NEOBYTSCHAJNYJE PRKLJUTSCHENIJA MISTERA WESTA W STRANE BOLSCHEWIKOW(The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks, Lev Kuleshov, USSR 1924, 1. & 8.9., on piano: Eunice Martins) In this early "Red Western", the naive American Mr. West, accompanies a cowboy (Boris Barnet) to the recently established Soviet Union to do business. He expects evil surprises and wild men calling themselves Bolsheviks on unfamiliar territory. Kuleshov's exaggerated satire had little to do with films of the 1920s that reflected the class struggle and revolution with pathos and was promptly accused of "formalism".
GERMANIA ANNO ZERO (Germany Year Zero, Roberto Rossellini, Italy/G 1948, 2. & 6.9.) Italian neorealism is considered a radical movement of revival in film history, an unadorned cinema to counteract propaganda and entertainment and express the political "Zero Hour". But Rossellini did not detect a "Zero Hour" in Germany: He filmed Berlin in ruins and the mental state of the Germans after the war. Although the war is over, the barbaric Nazi mindset lingers on, not least in the pale, blond Edmund and his former teacher who incites him to poison his sick father.
ES (Ulrich Schamoni, FRG 1966, 3. & 7.9.) "The old cinema is dead. We believe in the new cinema".The 26 signatories of the Oberhausen Manifesto of 1962 did not call for anything less than the creation of a new German cinema. Fiercely, vehemently and confrontationally, they demanded means of production and took a (film)political stance. The first features shot in the spirit of the Manifesto - diverse, more than willing to experiment, and exhibiting a critical view of Germany, its society and West German politics - emerged in the mid-1960s. Schamoni's ES was made with a small budget and the smallest team possible. Fast-paced and informal, it revolves around a young unmarried couple in Berlin. When the woman falls pregnant and secretly has an abortion, the seemingly non-bourgeois couple is hit by crisis.
SOUS LES TOITS DE PARIS (Under the Roofs of Paris, René Clair, F 1930, 4. & 14.9.) Like many directors of the late 1920s, René Clair also regarded the emergence of sound cinema as an imminent threat and sound film technology as the cause of a crisis, if not the end of film as a form of art. Despite his initial reservations, with his film about the daily life of "ordinary people" in Paris, he made a magnificent "sound painting" in which he set sound and image into contrapuntal relation to one another. Songs and sounds rebel against all forms of superficial realism, just as Albert rebels against his friend Louis who tries to lure away his beautiful girlfriend Pola.
LA NOIRE DE (Black Girl, Ousmane Sembène, Senegal 1966, 9. & 15.9.) A pioneer of Sub-Saharan cinema, Senegalese director Ousmane Sembène has influenced generations of African filmmakers. His feature debut LA NOIRE DEwas the first sub-Saharan film to make a major impact in Europe and North America. A parable of neocolonialism, it depicts the life of a young Senegalese woman Diouana (Mbissine T. Diop) who leaves Dakar to work for a French couple as a live-in maid in Antibes on the French Riviera. Her employers exploit and humiliate her wantonly and she sends out a drastic, radical message.
BOROM SARRET (The Wagoner, Ousmane Sembène, Senegal 1963, 9. & 15.9.) A day in Dakar and the life of a cart driver whose cart is confiscated by a policeman. Robbed of his means of earning a living, he returns to his wife who sets off to find enough money to buy supper. Unsentimentally and in the style of neorealism, Sembène depicts urban Dakar and a protagonist trapped between traditional and postcolonial modernity.
SHOAH (Claude Lanzmann, F 1974–85, 10. & 11.9.) Lanzmann's "oral history of the Holocaust" (CL) cannot be attributed to a genre or category. Like no other work in film history, the film - without using archive material or voiceover - attempts to approach what one of the film's protagonists says at the beginning of the film: "It cannot be told; it goes beyond any imaginable depiction." But Lanzmann insists and persists in bringing witnesses of the mass murder of Europe's Jews to talk, interviewing both survivors and perpetrators of the Nazis' crimes. He uses precise imagery and sound to create a multifaceted picture of memory and enables a visualization of the past in the present.
DIE 1000 AUGEN DES DR. MABUSE (The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse, Fritz Lang, FRG 1960, 13. & 16.9.) Some 40 years after his first Mabuse film, Lang revisited the theme of the omnipresent criminal. The mad and power-hungry Mabuse endeavors once again to plunge the world into chaos from his HQ in a luxury hotel built by the Nazis and equipped to spy on people in every room. By setting his Weimar Republic film icon in the post-war era, he unearths the legacy of National Socialism from the hidden basement control rooms, letting the 1000 eyes of the title become visible on the surface.
HUNG SIK LEUNG DJE CHING (The Red Detachment of Women, directing collective, China 1970, 17. & 26.9.) One of six films produced during the Chinese cultural revolution, at once an example of communist kitsch and a disturbing testimony of one of the most radical, state-dictated social upheavals of the 20th century. This revolution musical is set in 1930 on the island of Hainan where revolutionary troops train an all-female battalion. A young housemaid joins up, breaking with her petty bourgeois origins.
DAS KANINCHEN BIN ICH (The Rabbit is Me, Kurt Maetzig, GDR 1965, 18. & 21.9.) One of 12 cinematic works to be banned in the wake of the 11th Plenum of the Central Committee of the SED on the grounds that they promoted viewpoints which were considered contrary to the socialist perspective. The banning of a large part of DEFA's feature film production in 1964/65 triggered a bloodletting in the cultural world, and marked the beginning of repressive cultural policy on the part of the SED. Based on Manfred Bieler's novel of the same name, Maetzig's film is about a young woman called Maria who is no longer allowed to study after her brother is convicted of sedition against the state and sent to jail. Working in a bar, she meets her brother's lawyer and starts an affair with him.
CHRONIQUE D'UN ÉTÉ (Chronicle of a Summer, Jean Rouch, Edgar Morin, F 1960, 19. & 22.9.) Starting from the question of happiness, Rouch and Morin established a new documentary form in 1960: The beginning of "cinéma vérité" is marked by this at once light-hearted and profound exploration of the sentiments of Parisians soon after the beginning of Algerian War and continues to influence documentary filmmaking to this day.
Forty years later, BEIJING DE FENG HEN DA (There Is a Strong Wind in Beijing, Ju An Qi, China 2000, 19. & 22.9.) was produced in China and followed a similar principle. Here it is the "wind", whose significance of freedom has a long history in China, that is central to the question.
KILLER OF SHEEP(Charles Burnett, USA 1977, 20. & 23.9.) In the mid to late 1970s, a group of African and African-American filmmakers at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television sought new images apart from white Hollywood and Blaxpoitation cinema to depict communities of color. The cameraman and director Burnett became a central figure of what is now known as the L.A. Rebellion. His debut film depicts excerpts from the life of the sensitive dreamer Stan who lives with his wife and child in LA and whose job in the slaughterhouse increasingly takes its toll. Moments of simple pleasures, a dance with his wife, a cup of coffee allow him to forget his bleak life, temporarily at least.
WANDA (Barbara Loden, USA 1970, 29. & 30.9.) Hollywood in crisis: In the mid-1960s, the big studio productions were faced a lack of understanding and interest on the part of young people whose reality was shaped by protest movements and pop culture. A new generation of US filmmakers emerged who experimented with other forms of narration and depiction and produced outside of the studio system. Barbara Loden was part of the wider group of New Hollywood directors. In her first and only film, which is described as an "anti-Bonnie and Clyde", Wanda (Barbara Loden) turns her back on the mining region, her recently divorced husband and her children and runs off with a petty criminal to rob a bank. (mg)
