Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus
Celebrated West German director Alexander Kluge presents this drama that strings together vignettes of events taken from everyday newspaper headlines. Germans are shown in their reactions to World War II, minorities, and the elderly. A side plot follows a meeting between former West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt and East German leader Erich Honecker.
Extraordinary images from Werner Herzog. Shot in the Australian Outback the Aborigines (in this film anyway) believe that this is the place where the green ants go to dream, and that if their dreams are disturbed, it will bring down disaster on us all. The Aborigines' belief is not shared by a giant mining company, which wants to tear open the soil and search for uranium.
Reverend Huie Rogers is a preacher at the Bible Way Church of Our Lord Jesus Christ in Brooklyn. He is the topic of this short film, during which launches into an epic call-and-response denunciation of human hubris, greed, corruption and failure. The use of lengthy shots present it less like a sermon and more a performance, and induce an almost trance-like state.
The emotion and feelings should not be confused with sentimentality. Emotion is ancient and more powerful than any artistic expression. The film observes young couples face difficulties while trying to move their love experiences clear decision making. A film full of ideas, details and associations, fictional scenes, documentary footage, archival materials and opera music.
The Cold War is peaking again in divided Germany in the early 1980s. How to deal with the upcoming nuclear annihilation shows this Alexander Kluge short.
Fitzcarraldo is a dreamer who plans to build an opera house in Iquitos, in the Peruvian Amazon, so, in order to finance his project, he embarks on an epic adventure to collect rubber, a very profitable product, in a remote and unexplored region of the rainforest.
The documentary follows Gene Scott, famous televangelist involved with constant fights against FCC, who tried to shut down his TV show during the 1970's and 1980's, and even argues with his viewers, complaining about their lack of support by not sending enough money to keep going with the show.
Having fathered an illegitimate child with his lover, Marie, feckless soldier Franz Woyzeck takes odd jobs around his small town to provide some extra money for them. One of them is volunteering for experiments conducted by a local doctor, who puts Woyzeck on a diet of peas. This serves to drive him close to madness, and the discovery that Marie is involved in an affair with the local drum major exacerbates the situation. Pushed too far, Woyzeck resorts to violence.
Jonathan Harker, a real estate agent, goes to Transylvania to visit the mysterious Count Dracula and formalize the purchase of a property in Wismar. Once Jonathan is caught under his evil spell, Dracula travels to Wismar where he meets the beautiful Lucy, Jonathan's wife, while a plague spreads through the town, now ruled by death.
Gabi Teichert, a history teacher, is unhappy with the way history is portrayed in textbooks and is looking for an alternative, more practical approach to 'uncovering' the past, quite literally digging with the spade and dissecting books with hammers and drills.
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.
Werner Herzog takes a film crew to the island of Guadeloupe when he hears that the volcano on the island is going to erupt. Everyone has left, except for one old man who refuses to leave.
Bruno Stroszek is released from prison and warned to stop drinking. He has few skills and fewer expectations: with a glockenspiel and an accordion, he ekes out a living as a street musician. He befriends Eva, a prostitute down on her luck and they join his neighbor, Scheitz, an elderly eccentric, when he leaves Germany to live in Wisconsin.
A documentary short examining the language and performance of auctioneering, filmed at the World Livestock Auctioneer Championship in Pennsylvania.
A small Bavarian village is renowned for its "Ruby Glass" glass blowing works. When the foreman of the works dies suddenly without revealing the secret of the Ruby Glass, the town slides into a deep depression, and the owner of the glassworks becomes obssessed with the lost secret.
A darkly humorous short documentary about a preschool-age boy ostracised from interactions with his classmates until a girl who has become interested in his pet crow provides the link to social acceptance.
The film follows Kaspar Hauser (Bruno S.), who lived the first seventeen years of his life chained in a tiny cellar with only a toy horse to occupy his time, devoid of all human contact except for a man who wears a black overcoat and top hat who feeds him.
A study of the psychology of a champion ski-flyer, whose full-time occupation is carpentry.
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 few decades after the destruction of the Inca empire, a Spanish expedition leaves the mountains of Peru and goes down the Amazon river in search of gold and wealth. Soon, they come across great difficulties and Don Aguirre, a ruthless man who cares only about riches, becomes their leader. But will his quest lead them to "the golden city", or to certain destruction?
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.
A documentary by Werner Herzog exploring the different treatment accorded to the disabled in Germany and the USA.
Shot under extreme conditions and inspired by Mayan creation theory, the film contemplates the illusion of reality and the possibility of capturing for the camera something which is not there. It is about the mirages of nature—and the nature of mirage.
Through examining Fini Straubinger, an old woman who has been deaf and blind since her teens, and her work on behalf of other deaf-blind people, this film shows how the deaf-blind struggle to understand and accept a world from which they are almost wholly isolated.
The Indomitable Leni Peickert is a loose, half-hour sequel to Alexander Kluge's second feature film, Artists in the Big Top: Perplexed. This shorter work, seemingly assembled from leftover footage from the longer film, continues the story of the circus owner Leni Peickert after she first abandoned her idea of a radical circus in favor of a job in television. It opens where the previous film left off, at a TV station where Leni and her friends have gathered as employees, attempting to infiltrate the corporate establishment with their own revolutionary ideas. This radicalism is somewhat undercut by the way that Kluge deliberately shoots down the low-cut blouse of one of these young revolutionaries, the camera eyeing her cleavage and then panning down, to the text she's reading, and then back up again, finding her sexuality ultimately much more interesting than her radicalism.
The inhabitants of an institution in a remote country rebel against their keepers. Their acts of rebellion are by turns humorous, boring and alarming. An allegory on the problematic nature of fully liberating the human spirit, as both commendable and disturbing elements of our nature come forward. The film shows how justifiable revolt may be empowering, but may also turn to chaos and depravity. The allegory is developed in part by the fact that the film is cast entirely with dwarfs
The Flying Doctors of East Africa (German: Die Fliegenden Ärzte von Ostafrika) is a 1969 documentary film by Werner Herzog about the "flying doctors" service of the African Medical and Research Foundation in Tanzania, Kenya, and Nairobi.
Documentary film by Günther Hörmann.
The film features several horse trainers and other track workers talking about their roles at the track, always eventually interrupted by an older man who claims to be the true authority, and demands that they be thrown out. One recurring young man, the first to appear, claims that he protects the horses from enthusiastic racing fans. He does not appear to be employed by the track, but seems to provide his services voluntarily. His protection from "fanatics" gives the film its title. The film is shot in a documentary style, but the sheer implausibility of the dialogue leaves the exact nature of the film ambiguous.
Kluge’s short-film starring his sister/muse Alexandra.
Early short by Werner Herzog shot while being on location in Greece shooting "Lebenszeichen".
A young circus director ends up going into television after her father, a trapeze performer, dies in a circus accident.
During World War II, three German soldiers are withdrawn from combat when one of them, Stroszek, is wounded. They are assigned to a small coastal community on the Greek island of Kos while Stroszek recuperates. The men become increasingly stir crazy in their uneventful new assignment. Stroszek eventually goes mad.
Elizabeth is a young woman who seeks happiness excessively burning out all those around her.
A young German woman search for happiness, liberation, and independence in the illusive wake of a transformative national recovery.
Early Alexander Kluge short film that follows the career of a German policeman from World War I into the 1960s.
