“Generation War, which was broadcast as a mini-series on German television last year, is perhaps more interesting as an artifact of the present than as a representation of the past. As tWW2 slips from living memory, as Germany asserts its dominant role in Europe with increasing confidence, and as long-suppressed information emerges from the archives of former Eastern bloc countries, the war’s cultural significance for Germans has shifted.”>review (c) NYT, 2014
>trailer (c) musicbox films
“When last week we featured Bertrand Russell telling a story about his philosophical disciple Ludwig Wittgenstein, I mentioned in passing a film about the latter by Derek Jarman” shot 20 years ago. >more (c) open culture 2013
Jasmila Zbanic‘s “brave drama commemorates the victims of atrocities in 1990s Bosnia, making a substantial impression despite a short running time. She commemorates the more than 3,000 Bosniaks murdered during ethnic cleansing in the Visegrad area in the 1990s, especially the women tortured in rape encampments.” Thus, her movie van be seen as a direct response to the nationalitic Potemkin Village project of another Bosnian director: Emir Kusturica. See the full review (c) variety.com 2013 Cf. the text on Kusturica in THE GUARDIAN, 2012
“The 1993 experimental film above—One Way Street: Fragments for Walter Benjamin—is part documentary, part low-budget cable-access editing exercise. The film provides an introduction to Benjamin’s life and thought through interviews with scholars, re-enactments of his last days, and montages centered around his many aphoristic expressions.” >full text (c) open culture 2013
>another film: Flâneur III: Benjamin’s Shadow (1998)
“Four decades ago, the southern German state of Bavaria became the birthplace of a film genre like no other: the Lederhosen Porn. The alpine meadows were rugged, the men wore leather trousers, the porn was soft — and Germany was hooked.” Today, these films tell us much about zeitgeist, sexuality and gender in the 1970s >full text (c) DER SPIEGEL INT’L, 2013
This is the first known/preserved animated film (Lotte Reiniger, Germany, 1926)
and a striking example of popular Orientalism in early Modernism as well.
If “writing poem about Auschwitz is barbaric, as German philosopher Theodor W. Adorno claimed: what about feature films on genocide? In this case Body Complete (about the Srebrenica massacre) by Austrian director Lukas Sturm >interview (c) wieninternational.at 2013
The new German film by Margarethe Trotta on the German American philosopher Hanna Arendt & the Holocuast organizer Adolf Eichmann is out. And Arendt’s original articles on the “Banality of Evil” are avialable in the New Yorker archive >text (c) OPEN CULTURE / FILM,HISTORY 2013
“Horror movies frighten us; violent thrillers agitate us; sentimental stories make us cry. Suffering is often part of our enjoyment. Within limits, however: we are not to be so displeased that we are not pleased. Buñuel deliberately went beyond the limits of permissible displeasure. And so, in his own way, does the Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke” (winner of the European Film Award 2012 in four categories). Text (c) THE LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS, 2012
“A homophobic, middle-aged Serbian gangster ends up sacrificing himself to protect Gay freedom in his country…” The surpise success movie in the Western Balkans this Fall. It promotes nothing less than the Utopian reconcilation of the ex-Yugoslav peoples (or, of their gangsters, at least;) over the protection of Serbian LGBT rights. Or does it take to be a mobster to support gays and lesbians (which would be a less nice message)?
delirium clemens 