September 25 (Monday) 9 pm
Directed by
Wolfgang Staudte
East Germany
1946, 16mm, b/w, 87 min.
With Hildegarde
Knef, Ernst Wilhelm Borchert, Arno Paulsen
German with
English subtitles
The first feature film to issue from a shell-shocked nation, The Murderers Are Among Us gained recognition for its expressionistic shadows, which evoked Weimar Germany’s "haunted screen," and for its documentary verisimilitude, which echoed neorealism’s exploration of postwar spaces. Set in Berlin, former capital of the German Reich but now reduced to mounds of rubble, the film focuses on the struggles of the city’s desperate and cynical survivors. In portraying a country shattered by bombs and shackled with guilt, Staudte delivers a powerful indictment of an unreconciled past.
October 2 (Monday) 9 pm
Directed by
Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet
West Germany
1962, 16mm, 18 min.
With Erich Kuby,
Renate Lang
German with
English subtitles
Straub-Huillet’s adaptation of Heinrich Böll’s biting satire Bonn Diary presents the reflections of a reactivated officer who is summoned to the West German capital by the Ministry of Defense to establish an Academy for Military Memories. Straub considered his film to be an intervention against German rearmament in the Adenauer era: "Machorka-Muff is the story of a rape, the rape of a country on which an army has been imposed, a country which would have been happier without one."
Directed by
Volker Schlöndorff
West
Germany/France 1966, b/w, 16mm, 87 min.
With Matthieu
Carrière, Bernd Tischer, Marian Seidowski
German with
English subtitles
Schlöndorff’s debut feature turned against the fatal constellations of the Adenauer era: its impersonal and mindless film productions, its evasions of political problems, and its vacations from history. Reverting to the distant past of Robert Musil’s famous novella of 1906, it offered a less obvious contribution to the definitive postwar German project of "coming to terms with the past" through its penetrating study of young cadets in an Austrian military academy—a preview of coming fascist attractions. Young Törless has gone down in film history as a seminal work that announced a new German cinema of international stature.
October 9 (Monday) 7 pm
Directed by
Rainer Werner Fassbinder
West Germany
1970, 16mm, b/w, 80 min.
With Karl
Scheydt, Elga Sorbas, Margarethe von Trotta
German with
English subtitles
A full-scale, mood-thick homage to the world of Humphrey Bogart and great action directors like Raoul Walsh and Sam Fuller, Fassbinder’s film centers on a gunman named Ricky, a charismatic figure in soft hat and white suit. Recently returned from a Vietnamized America, Ricky carries out his assigned murders with neither knowledge nor emotion. The amazing final shoot-out is probably the most startling of Fassbinder’s patented off-beat endings.
October 9 (Monday) 9 pm
Directed by
Werner Herzog
West Germany
1968, 16mm, b/w, 11 min.
German with
English subtitles
An outraged old man declares himself the protector of race horses and fights against fanatic trainers.
October 9 (Monday) 9 pm
Directed by
Werner Herzog
West Germany
1967, 16mm, b/w, 90 min.
With Peter
Brogle, Wolfgang Reichmann, Athina Zacharopolous
German with
English subtitles
Herzog’s first feature, which marked a turning point in the renaissance of German cinema, is an original mixture of Quixote-madness and case history. The central character is a wounded German soldier sent to sit out the war in an isolated Mediterranean garrison. Unhinged by the torpid circularity of island life, he is driven mad by the incredible vision of a valley filled with thousands of small, whirring windmills and stages an insane, one-man revolt.
October 16 (Monday) 9:15 pm
Directed by
Rainer Werner Fassbinder
West Germany
1971, 35mm, color, 89 min.
With Hans
Hirschmüller, Irm Hermann, and Hanna Schygulla
German with
English subtitles
The first Fassbinder film to garner broad praise in Germany, this film tableau, saturated with color, centers on a repugnant family based on Fassbinder’s own, with events plucked directly from his familial life. The director’s sympathies lie firmly with Hans, his protagonist, a spirit yearning for unattainable freedom amidst unexceptional people in a lonely city. "This is a melodrama," Fassbinder claimed. "That always sounds like a dirty word, but I don’t think it is. It’s a socially critical melo-drama, to put it simply."
October 17 (Tuesday) 9 pm
Directed by
Rainer Werner Fassbinder
West Germany
1973, 35mm, color, 94 min.
With Brigitte
Mira, El Hedi ben Salem, Barbara Valentin
German with
English subtitles
To say this film is a family melodrama would be an understatement. This is melodrama with a capital M, and a beautiful homage to the great German-American director Douglas Sirk, particularly to his film All that Heaven Allows. Fassbinder brilliantly articulates class and sexual politics by showing how once the prejudices surrounding a controversial couple begin to lessen, their relationship starts to unravel. His famous interior long shots are perfectly integrated and the colors masterfully contrasted with the reality they adorn.
October 23 (Monday) 9:30 pm
Directed by
Werner Herzog
West Germany
1974, 16mm, color, 110 min.
With Bruno S.,
Walter Ladengast, Brigitte Mira
German with
English subtitles
Reminiscent of Truffaut’s The Wild Child in theme but decidedly darker in its conclusions, Herzog’s film opens in Nuremberg in 1828, where a grown man is found catatonic in the town square. He is Kaspar Hauser, the ultimate Herzogian outsider: without speech, reason, or memory, and without human contact since childhood. Initially treated as a curiosity, he is gradually educated in the ways of Western civilization. But his initiation into the mysteries of language, logic, and religion only drives him to despair. The film’s visual style (odd angles, awkward compositions, unusual lighting) conveys Kaspar’s perceptual disorientation, an estrangement heightened by the inspired casting of Bruno S.—a former schizophrenic who spent many years in institutions.
October 24 (Tuesday) 9:30 pm
Directed by
Werner Herzog
West Germany
1972, 35mm, color, 95 min.
With Klaus
Kinski, Ruy Guerra, Del Negro
German with
English subtitles
Filming in South America, Herzog recreated the exploits of sixteenth-century Spanish explorer Aguirre (Kinski) who, with his retinue, searched for El Dorado over mountains, through jungles, and down a great river. The film is at once documentary-like and deliriously lyrical: although it identifies with Aguirre’s obsessed and unbalanced state of mind, it keeps a critical and ironic distance on the whole adventure. Kinski’s performance in the title role is nothing short of phenomenal.
October 30 ( Monday) 9 pm
Directed by Wim
Wenders
West Germany
1974, 16mm, b/w, 110 min.
With Rüdiger
Vogler, Yella Rottländer, Lisa Kreuzer
German with
English subtitles
In this tender, melancholy road movie, a Polaroid-snapping German photo-journalist (Vogler) travels across the United States and becomes burdened by an obstinate nine-year-old girl, Alice (Rottländer), abandoned by her German mother (Kreuzer). The search for Alice’s family takes the two gradually back to Europe, where, almost wordlessly, they grow closer. A quiet warmth takes effect as Alice and her taciturn companion travel about, including a stop at a Chuck Berry concert. This modest film, which foreshadows Paris, Texas, is perhaps Wenders’s most perfect work, and the most overtly humanist.
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Copyright © 2006 President and Fellows of Harvard College.