems that either Lang’s artistically triumphant two decades in Hollywood have earned him no respect and he’s been kicked down to making silly action flicks – or maybe these are the kinds of movies he’d been wanting to make again. Seems like the former, a bland assignment for a tired old man, since the plotting is snappy but this lacks the atmosphere and interest of Franju’s Judex a few years later.

Wolfgang Preiss, who would continue playing Mabuse throughout the 60’s and appear in Chabrol’s Dr. M:

Roger Corman-looking billionaire Peter van Eyck of Wages of Fear and Mr. Arkadin:

Movie starts with a flutter of things happening. Inspector Kras speaks with a blind psychic named Cornelius, snipers are ordered by a clubfooted kingpin to kill a reporter in rush hour traffic, and the cops declare that Dr. Mabuse’s crime legacy was forgotten in the wake of the whole nazi thing. Then billionaire Travers talks a suicidal woman named Menil down from a ledge while an insurance salesman called Mistelzweig bothers everyone down at the bar.

Mistelzweig: Werner Peters, a Mabuse film regular

fake-suicidal Dawn Addams, who followed-up by playing Jekyll/Hyde’s wife in a Hammer film:

The billionaire falls for the pretty suicidal girl (and is shown a secret one-way mirror where he can watch her) while the inspector fends off assassination attempts while investigating the crime-ridden fancy hotel where those two are staying. Anyway, the psychic is the girl’s psychiatrist is Mabuse, Mistelzweig is an undercover cop, the girl is a Mabuse plant who gets the billionaire to fake-kill her fake-husband, and all this leads where it must: to a confession of evil plans in an underground lair and a car chase/shootout.

Inspector Gert Frobe, who would run into another master criminal years later in Nuits Rouges:

Henchman Howard Vernon, a Jean-Pierre Melville regular and title star of The Awful Dr. Orlof:

According to Wikipedia, based on a novel written in Esperanto. I’d like to hear the Masters of Cinema commentary with David Kalat, but I’ve already bought the other two Lang-Mabuse movies domestically, so it seems nuts to buy the UK box set for $60.

by ·Comments Off on World on a Wire (1973, Rainer Fassbinder)

Stiller manages a perfectly realistic virtual-reality simulator set in the future so government (and increasingly, industry) can make predictive policies. And about ten minutes into the three and a half-hour movie I realized that Stiller is himself a fictional character inside a virtual reality. I knew this because I’ve seen science fiction before, and the story was seeming familiar – turns out it’s based on the same source novel as The Thirteenth Floor. Fortunately, Stiller figures this out at the halfway point, after obsessing over an erased security chief whom only he can remember, so we’ve got the whole second half (episode – this was a TV miniseries) to deal with this info. More fortunately, there’s no slow grinding of the plot gears as the characters slowly realize something that I already know, because the film is 100% fun to watch, even while being obvious. Fassbinder has found a way to make low-budget, no-effects TV sci-fi look terrific, covering every surface with mirrors and windows and screens (you catch sight of the camera crew pretty often – another fun game), creeping around corners with his Ruizian camera (with sparing use of the requisite 70’s zooms) and playing with perspective. With this and Sam Fuller’s Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street being my only touchstones, I have to assume that mid-70’s German television was amazing.

Stiller (Klaus Lowitsch of Peckinpah’s Cross of Iron), the shortest person in the movie, is taking over the project because his predecessor/father-figure Vollmer has unexpectedly suicided. Vollmer’s daughter Eva, Stiller’s main squeeze, has grown distant, the corporate project head (Stiller’s boss) Siskins is becoming more demanding, and Stiller’s new secretary Fromm (Fassbinder regular Barbara Valentin) is obviously a spy, implanted to keep Stiller abreast of the situation.

Get it?

Stiller gets more impertinent, programs a singing, tap-dancing version of his boss into the simulacrum. He goes on the run after his mid-movie revelation, realizing that Vollmer was killed for finding out the same thing. Eva reappears, says she’s from the real world, that Vollmer never had a daughter until she programmed herself in a few days before, that they have many virtual worlds but this one captured attention for being the only one that created its own sub-virtual-world. And since the real Eva is in love with the virtual Stiller, she helps him escape by swapping psyches with someone outside.

Eva and Stiller trying to pull a Minority Report pose:

I liked the electronic music, daring for 1973, but sometimes the bonkers, intense squeals which occur when Stiller is troubled would make Ash upset. I also like that you can have fully naked women on German television. Don’t know much about Fassbinder, assumed he’s kinda Nick Ray meets Doug Sirk meets Sam Fuller meets Hedwig, based on my decade-ago half-rememberance of watching The Marriage of Maria Braun.

Stiller being told that he’s a fictional character:

Stiller sneaks into a theater while on the run from the law, watches what appears to be based on the last few minutes of Dishonored:

Nashville Scene rightly calls it “a film that feels somehow inevitable in your viewing, a missing link that should have been there all along.”

Another key reference for World on a Wire is Jean-Luc Godard’s own lone foray into sci-fi, 1965’s Alphaville. Much like Godard’s film, World generates a futurescape from the present mostly by judicious selection. Abandoned building sites, freeways and glass skyscrapers, it seems, are forever. (In the final moments of World, Fassbinder completes the homage as Alphaville’s star, Eddie Constantine, makes a cameo appearance.)

Eddie C.:

Film Quarterly:

Despite not actually being an adaptation of a Dick fiction, World on a Wire has more in common with the wry mordancy of Dick’s work than many official Dick adaptations, not least in the way that it shows each of its three nested worlds as being equally drab. We actually see very little of the world “below” (the world inside the Simulacron) and almost nothing of the world “above” (the world one level up from what we first took to be reality). The world below we see only in snatched glimpses of hotel lobbies and inside a lorry driver’s cab. But it is the revelation—or non-revelation—of the world above at the climax of the film that is most startling. Instead of some Gnostic transfiguration, we find ourselves in what looks like a meeting room in some ultra-banal office block. At first, the electronic blinds are down, momentarily holding open the possibility that there will be some marvelous—or at least strange—world to be seen once they are up. But when they do eventually rise, we see only the same grey skies and city- scape.

Vollmer, just before his death:

by ·Comments Off on Deserter (1933, Vsevolod Pudovkin)

Another Russian movie full of visual and sound innovation that wears out its welcome after an hour and forty-five minutes of tedious state propaganda. I’m lost from the beginning – when the workers strike, are we on their side? We must be – in a Russian movie we are always on the workers’ side. But then wise Zelle with his hitler mustache tells us that a strike is unwise. A newsgirl is scolded by a policeman. Police vs. striker battle. Months pass. A boat is named “the five-year plan”. Someone is killed by a car chauffeuring a bored rich gentleman. Another guy jumps into the river (in gorgeous slow-mo) after reading a headline about mechanizations that can replace ten workers with a single machine operator. Negotiations continue. Finally the strikers are machine-gunned down, then strike-breakers march in while the soundtrack still plays the moans of the dying. Meanwhile, striker Karl Renn stays home because he’s tired of the whole thing. The survivors, I suppose, hold a meeting and decide to send four reps to the Soviet Union aboard “their” ship. I wasn’t aware that shipyard workers owned the ships they built, nor did I realize until halfway through the movie that it’s set in Germany! Whoops.

They send the four least useful workers, including shirker Karl Renn, to Russia for inspiration or something. After a massive welcoming parade, Karl joins a factory for some months, and sees it pull together with shock workers to complete an important project. Much, much, much typical proletariat talk precedes and follows, culminating in an endless speech by Renn made more endless by a german-russian translator. I did learn that the enemy of the German workers is the “social democrats” – should’ve realized that. Back in Germany, Zelle is dead and Renn joins the struggle. Movie ends with a wordless montage of cops beating the shit out of protestors.

It’s a part-talkie with total silence during some scenes. There are cool sound moments in others. The newsgirl’s voice keeps cutting off the music, which immediately restarts after, cut into shreds. Extremely rapid-fire cutting at times, too fast for my computer to keep from fragmenting the DVD image, with almost subliminal shots of explosions during the machine-guns-vs.-strikers scene. More explosions are superimposed over quick-cut exciting scenes – Pudovkin was a proto-Michael Bay.

Renn: “Long live communist party!”

From one of the writers of Potemkin. The newsgirl was Tamara Makarova, a film actress through the 80’s, and Karl Renn was in October. In Germany we see a movie theater playing Madchen In Uniform.

The NY Times’ 1934 review begins: “While the crushing of the labor movement in Germany during the two years devoted by V.I. Pudovkin to the production of his first dialogue motion picture has robbed it of much of its timeliness, the main theme of Deserter remains unaffected by the triumph of Hitlerism.”

by ·Comments Off on Grand Illusion (1937, Jean Renoir)

A weird sort of (anti-)war film in that the opposing sides (mostly French vs. German) are extremely nice to each other. The great Jean Gabin (between The Lower Depths and La Bete Humaine) is pilot Marechal, flying the right proper monocle-wearing Captain Boldieu (Pierre Fresnay, star of Le Corbeau and Duvivier’s Phantom Carriage remake) when they’re shot down by the right proper monocle-wearing Erich von Stroheim – who shakes their hands and invites them to dinner.

The next section is the source of many comic/dramatic prison camp films, but without the grit and terror of many of them (although Gabin is painfully placed in solitary confinement after provoking a celebration over Germany losing a battle), since WWII forever changed the face of prison camps. The men are stationed with a series of characters digging an escape tunnel beneath their barracks, including three major Rules of the Game actors: The Engineer (jealous husband Gaston Modot), The Actor (Julien Carette, Gaston’s poacher nemesis) and Rosenthal (Marcel Dallo, the marquis), along with Jean Daste (a brush-mustached vegetarian).

That’s Daste at upper-right, and his L’Age d’Or-starring engineer companion over his shoulder:

Before they can use the tunnel, our initial two Frenchman plus Rosenthal (a rich jew who receives lavish care packages from home) are transferred to a new camp – one run by a stiffly strict Stroheim (is there any other kind of Stroheim?), now in a back/neck brace from an injury. They immediately set about planning their escape again. Boldieu causes a distraction while the other two climb down a handmade rope. Stroheim is extremely depressed to have to shoot down Boldieu, a man he considered too respectful to break the prison rules.

Gabin and Dallo on the run:

Finally, a section that proved unexpectedly resonant with Essential Killing – a prisoner on the run encounters a woman living alone (the lead actress of the film, not appearing until the last fifteen minutes) who brings him in and cares for him. Rosenthal has a leg injury, but overall the guys are in better shape than Vincent Gallo was, and Gabin falls for the lovely Dita Parlo (Renoir was always casting actors from L’Atalante), a German civilian with a young son, whose husband and brothers have all died in the war. The men walk off through Switzerland, Gabin hoping to return. But Renoir obviously doesn’t believe he will.

P. Cowie on the audio commentary:

“War is a great illusion,” said Renoir on another occasion, “with its hopes unfulfilled, its promises never kept.” Of course the interesting thing is that [Marechal and Rosenthal] say farewell to each other with no plans to meet, whereas in the original scenario, Bazin claims that the two fugitives had arranged a rendezvous at Maxime’s in Paris for the first Christmas Eve after the war, and the last shot would show “December 24, 1918,” and their table, reserved but empty in the midst of the busy restaurant, as though even their friendship had been an illusion. . . . Many years later, when Renoir was asked about war films and their effectiveness, he replied soberly, “In 1936 I made a picture named Grand Illusion in which I tried to express all my deep feelings for the cause of peace. This film was very successful. Three years later, the war broke out.”

by ·Comments Off on The Haunted Castle (1921, FW Murnau)

A silly-ass mystery film with little of the grand style of Murnau’s later films. Also: the castle isn’t haunted, and it’s not a scary movie, and Kino knew that when they gave it that goth-expressionist cover art. All was forgiven when Julius Falkenstein of The Oyster Princess showed up, got scared and had a Nosferatu-prefiguring dream sequence.

D. Cairns already gave a terrific write-up of this movie last month, so there’s little I can add, except that the story revolves partly around a fake beard that I spotted the moment I saw it (then a close-up revealing the character’s “bald” head to be a cap confirmed that even in the film’s reality, this is a fake beard).

Plot concerns a count named Oetsch who comes uninvited to a hunting party at the Vogeloed castle, sits stewing in the corner while everyone gossips about how he murdered his brother the baron a couple years’ back. The brother’s widow, now remarried, is an invited guest, mostly stays in her room avoiding the count. Meanwhile a priest (the count with the fake beard) wanders about then disappears. Somehow this all makes the baroness’s new husband admit his guilt in the ex-husband-slaying, letting the count off the hook.

by ·Comments Off on People On Sunday (1930, Siodmak & Ulmer & Zinnemann & Wilder)

“Filmstudio 1929 presents its first experiment: People On Sunday, a film without actors.”

Like Natalie Portman in Garden State, I like to do things nobody else has ever done before, hence I watched the German silent film People On Sunday on my laptop whilst listening to John Zorn’s manic, screechy, pounding “Spy vs. Spy: The Music of Ornette Coleman.” Once my Portmanic originality had been established, I switched to Zorn’s more pleasing “Filmworks Anthology” disc.

Things the movie proved to me:
– All germans eat are sausages, and all they drink is beer.
– In the 1920’s/30’s, young men held spanking parties.

The movie suffered from the fact that I’d just watched Lonesome, a much more exciting movie from the same era with the same working-people-on-vacation vibe. This one has less urgency and romanticism, just taking it easy on a lazy Sunday, some friends out for a picnic and paddleboat ride, trying to score with women in the park. My favorite plot point was the girl from the original group who never makes it to the park, stays in bed and sleeps through the whole movie.

Nicely-shot and well-paced, a fine way to spend 80 minutes. It’d probably be a forgotten footnote if not for the amazing combination of soon-to-be-famous filmmakers who worked on it – co-directed by Curt and Robert Siodmak, Edgar Ulmer and Fred Zinnemann, cowritten with Billy Wilder, shot by Eugen Schüfftan (Eyes Without a Face, Port of Shadows), all just starting out in the movies. An IMDB commenter: “Within a few years most of these people were in Hollywood, and Hitler had destroyed both the wonderful film industry they had helped build and the joyous Berlin that this film depicts . . . the film allows us a glimpse of Berlin between the wars and it is sad to watch it with the knowledge of what was soon to be.”

N. Isenberg:

Shot in Berlin on the eve of the Great Depression with almost no budget, an equally modest cast of amateur actors, a relatively untested, unknown crew, and no major studio backing . . . a remarkably straightforward depiction, by turns affectionate and comical, of courting rituals, leisure activity, and mass entertainment circa 1930

In the first act the sleepy model and her man tear up each other’s movie star pictures – recognized Greta Garbo and Harold Lloyd:

Stylishly scrawled end titles: “4 million people waiting for next sunday,” one word at a time.

Some fun editing, including one weird bit with rapid cutting between a man in the park and various statues. Lots of close-ups and few intertitles. A different kind of movie, free-spirited and outdoorsy, can see why they labeled it an experiment.

Sweet record advertisement (from the same songwriter as “Jollity Farm”):