Germany in Autumn
Germany in Autumn does not have a plot per se; it mixes documentary footage, along with standard movie scenes, to give the audience the mood of Germany during the late 1970s. The movie covers the two month time period during 1977 when a businessman was kidnapped, and later murdered, by the left-wing terrorists known as the RAF-Rote Armee Fraktion (Red Army Fraction). The businessman had been kidnapped in an effort to secure the release of the orginal leaders of the RAF, also known as the Baader-Meinhof gang. When the kidnapping effort and a plane hijacking effort failed, the three most prominent leaders of the RAF, Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, and Jan-Carl Raspe, all committed suicide in prison. It has become an article of faith within the left-wing community that these three were actually murdered by the state.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Volker Schlöndorff
Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus
Bernhard Sinkel
Katja Rupé
Alexander Kluge
Maximiliane Mainka
Alf Brustellin
Hans Peter Cloos
Edgar Reitz
Peter Schubert
Casts & Crew
Hannelore Hoger
Angela Winkler
Vadim Glowna
Katja Rupé
Heinz Bennent
Also Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Hans is a street fruit peddler and born-loser. His choice of career upsets his bourgeois family, causing him to turn to drinking and violence. After recovering from a debilitating heart attack, his business finally begins to take off. However the more he becomes a credit to his family, the more depressed he becomes.
Petra von Kant is a successful fashion designer -- arrogant, caustic, and self-satisfied. She mistreats Marlene (her secretary, maid, and co-designer). Enter Karin, a 23-year-old beauty who wants to be a model. Petra falls in love with Karin and invites her to move in.
Fox, a former circus performer, wins the lottery of DM 500,000 and can now have the life and things that he has always wanted. While he wants to climb up the social ladder, it isn't without turmoil, and being torn between his old working class roots, and the shiny new facade of middle class consciousness.
"Whity" is the mulatto butler of the dysfunctional Nicholson family in the American southwest in 1878. The father, Ben Nicholson, has an attractive young wife Katherine, and two sons by a previous marriage; the homosexual Frank, and the retarded Davy. Whity tries to carry out all their orders, however demeaning, until various of the family members ask him to kill some of the others.
Tensions between members of a film crew build while they wait for the arrival of the director and star to arrive on location.
The lackluster and plodding Bolweiser has the (mis)fortune to be married to the town's siren; his trusting nature leads him into serious trouble when she beds nearly every available guy.
Based on Franz Xaver Kroetz's play, which is in turn based on a true story, this film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder tells the story of a very young girl who, after persuading a local boy to become her lover, induces the anger of her father, whose incestuous sexual attentions to her have grown unbearable.
A pseudo variety show about the Aufbau-Era, the time of the German 'economic miracle'. Brigitte Mira recounts her four husbands through song and joke, on an series of artificial sets.
The story of the young man Peter, who grew up during the economic miracle, bereft of parental care and love. Learning early on that interpersonal relationships are based on the principles of exchange or purchase, he abides by these rules and gives generous presents to his family and his wife Erika. But when he is unable to keep up this life-style, his story takes a horrendous turn ...
Rainer Werner Fassbinder visits for two weeks the "Theater der Welt" festival 1981 in Cologne. 30 companies showed in over 100 performances their own visions of a new theater. Framed by Fassbinder's reading of one of the famous essays on theater: Antonin Artaud's "The Theater and its double". The audience is left to wonder how much of Artaud's radical and beautiful vision is realized in contemporary theater.
Also Directed by Volker Schlöndorff
Thirteen filmmakers talk about Henri Langlois and their relationship with him.
Rita Vogt is a radical West German terrorist who abandons the revolution and settles in East Germany with a new identity provided by the East German secret service. She lives in constant fear of having her cover blown, which unavoidably happens after the German re-unification.
A drama loosely based on Jean Bernard's Nazi-era prison diary.
A nearly illiterate woman becomes one of the founders of Poland's Solidarity union.
Pollet and Schlöndorff imagine the Mediterranean as a supernal arena.
A regular day in a Louisiana sugarcane plantation changes course when a local white farmer is shot in self defense. A group of old, black men takes a courageous step by coming forward en masse to take responsibility for the killing of a white racist, whom one of their members has shot. As the sheriff confronts the suspects, the young plantation owner stands alone in her daring defense of this group of men, provoking racial tension that makes a compelling drama.
An interview in six parts between Volker Schlöndorff and Billy Wilder.
Television film.
Frenchman Abel Tiffauges is a naive man who lives a simple life working as a mechanic. Falsely accused of being a child abuser, he is recruited as a soldier when World War II begins, but is captured soon and taken to the heart of Nazi Germany.
Somewhere in the endless steppes of Central Asia lies a treasure. One man holds the key to it, a fragment of an ancient map. But in his restless quest, Charles isn't looking for fame or glory. He's looking for a way to heal his wounded soul. He's looking for love. Ulzhan felt it the first time she laid eyes on him.
Also Directed by Bernhard Sinkel
The three daughters of the Dessau merchant Sellmann move with their father to Prague in 1936, where he accepted a position as director of the Böhmische Landesbank. For the three different women begins a new life, which accompanies the film over a period of ten years.
Ernest Hemingway attained celebrity at the age of twenty-five. Some of his novels are among the greatest bestsellers of American literature. His life is a legend woven with countless passions, encounters and experiences. This colossus of a man was a novelist, journalist polemicist, playwright, hunter, fisherman, adventurer... A globetrotter with a hermit's soul, he went through three wars, had a life-long romance with danger, and made death his closest companion and his main source of inspiration. The son of a Puritan family, he was also a pleasure seeker. A self-confessed male chauvinist, he thought of Woman as a muse, a worshipper, a second mother. His four wives- Hadley Richardson, Pauline Pfeiffer, Martha Gellhorn and Mary Welsh - represented both his mirror and his straight man, seeking to appease his torments and contradictions and to accompany him to the end of his dreams.
After the death of the owner of the house Lina Braake is living in, the house is accrued to the bank. During the complete refurbishment of the building, the 81-year old woman is thrown out of her flat and is put in an old people′s home. There she meets 84-year old Gustaf. Together, the lively seniors come up with a plan to trick the bank with a smart credit fraud and take their revenge. They need the money to buy a country house on Sardinia and leave Germany for good. Although their coup proves to be successful, the bank soon finds Lina. But due to her old age she cannot be tried anymore.
Based on unfinished 1954 novel by the German author Thomas Mann. It is a parody of Goethe's autobiography Poetry and Truth, particularly in its pompous tone.
A young man seeks freedom and eventually gets conformed. To escape society, he wanders south. After some adventures he returns to his lover, where he expects a civil career.
In the late 1970s the German secret service fights against RAF terrorism and searches for constitutional enemies in the public service. Teacher Brasch implicates secret service agent Körner and the government in the suicide of a young teen. As a result Brasch and the exposed Körner are fired.
Germany in the Thirties. A movie teller realizes that his profession is not longer needed. Silent movies are not produced any longer. Telling stories is the only thing the man was ever good in, so he does not know what to do now. As political circumstances are changing dramatically these days in Germany, he gets new hope that things will again be going better for him...
Also Directed by Alexander Kluge
An opera film by Alexander Kluge
Film by Kluge and Aust.
Short science fiction film with footage from Willi Tobler und der Untergang der 6. Flotte.
Outer space in 2034 is run by greedy corporations in a rundown bureaucracy. Two astronauts, who are not very smart, make their way with shady dealings, smuggling and spaceship wrecking.
Combining fictional and documentary modes, Kluge's In Danger and Dire Distress... takes a critical stance toward Frankfurt's public sphere and urban redevelopment. Despite the serious formal and political concerns of the film, Kluge's heightened sense of the absurd safeguards a reserve of utopian optimism.
Willi endeavors to survive in a world where annihilistic galactic battles rage, by taking a job at the centre of power. But it's the wrong side that he takes in this civil war...
A new version of Nipp and Tuck (Del Ruth / Sennett, 1923)
No known information
Also Directed by Maximiliane Mainka
Alexander Kluge reflects on the medieval Staufer dynasty and draws a line from Emperor Barbarossa to Operation Barbarossa.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder reflects on the various stages of his career, discusses how his motives behind filmmaking evolved up his film Despair.
Alexander Kluge documents the preparations for an exhibition on the Staufer dynasty.
Also Directed by Alf Brustellin
The three daughters of the Dessau merchant Sellmann move with their father to Prague in 1936, where he accepted a position as director of the Böhmische Landesbank. For the three different women begins a new life, which accompanies the film over a period of ten years.
Eleven-year old Jason and his companions, including Hercules and Orpheus, go with the ship "Argo" in the search for the Golden Fleece. With wit and cunning to overcome various obstacles until they reach the destination of their fantastic journey. The experiment is not only due to the popularization or naive glorification of a myth, but the search space occupied by fact that the heroes of antiquity were actually very young.
Also Directed by Hans Peter Cloos
Also Directed by Edgar Reitz
Lulu, the daughter of musician Hermann Simon, is looking for something she feels is missing from her life. She delves into the past and is transported to the lives of her ancestors via dreamlike sequences that show the hopes and realities of her female relations over the course of an entire century. Heimat Fragments is an intoxicating trip into the lives of venerable characters from different periods in Lulu's family history, from long-forgotten scenes of war to every day family life on the farm. This gripping film shows fragments of the lives that shaped her own. Her gaze into the past does not simply signal the end of her youth, it means the beginning of a newly gained freedom.
Made for the Venice Film Festival's 70th anniversary, seventy filmmakers made a short film between 60 and 90 seconds long on their interpretation of the future of cinema.
Combining fictional and documentary modes, Kluge's In Danger and Dire Distress... takes a critical stance toward Frankfurt's public sphere and urban redevelopment. Despite the serious formal and political concerns of the film, Kluge's heightened sense of the absurd safeguards a reserve of utopian optimism.
A short by Alexander Kluge.
Follow-up to the TV trilogy "Heimat", this time for cinemas, set again in the fictional village Schabbach in the Hunsrück region of Rhineland-Palatinate.
Eleven-year old Jason and his companions, including Hercules and Orpheus, go with the ship "Argo" in the search for the Golden Fleece. With wit and cunning to overcome various obstacles until they reach the destination of their fantastic journey. The experiment is not only due to the popularization or naive glorification of a myth, but the search space occupied by fact that the heroes of antiquity were actually very young.
Two women during WW2 living in a Hunsrück village embark on a trip to Vienna.
Short by Edgar Reitz.
Documentary short by Edgar Reitz.
A meditation on the first 100 years of German cinema, featuring some of its greatest directors.
Also Directed by Peter Schubert
Unser Walter is a German television series.