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What is German Film Review ?
German Film Review (GFR) is a German website that reviews German Films in the English language. With Tom Tykwer's "Run Lola Run" and Wolfgang Becker's "Good Bye Lenin!" having gathered some renown abroad, with Fatih Akin winning the Golden Bear at the Berlin film festival this year with "Head On" (reviewed here), there is a budding international interest in German film, which we hope to kindle by offering regular glimpses into the German film scene. We cannot, alas, provide DVDs of reviewed films with English subtitles. We cannot even provide texts written by native speakers (unless, of course, those feel like mailing in, which they are encouraged to do. And, yes, we gladly accept corrections of English language mistakes we make). We can, however, provide reviews that might give at least some insight into what is going on in German cinema.

German Film Review is part of German movie magazine Jump Cut, whose emphasis is not at all on German but rather on world cinema with a special interest in Asian film, from Bollywood to Japan. If you want to have a look - it's mostly German, though, - just go this way.

German Film News & Weblinks

 

 

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reviews 

  

Hans Weingartner: Die fetten Jahre sind vorbei / The Edukators (Germany 2004)

Review by Ekkehard Knörer

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All this, the idyllization, the insistence on sending messages without precise content, the half-conscious criticism that lacks analytical rigour but abounds in clichéd language and thought (to which the sloppiness of the film's cinematic language perfectly corresponds), the will to action that resorts to privatist escapism, all this may be read as an uncannily accurate (or accurately uncanny) - albeit unintentional - depiction of a current state of public and political affairs.
     

Angela Schanelec: Marseille (D 2004)

Review by Ekkehard Knörer

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We learn more about Ivan, we learn more about Hanna. We see Ivan taking pictures of women workers in a factory, without an explanation. We just see and watch. We watch the women from a sidewards angle, then we watch Ivan taking the pictures, then we watch the women from Ivan's perspective. They talk, but not much. We just hear and see and watch. There is a lot we see - although it takes some time to realize how much.
 

Andres Veiel: Die Spielwütigen (Crazy for Acting, D 2004)

Review by Ekkehard Knörer

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Life, no doubt, has to be formed to be presentable as a documentary, just the way characters have to be formed to be presentable on a stage, as actors. There is, it seems, a deep and most probably subconscious connection here between the film, which insists on having a form, and the training the acting pupils undergo in order to find a form, to be put into a form that resembles what the audience readily accepts as, recognizes as: the right form in which it is done. Making a documentary. Acting.
 

Jan Krüger: Unterwegs (On the Road, D 2004)

Review by Ekkehard Knörer

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In the beginning there is darkness. And a lighter moving in the darkness. A tent, one person, two persons and a third one, perhaps. The positing of a beginning, in the darkness, confined, light and perception moving shakily. From here starts a story, or so we should assume. Three make a family: mother, father, daughter.
 

Mennan Yapo: Lautlos (Without a Sound, 2004)

Ekkehard Knörer

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Mennan Yapo, a German director of Turkish origin, certainly has made one of the most broodingly unfunny movies you will meet in quite some time, but he very obviously knows what he is doing, using almost unobtrusive style to create an atmosphere of cold beauty. He is very ably supported in his endeavor by his set designer and, above all, by cinematographer Torsten Lippstock who tends to leave backgrounds out of focus in favor of what is immediately in front of his lense. And with good reason: he imbues his pictures with a brownish tint that gives them a painterly beauty in earthen colors and he manages to conjure up a kind of material yet transparent, palpable yet weightless light in his images.

Short Review: Iain Dilthey: The Longing (Das Verlangen; D 2002)

"The Longing" was awarded the Golden Leopard at the filmfestival at Locarno in 2002

Where is the place, the space of Iain Dilthey's "The Longing"? It is not the real world, this film forms and invents itself a sealed world, in which it is hard to breathe and speak and smile. The one person who almost can't breathe and speak and smile is Lena, the priest's wife, who is fucked by her husband without tenderness or even a remote interest in her person. She is tortured by her husband's paralysed sister, she plays the organ in a makeshift church. Lena falls in love with Paul the car mechanic but in a strange Dürenmattian turn of events a crime story intrudes the plot, a police officer intrudes the village and threatens to block Lena's way to happiness. This hell of a life is the habitat given to her by this film. It's a zone of spiritual hopelessness, invented, it soon seems, for no other reason than the filmmakers' will to sadism. (EK)

     

German Film Short Review: Der Untergang / Downfall (Oliver Hirschbiegel, Germany 2004)

German movie mogul and script writer Bernd Eichinger and director Oliver Hirschbiegel clearly don't know what they're doing here. So "Downfall" becomes a case of misdirected makebelieve that dares not show what it dares not imagine. What is shown, then, is just a literal minded portrait of late Hitler that manages to bore with its aesthetic cowardice. The rest is obscenity: History is staged as if it were not staged. We are made (faked into) eye witnesses of the Führer's last hours by the direction's brute and naive naturalism. And we unwittingly become voyeurs of a scenario from which we do not even learn that there is nothing to learn. "Downfall" has Hitler on its mind - and nothing else. (EK)
 

Dominik Graf: Hotte im Paradies (Hotte in Paradise; D 2002)

Review by Ekkehard Knörer

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Love, within the system, is nothing but a word and a bait to get women in. That's what we learn when Hotte lures another woman into his little paradise. There is no place for sentiment here. There is no place for tragedy here. Everything very clearly, very simply follows nothing but the logic of money. What remains is a yearning, a desire to escape, a hope for redemption. It cannot amount to much within the world of prostitution.
 

Marcus Mittermeier: Muxmäuschenstill (Mux, D 2004)

Review by Ekkehard Knörer

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You don't know what exactly to make of Mux. An average enough guy who feels the disillusionment about daily life and about human bevavior in our society we feel. He just draws rather extreme conclusions, taking the position of the law, supplementing it by putting himself in its place. This act of supplementation, not necessarily in the maxims underlying his actions, just as an act, is, of course, exactly a subversion of the law. He can never be right enough in order to be right in what he does.
 

Fatih Akin: Gegen die Wand / Head On (D 2004)

Ekkehard Knörer

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"Head On" was awarded the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival in 2004

The leading actress was casted from the street - her only "acting" experience being porn movies -, but even her lack of professional skills fits her role just perfectly. Akin does not have very much of a deliberate concept, it all seems done by intuition, every single picture of it. But it is convincing. It is touching. It is powerful. A comedy, a tragedy, a tragi-comedy. A sad, a gentle ending.
 

Dominik Graf: Kalter Frühling (Cold Spring, 2004)

Ekkehard Knörer

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Sylvia, the temporarily disinherited daughter, will have taken revenge, will have betrayed her father, will have manipulated her mother in the most infamous way and will have fulfilled her desires in a deeply disturbing manner. She has won everything and she has lost her soul. The family's restitution remains deeply ironic as it is founded on nothing but betrayal. Even the last word, and therein lies the film's radicality, is truth and lie at the same time. "Is everything all right", the father asks at the moment when nothing will ever possibly be remedied. "Is everything all right?". "Yes", the daughter says, which is sheer truth and sheer lie, a truth and a lie she will now live.  
 

Philip Gröning: L'amour, l'argent, l'amour (D 2000)

Review by Ekkehard Knörer

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They drift, once again. They go to Paris, we see a few picture postcards, coming alive and disappearing in the next moment. This, by the way, is the narrative and pictorial logic of this film: a drifting and disappearing, a superimposition that creates a mood and leaves it abruptly. L'amour, l'argent, l'amour is not a discourse on the economy of love and it is even less a discourse on love and society.

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