REBECCA (Alfred Hitchcock, USA 1940, 1. & 5.8.) On a trip to Monte Carlo, a young, shy travelling companion (Joan Fontaine) paid to accompany her employer meets affluent widower Maxim de Winter (Laurence Olivier). He falls in love with the young woman’s genuineness and proposes to her. Full of delight, she accepts his proposal, even though everything at his Manderley estate still seems to reference the first Mrs. de Winter. A large country house seemingly under a curse, its deceased mistress whose morbid presence still haunts the property even years after her death, and a housekeeper who is "a governor of the dead in the realm of the living" (Klaus Kreimeier) are the cornerstones of this spine-chilling Bermuda triangle, in which a young woman from a modest background risks insanity due to her romantic streak, naïveté, and inexperience.
WESELE (The Wedding, Andrzej Wajda, Poland 1972, 2. & 8.8.) Wajda's faithful adaptation of Stanisław Wyspiański's famous play revolves around lost identity and the myth of Poland. Set at the turn of the century, the plot unfolds on two levels, which come together in a surreal phantasmagoria at the bacchanal wedding of a poet and a peasant girl. The discussions between the wedding guests and the ghosts from Polish history that appear from nowhere gradually spiral into a frenzy.
TABU (Miguel Gomes, Portugal/Germany/Brazil/ France 2012, 6.8.) unfolds between present-day Portugal and a former colony's past, between fiction and memory. Aurora is an eccentric elderly lady who lives with her Cap Verdean housekeeper in Lisbon. When Aurora dies, her former lover is able to be traced, with the second part of the film consisting of him relating the story of his love for Aurora in Africa. TABU is akin to an incantation, as timeless as Murnau's 1931 "Tabu", which was equally made as a silent movie at a time when the talkies were already dominating Hollywood.
VAMPYR (Carl Theodor Dreyer, France/Germany 1932, 4. & 9.8.) is a classic horror movie that largely dispenses with the clichés of the genre. In his first sound film, Dreyer creates an atmosphere of uncertainty due to the lack of narrative continuity with respect to space and time. The film was shot in a dilapidated factory and an empty castle close to Paris and gives the impression of a waking dream; the images, seen as if through gauze, take on a ghostly white appearance. "Horror has nothing to do with the things around us, but rather lurks in our own subconscious mind." (Dreyer)
ORPHÉE (Jean Cocteau, France 1950, 7. & 11.8.) Using the basic motifs of the Greek myth of the singer/musician Orpheus who attempts to free his wife Eurydice from the underworld, Cocteau creates a dance that alternates between the poetically spaced out and the grotesquely quotidian, revolving around the titular poetic Orphée (Jean Marais), a mysterious wanderer of the netherworld named Princess (Maria Casarès) to whom Orphée feels magically drawn, his wife, the unadorned Eurydice (Maria Déa), and the Princess's driver. As so often in Cocteau's work, the mirror is a portal into the realm of the dead, a hopeless ruined landscape that is nonetheless the only place where the love between Orphée and the Princess can take form.
TÜZOLTÓ UTCA 25 (25 Fireman's Street, István Szabó, Hungary 1973, 3. & 16.8.) House number 25 on Fireman’s Street in Budapest is to be torn down. The night before the works are to begin becomes a trip into the past for the inhabitants of the aging apartment block, in which personal memories are interwoven with Hungary's historical developments in the 20th century. A stream of word, image, and object associations begins, different worlds and levels of time are connected, and images from dreams, memories, and nightmares suddenly appear, together becoming the place where the dead, phantoms, constructions and fears can be reencountered.
LOONG BOONMEE RALEUK CHAT (Uncle Boonmee Recalls His Past Lives, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand/United Kingdom/France/Germany/Spain/The Netherlands 2010, 10. & 12.8.) "Ghosts are not bound to places but to people, to the living." Uncle Boonmee only has a short time to live and has returned to his home village to die. The ghost of his deceased wife appears to him, as does the son who disappeared into the jungle long ago, returning now as a monkey-man. Family and friends take their leave and accompany him from one plane of existence to another. Drawing on images of free of any mysticism that show the impenetrable jungle, the pitch-black night, and the apparitions that shine through both, Weerasethakul tells a story of life and death, reincarnation and wandering souls, all suffused with the same intensity.
AFTER LIFE (Hirokazu Kore-eda, Japan 1998, 13. & 17.8.) Limbo is the name of the holding facility between Earth and the other side, where all those who have just died spend one week. For each of the new arrivals, it's now about determining one special moment from their lives from the wealth of their memories and then filming it. At the end of the week, there is a joint screening of these visualizations of life's moments, a program that becomes a condensed cross-section of everyday life in Japan in the second half of the 20th century. An impressive reflection about identity and memory and their reality and construction.
THE PURPLE ROSE OF CAIRO (Woody Allen, USA 1984, 14. & 15.8.) In his declaration of love for cinema and his take on the doppelganger leitmotif, Woody Allen turns the standard view of the cinema-goer on its head. Cecilia (Mia Farrow) is at the movies watching a film for the fifth time, so enraptured is she by its hero, a smart archeologist named Gil. Yet this time, the actor unexpectedly returns her gaze and climbs out of the movie to join her. The boundaries between cinema and reality are casually blurred, with not only Cecilia's life but the whole of Hollywood being turned upside down as a result. In the end, Shepard, the actor playing Gil, must find his double and return him to the movie.
DYBUK (Der Dibbuk, Michał Waszyński, Polen 1938, 15. & 18.8.) An early adaptation of S. Ansky's stage version of the Jewish legend: A young Talmudic scholar dies of a broken heart when the bride he thought pre-destined for him is made to marry another suitor. On the day of her wedding, the young bride is possessed by the spirit of her past lover, by the Dibbuk. This combination of mysticism and Expressionism created one of the great masterpieces of Yiddish cinema.
THE HALFMOON FILES (Philip Scheffner, Germany 2007, 30.8.) "When a person dies, he constantly roams about and becomes a ghost", we hear Bhawan Singh say in a crackling voice that has survived on a gramophone record kept in a sound archive. His voice and those of hundreds of other colonial soldiers recorded while they were being held as prisoners of war during the First World War in the town of Wünsdorf in Brandenburg serve as the starting point, central element, and leitmotif of a complex piece of audiovisual research about the connections between politics, colonialism, science, and the media. A particular narrative freedom emerges from the meticulous search for the traces of the former prisoners, whereby the boundaries between the real and unreal seem to blur together across different interwoven levels of time.
IL BACIO DI TOSCA (Tosca's Kiss, Daniel Schmid, Switzerland 1984, 21. & 23.8.) At the end of the 19th century, Giuseppe Verdi founded a "Casa di riposo", a old people's home for opera singers, musicians, and dancers whether celebrated or not, who can spend the evening of their lives in calm and dignity even without the corresponding financial means. Here they are surrounded by all sorts of good spirits, those of the present and those carrying out practical tasks, as well as those of the past. Suitcases with costumes, musical scores, and photos become horns of plenty from which memory flows forth, with the loving, structuring spotlight that Schmid throws on the aging artists uncovering a space between dreams and real life, between construction and reality.
SCHAMANEN IM BLINDEN LAND (Shamans of the Blind Country, Michael Oppitz, Nepal/Germany/USA 1980, 19. & 25.8.) Between 1977 and 1979, Michael Oppitz accompanied three expeditions to a remote region of the Himalayas in western Nepal in order to document the numerous local manifestations of shamanism that used to flourish there. The most well known result of this field research is SCHAMANEN IM BLINDEN LAND, a classic of visual anthropology in two parts which is dedicated to the shamanic rites (magical healing processes or ritualistic journeys), the mythical tinge of everyday shamanic life, and the transcendental aura of landscape and society.
DET SJUNDE INSEGLET (The Seventh Seal, Ingmar Bergman, Sweden 1957, 20. & 27.8.) Ingmar Bergman's study of belief, doubt, and the question of God’s existence is set in a realm somewhere between life and death. In the late middle ages, knight Antonius Block returns from the crusades to a Sweden wracked by plague and poverty. He meets Death personified, who demands his life. Not yet ready to die, Block negotiates a period of respite lasting the length of a chess game with Death. He ultimately finds answers to his questions from juggler Jof, his wife Mia, their small child, and their connection to life, which is deeply rooted in the everyday.
DER ANDERE (Max Mack, Germany 1913, 24. & 26.8., with a live piano accompaniment by Eunice Martins) Following a fall, lawyer Dr. Haller's consciousness becomes altered, causing him transform into "The Other", an alter ego that then roams the Berlin demimonde. This variation on Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde anticipates one of the most important themes of Weimar cinema: the loss of the self and actions that are carried out by others.
ZWEIMAL GELEBT (Max Mack, Germany 1912, 24. & 26.8., with a live piano accompaniment by Eunice Martins) will be shown beforehand: Shocked by her daughter's close escape from an accident, a mother has to be committed to a sanatorium, where she seemingly dies. When she returns to life, the only witness is the doctor who's already been in love with her for some time and keeps this new turn of events from her family.
BRIGADOON (Vincente Minnelli, USA 1954, 28. & 31.8.) Two Americans lose their way in the Scottish Highlands and end up in the village of Brigadoon, who doesn't show up on any map. It is a marvelous place where time has stood still since it received a supernatural privilege way back in the 18th century that permits it to only appear every 100 years for a single day. The magic only endures, however, as long as two fundamental rules are obeyed: no inhabitant may leave the village and a stranger may only stay if he or she falls in love... Minnelli stages this ghost story as a musical whose decors and costumes are rendered in radiant colors. (mg)
