Hanna Schygulla
Women were clearly at the core of legendary photographer Helmut Newton's work. The stars of his iconic portraits and fashion editorials – from Catherine Deneuve to Grace Jones, Charlotte Rampling to Isabella Rossellini – finally give their own interpretation of the life and work of this controversial genius. A portrait by the portrayed. Provocative, unconventional, subversive, his depiction of women still sparks the question: were they subjects or objects?
In a bizarre Breton library that collects rejected, never published manuscripts, a young editor discovers a novel that she considers a masterpiece. It was written by a certain Henri Pick, a cook who died two years earlier and who, according to his widow, had never read a book in his life or written anything but a shopping list... Did he have a secret life? When the book becomes a huge best-seller, Jean- Michel Rouche, a skeptical and stubborn literary critic, teams up with Joséphine, Pick’s daughter, to unravel the mystery.
In a world where death is finally conquered and people can live forever, a cop (Darius, 120yo) and a young woman (Christa, 24yo) must investigate the mysterious suicide of seven teenagers. With the promise of eternal youth, why would a group of teenagers commit such an act? Was it a cult? A political act? The two will embark on a mysterious and dangerous investigation from which there will be no turning back.
Thomas is a drug addict. In an effort to put an end to his habit, he joins a community of former addicts who live isolated in the mountains and use prayer as a way to cure themselves.
Documentary about the making of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's 1972 German television series EIGHT HOURS DON'T MAKE A DAY, featuring interviews with actors Hanna Schygulla, Irm Hermann, Wolfgang Schenck, and Hans Hirschmüller.
MARIANNE (Evabritt Strandberg) is a 68-year old woman diagnosed with a terminal disease. Left with angst, she seeks therapy at a clinic where she is treated with Psilocybin (LSD) and meditation by a counselor, Eva (Hanna Schygulla). Through this she is transferred to her subconscious, where she meets and confronts her 25-year old self and her former husband.
What does ‘normal’ actually mean? And what is ‘crazy’? Everybody attempts to convince Léa that her mother, Suzanne, is mentally ill. Her father wants to see her returned to the psychiatric clinic, but Léa refuses to see her mother in the same light: Suzanne is happy – even if she doesn’t act like others expect her to. She appears to live a joyfully infantile existence after calmly letting go of life’s pressures. Léa captures her mother’s life on film and focuses her attention on examining the old super-8 films from the family archives. When she is left to drive her mother back to the clinic after a weekend at home, Léa grabs her opportunity: She turns the car around and whisks Suzanne off on a journey; a road trip without the judgements of others. AVANTI follows a mother-daughter relationship with an ease and depth that highlights the complexity of the emotional ties within a family.
A documentary that focuses on the making of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's "The Marriage of Maria Braun".
Unique archives show a world that no longer exists: pre-war Poland in which two cultures: Jewish and Polish, coexisted wall-in-wall; cottage in a cottage; town next to town. "Po-lin" - meaning "we will stop here" in Yiddish - does not deny the painful past. It only shows that there was something more next to them. Worth remembering and - perhaps - reconstruction.
A documentary about the making of the television mini-series by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, including interviewees with the principal actors.
Nejat seems disapproving about his widower father Ali's choice of prostitute Yeter for a live-in girlfriend. But he grows fond of her when he discovers she sends money home to Turkey for her daughter's university studies. Yeter's sudden death distances father and son. Nejat travels to Istanbul to search for Yeter's daughter Ayten. Political activist Ayten has fled the Turkish police and is already in Germany. She is befriended by a young woman, Lotte, who invites rebellious Ayten to stay in her home, a gesture not particularly pleasing to her conservative mother Susanne. When Ayten is arrested and her asylum plea is denied, she is deported and imprisoned in Turkey. Lotte travels to Turkey,where she gets caught up in the seemingly hopeless situation of freeing Ayten.
Despite advancing age, rural businessman Franz has remained fit and energetic, but serious mental illness and financial problems mean that this hitherto ordinary man one day finds himself on a journey to Nairobi to get his money back, and perhaps his human dignity as well.
Two very different love stories cross each other in warm and magical way. A humanistic and yet mysterious film about love and death near the German/Danish border.
"Promised Land" tells the story of a group of young unwitting Estonian girls smuggled through Egypt to be auctioned off as prostitutes in Israel, and of their initiation into this trade of flesh, and finally of the accidental freeing of one girl who most fight for her freedom.
Though he never actually worked in Hollywood, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who died in 1982 at the age of 36, was influenced greatly by Amercian studio films of the 1950s and the convention of melodrama (the link most often mentioned is Douglas Sirk).
Nineteen people with differing degrees of visual impairment – from mild nearsightedness to total blindness – discuss how they see themselves, how they see others and how they perceive the world. Unusual images, of burning trees or empty deserts, link the interviews, which vary from deep to funny to poetic.
An essay film in which filmmaker Rosa von Praunheim interviews "the willing victims of Rainer Werner Fassbinder."
This story takes place in a small town on the Hungarian Plain. In a provincial town, which is surrounded with nothing else but frost. It is bitterly cold weather — without snow. Even in this bewildered cold hundreds of people are standing around the circus tent, which is put up in the main square, to see — as the outcome of their wait — the chief attraction, the stuffed carcass of a real whale. The people are coming from everywhere. From the neighboring settlings, even from quite far away parts of the country. They are following this clumsy monster as a dumb, faceless, rag-wearing crowd. This strange state of affairs — the appearance of the foreigners, the extreme frost — disturbs the order of the small town. Ambitious personages of the story feel they can take advantage of this situation. The tension growing to the unbearable is brought to explosion by the figure of the Prince, who is pretending facelessness. Even his mere appearance is enough to break loose destructive emotions...
Documentary musing upon the work of German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
Jack Altieri, a young Italian-American restaurant owner, arrives at Vesta awaits him a painting of the sixteenth century that depicts the veiled face of Medea of Carpi, noble woman processed to witchcraft. Shortly after the arrival of Jack, a country girl is killed in a mysterious way, dropping the suspicions of the Commissioner Gianzi on the young restorer, who is soon advised to not complete the work on the opera, because it would hide an ancient curse.
51-year-old Herbert Strehlow, a furniture restorer, falls in love with 21-year-old Lea, who has not spoken a word since childhood when her father killed her mother. She bears a striking resemblance to Herbert's dead wife. They get married, but their relationship seems doomed, until gradually each one manages to penetrate the mysterious world of the other, and they begin to realize that they are bound by a kind of spiritual relationship. For Lea it is the death of her mother, for Herbert it is the death of his first wife. His hard exterior slowly beings to thaw, and he starts to show feelings and responses that soften Lea's initial hatred and fear of him, and which put their relationship in a more positive light.
A meditation on the first 100 years of German cinema, featuring some of its greatest directors.
Monsieur Cinema, a hundred years old, lives alone in a large villa. His memories fade away, so he engages a young woman to tell him stories about all the movies ever made. Also a line of movie stars comes to visit him giving him back the pleasure of life - but amongst them there are also some young students only striving after his money for the realization of their film projects. The two stories - Monsieur Cinema's and the young people's life - are told in parallel until they come together in the end when the old man plays a role in the film made by the students.
Ernest, Ted and August fulfill their friend Carl's dying wish and take him to Heidelberg, where they all first met 45 years ago, to see his old girlfriend one last time. However, the locals won't talk about her, due to a WW2 secret.
On the Schiermoser farm tense expectation prevails. The 'Urban', the Schaubleins, surprisingly announced their arrival. In the past, they were welcome as generous summer visitors. But now the shortage years of the First World War prevail. And the farmer's wife suspects lazy parasites in the townsfolk. The city family is indeed facing ruin. Especially since the defiant daughter Rosalie has just knocked out a promising money marriage without regard to scandal. The Rosalie is attracted to the Schiermoser heir Franz. His mother already drives the thought of a 'Madame Bäurin' to madness. Everyone experiences a turbulent time of upheaval. The end of the First World War will shake the social fronts as well as the new machine age.
Danny Cornish, a sort of stateless man who arranges art exhibits, is called from Tel Aviv to Paris with the news that a great uncle has died, in Birobidjan, the autonomous Jewish zone in Russia, leaving him a valuable art collection and the hand of a huge sculpture of a Golem. The uncle's will instructs Danny to find the rest of the statue, so Danny, who speaks no Russian, embarks on a trip that takes him (and the Golem's hand) to Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Siberia, fumbling with hotel clerks, taxi drivers, and bureaucrats, following leads, and making discoveries about myth, story telling, art, and hope.
Mavi Sürgün is a fictionalized account of one period of the life of a Turkish journalist who was condemned to exile for an article he wrote in 1925. He turned his punishment into a reward by creating a little paradise in what is today the holiday resort, Bodrum. In fact he is considered by some to be the first ecologist. The film concentrates on this latter aspect of his character and through flashbacks portrays the inner turmoil of a man who is trying to come to terms with his past. The slow pace is somewhat of a drawback, the flashbacks are often confusing and the protagonist is not always very convincing. But the photography of the country side is exceptional Kenan Ormanlar and the short appearance by a very theatrical Hanna Schygulla of Fassbinder fame adds a little spice to the drama.
A documentary about the life and work of director Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
An allegory of the Golem, a Jewish mythical creature personifying displacement and exile, this film tells the story of a woman (similar to the biblical Ruth) and her sisters, who are forced into exile after the death of their husbands. It is set in 1990s Paris, where the director was living in self-imposed exile following the ban on his 1982 documentary in Israel. The recurring theme of the film is migrations and unrooting, like the legendary Golem.
In the winter of 1943 two young Jews, Alek and Fryda, escape, via sewer tunnels, from the atrocities underway in Warsaw ghetto. Alek, entrusted with undeveloped photos of the horrors within, makes his way to a supposedly safe apartment only to find it occupied by Germans. Another tenant, a pole Stephania, abruptly offers to shelter him in her spacious apartment. She comforts him and they make love that very night. Stefania is uncommonly generous and willing to jeopardize her own safety by hiding a Jew. She even goes to a nearby church and rescues Fryda. But Fryda is ungrateful and proceeds to sabotage the trio's safety in insidious ways.
Interviews with four women who were important to the life and art of German film director Rainer Werner Fassbinder
In 1949 composer Roman Strauss is executed for the vicious murder of his wife Margaret with a pair of scissors. In 1990s Los Angeles a mute amnesiac woman shows up at an orphanage and private eye Mike Church is called in to investigate. Under hypnosis both the woman and Church seem to have a strange link back to the Strauss murder.
In this tragic melodrama, a man who has been hiding his Nazi past has it come back to haunt him when his hippie daughter, whom he disapproves of, comes back to bond with her daughter, whom he's been raising. Meanwhile, he and his drinking buddy, a beer-truck driver, go on a jaunt to Poland to recover some gold fillings he had hidden years ago during the time when he worked in a concentration camp. The truck driver inadvertently leaves a filling lying around at home, and his mother immediately recognizes it for what it is. When she confronts him, he claims that "Jews don't mean anything to me" and she must then reveal his Jewish heritage to him: she was a housekeeper in a Jewish household and he was a child there whom she adopted during the Holocaust in order to save his life. The driver then confronts the wily old Nazi, who conceives a brutal scheme which will save his cozy life at the expense of the reputations of the driver and his granddaughter.
In Paris, unhappy movie actress Catherine Crachat becomes infatuated with the mathematician Pierre Indemini, but then breaks up with him. After a film shoot in Vienna, Catherine stays with a rich admirer, Fanny Hohenstein. Fanny has a history of many lovers of both sexes, two of whom killed themselves over her.
Mrs. Forbes, a German governess, is hired for six weeks to take care of two children, while their parents are away. She is authoritarian and repressive, so the children plan to murder her. But when they spy on her during the night, they discover Mrs. Forbes' secret.
Story of the owners (Mastroianni and Schygulla) of a fancy nightclub in Budapest before and during WWII.
A beautiful novelist gets involved with the violent underworld crime elements in New York City and becomes a target. Alec Baldwin plays the cop who pursues her killers.
Peter the Great is a 1986 NBC television mini-series starring Maximilian Schell as Russian emperor Peter the Great, and based on the biography by Robert K. Massie. It won three Primetime Emmy Awards, including the award for Outstanding Miniseries.
A 707 aircraft jetliner, en route from Athens to Rome and then to New York City, is hijacked by Lebanese terrorists, who demand that the pilot take them to Beirut. What the terrorists don't realize is that an elite team of commandos have been called in to eliminate all terrorists on the jetliner.
In this improbable, ponderous story about a couple who do not want to have children of their own, and a pregnant, single woman who needs a home for awhile, the relationship between the three is strange, at the very least.
Olga and Ruth become friends. Olga is independent, separated from her husband, living with an immigrant pianist, and teaching feminist literature. Ruth is withdrawn, a painter, possibly mentally ill. Ruth dreams in black and white, sometimes of her suicide. Olga lectures on a 19th-century writer, von Günderrode, a suicide after the breakup of her intense friendship with Bettina Brentano. Ruth's husband Franz encourages the women's friendship, then, as Olga draws Ruth out and the friendship deepens, he becomes jealous. After the women travel to Egypt, Franz has a tirade. Ruth seems crushed between her husband and her friend, and how she responds is the film's climax.
This sometimes confusing erotic drama about the incestuous relationship of a mother and daughter is based on the autobiography of Italian theater actress Piera Degli Esposti though it focuses more on her mother Eugenia.
In May of 1983, a man turns 49 and, with his 17-year old son, journeys to the village in Baden that he left 40 years before. He wants to discover what happened then, the truth about an affair his mother had with a young Polish prisoner of war, how the authorities came to learn of it, the lovers' arrest, and the aftermath. While his son takes Polaroid photographs, he retraces the steps of his childhood and interviews those who should remember. The story is disclosed in flashbacks that focus on the lovers (Paulina and Stanislaus), on a jealous and conniving neighbor, and on Mayer, the local SS commander who wants to find a way out of inevitable consequences.
In June of 1791, a group of passengers in a stagecoach find themselves caught up in the events of the French Revolution, when they find themselves in the city of Varennes when revolutionists arrest the fleeing King Louis.
While shooting a film, the director becomes interested in the unfolding struggle of a young factory worker that has been laid off by a boss who did not like her union activities.
Georg Laschen leaves his family in West Germany to go work as a war correspondent in Beirut during the fights between Christians and Palestinians.
The story of a German singer named Willie who while working in Switzerland falls in love with a Jewish composer named Robert whose family is helping people to flee from the Nazis. Robert's family is skeptical of Willie, thinking she could be a Nazi as she becomes famous for singing the song "Lili Marleen."
A documentary about the Director Fassbinder but edited as if it was a film of the Master himself, with some sequences of his own movies.
Maria marries a young soldier in the last days of World War II, only for him to go missing in the war. She must rely on her beauty and ambition to navigate the difficult post-war years alone.
A mogul merrily funds terrorists to boost his computer sales, by panicking West German government and industry c. 1980, as the third generation of Western European left-wing activists forms, after crippling of the violent Red Army Faction. International capitalist PJ Lurz's secretary is a gang member, while her police commissioner father-in-law/lover hired Lurz' corporate security force.
A miniseries about a pair of teenagers living in a slum at the fringes of Berlin. Alcoholism, prostitution, and violence are just a few of the themes of the three movies.
Encouraged by Fassbinder, with whom he became friendly after the then-enfant terrible of the German cinema visited him in Lugano, Sirk also did some teaching during the late 1970s at the film school in Munich, where he made three short films with his students.
Based on the best-selling novel by Nobel-laureate Heinrich Böll, this drama is a passionate indictment of Catholicism. Hans Schnier (Helmut Griem) has earned his living as a clown, though he is in fact a very covert sort of social critic. After enduring a difficult childhood in Bonn during the Second World War, including his mother's fanatic Nazism, he is appalled to discover many of the people he knows and loves swept deeply into involvement in the Catholic Church.
Six days in the life of Wilhelm: a detached man without qualities. He wants to write, so his mother gives him a ticket to Bonn, telling him to live. On the train he meets an older man, an athlete in the 1936 Olympics, and his mute teen companion, Mignon. She's an acrobat in market squares for spare change.
A German-made film based on one of the most famous German novels by Theodor Fontane. Effi Briest (Hanna Schygulla) is a socially ambitious, 17-year-old German girl who accepts a proposal of marriage from Baron Geert Von Instetten, a much older diplomat. Unfortunately, neither the Baron's family nor anyone in the secluded town she now calls home accept Effi as an equal. Starved for companionship, Effi begins an innocent friendship with a well-known womanizer that may jeopardize her position as the Baron's wife.
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 very stylized TV version of the Fassbinder play. The set consists of a few pieces of furniture in front of a large screen on which coastal scenery is back projected. Geesche is a nineteenth century woman who wants to have a mind of her own. She defies convention and will do anything to achieve her freedom from oppression by her family and friends. (synopsis written by Will Gilbert)
Acht Stunden sind kein Tag was a German television film series broadcast between 1972 and 1973. Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, it was commissioned by Westdeutscher Rundfunk.
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.
German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder directs the made-for-TV melodrama Pioneers in Ingolstadt, based on the play by Marieluise Fleisser. The film opens as a parade of soldiers are marching through a town square singing patriotic songs. Alma (Irm Hermann) and Berta (Hanna Schygulla) are watching them and musing about their ideas on men and relationships. The soldiers (often referred to as pioneers) have been given the task of building a bridge in the town. Alma seems to understand that the soldiers only want her for short sexual encounters, so she's prepared to live her life accordingly. Meanwhile, romantic Berta falls in love with self-centered soldier Karl (Harry Baer), who all but tells her to get lost. The soldiers get drunk and beat up a random passerby. The women grow to hate Alma for her acceptance of life as a sex object. Naïve Berta is ultimately humiliated.
"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.
Michel and Guenther, working in dead-end jobs, are obsessed with going to Peru to find buried treasure, using a map of the Rio das Mortes. Michel's girlfriend, Hanna, humors their plan, but really just wants to get married.
Adaptation of Robert Walser's novel about a young man who enters an oppressive servant school.
Inspired by the real life events of Mathias Kneißl, a marginal man, son of poor farmers from Bavaria, in the late XIX Century. Mathias stole from the riches to give to the poor, becoming a hero for the rural people, and a popular social rebel. He was chased by the police until his unfortunate sentence.
Can a small group of people start a proletarian revolution, asks the "Black Monk" in a leather jacket. The medieval shepherd, Hans Boehm, claims to have been called by the Virgin Mary to create a revolt against the church and the landowners. The "Black Monk" suggests that he would have more success if he dressed up Johanna and had her appear as the Virgin Mary.
Herr Raab is a technical draftsman. His wife pushes him to seek a promotion, which may be a long shot after he gives a dull and tipsy toast at an office dinner. But why would Herr Raab run amok?
Volker Schlöndorff transposes Bertolt Brecht’s late-expressionist work to latter-day 1969. Poet and anarchist Baal lives in an attic and reads his poems to cab drivers. At first feted and later rejected by bourgeois society, Baal roams through forests and along motorways, greedy for schnapps, cigarettes, women and men: ‘You have to let out the beast, let him out into the sunlight.’ After impregnating a young actress he soon comes to regard her as a millstone round his neck. He stabs a friend to death and dies alone. ‘You are useless, mangy and wild, you beast, you crawl through the lowest boughs of the tree.’
Small-time pimp Franz is torn between his mistress and Bruno, the gangster sent after him by a shady crime syndicate he's refused to join.
A man is released from prison and finds the society on the outside less than appealing. With several women as well as the police on his tail, he sets out to find an old friend.
"End of the Commune"/"Ende einer kommune" is a great 49 min. long movie made in 1969 about Fassbinder and the early years of the legendary Antiteater he was a member/leader of. You can here see and hear some of the actors he was going to use in his movies for the next years. The movie shows rehearsals for his play "The Coffehouse" which also became a television-movie, and you can watch unique footage from the 19th Film-Festival in Berlin (1969) where "Love is Colder Than Death" were shown. As told in this documentary, his first feature-movie were given a cold shoulder by many of the journalists and visitors at the festival. You can in "End of the Commune" watch Fassbinder and actor Ulli Lommel walk out on stage after the opening of "Love is Colder than Death", while a man in the audience is shouting "Out with the director!". In this interesting documentary Fassbinder also talks a lot about his father which was a respectable doctor.
Avant-garde adaptation of a Carlo Goldoni play. Well-to-do Venetians congregate in a coffee house and discuss their problems.
In this unflinching German drama by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, a group of young slackers, including the couple Erich and Marie, spend most of their time hanging out in front of a Munich apartment building. When a Greek immigrant named Jorgos, moves in, however, their aimless lives are shaken up. Soon new tensions arise both within the group and with Jorgos, particularly when Marie threatens to leave Erich for the outsider.
Abram returns to his small village and although his repairing skills are needed, people's suspicion about his sexual preferences make his life hard.
Three sequences are linked together in this short film by Straub; the first sequence is a long tracking shot from a car of prostitutes plying their trade on the night-time streets of Germany; the second is a staged play, cut down to 10 minutes by Straub and photographed in a single take; the final sequence covers the marriage of James and Lilith, and Lilith’s subsequent execution of her pimp, played by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. "The film is a look entirely at Western decadence" - Jean-Marie Straub.
