DIE SCHAUSPIELERIN (Siegfried Kühn, GDR 1988, 1. & 13.3.) 1930s Germany. The actress of the title Maria Rheine (Corinna Harfouch) falls in love with her Jewish colleague Mark Löwenthal (André Hennicke). She becomes a star, he finds refuge at the Jewish Theater in Berlin. She follows him there out of love and pretends to be Jewish herself until she is denounced to the Gestapo. The stage, rehearsals, performances and changes of costume all stand for the exploration of different realities and identities, mirror scenes become urgent self-interrogations between Maria and the roles that she plays.
BEZIEHUNGSWEISEN (Negotiating Love, Calle Overweg, G 2012,
2. & 8.3.) Three couples in crisis seek advice at therapy sessions and argue over infidelities, abortion and separate bedrooms. It is a film about relationships in progress. It is a set-up whereby the therapy takes place in the sober environment of a studio. The clients are played by actors, the therapists are real-life therapists and not playing a role. Staged with minimal decor, these sessions are supplemented by scenes from the everyday lives of the various couples, in line with the epic theatre tradition, as well as workshop discussions in which the therapists talk about their practice to the film team. Documentary elements and improvised acting are combined in distinctive fashion, creating a variation on the documentary that plays with abstraction and fiction and is not concerned with authenticity. Resembling nothing so much as a public experiment, this artificial set-up yields touching moments full of emotion.
L'ESQUIVE (Games of Love and Chance, Abdellatif Kechiche, France 2003, 3. & 23.3.) A group of schoolchildren in a Paris banlieue rehearses Marivaux's romantic comedy "The Game of Love and Chance" thus entering the world of 18th century theater. Lydia recites her lines passionately when she's not engaged in rap-like word duels with her classmates. The shy Krimo who loves her in secret tries to get closer to her via the play, but the text and acting are obstacles that seem almost impossible to overcome. "These suburbs are so stigmatized that it seemed almost revolutionary to set a story here that wasn't about drugs, girls shrouded in veils and arranged marriages. My aim was to find out how the people who live here talk about love and the theatre. I wanted to convey a entirely different, more personal perspective.” (Abdellatif Kechiche)
VARIETE (E.A. Dupont, Germany 1925, 4. & 14.3., with a piano accompaniment by Eunice Martins) Dupont's film marks the transition between expressionist aesthetics and the New Objectivity movement and conceptualizes variety stages and circus arenas as places of longing. Trapeze artist Boss (Emil Jannings) leaves his wife (Maly Delschaft) and child in order to start a new life both on and off the stage of the Wintergarten variety theater with his new partner, the mysterious and seductive Berta-Marie (Lya de Putti). When Berta also catches the eye of famous and sophisticated artist Artinelli, the Salta mortale which all three of them perform every evening becomes an act of life and death. Karl Freund's "unbound camera" allows the audience to get right up close to the dizzying numbers taking place high up in the circus dome only to create the "reverse shot" shortly afterwards by taking on the position of the audience seated before this stage of life by means of shots of opera glasses, spectacles and monocles.
OPENING NIGHT (John Cassavetes, USA 1977, 5. & 11.3.) Gena Rowlands as a "woman under the influence", playing idolized theater star Myrtle Gordon for whom life and theatre roles have fused together to form an indivisible whole. When she witnesses an accident in which a young admirer of hers is killed, the experience increases her resistance against the play and the role of the aging woman that she is supposed to play in it. The rehearsals and first dress rehearsals increasingly become a battle, Myrtle's constant, hysterical protests driving her to drinking and her colleagues to despair. The premiere threatens to end in scandal when Myrtle turns up at the theatre completely drunk.
VANYA ON 42ND STREET (Louis Malle, USA 1994, 6. & 19.3.) Louis Malle's chamber drama merges life and theater to such an extent that the transition between them is hardly even perceptible any more. A group of theatre folk meet in the run down New Amsterdam, an old vaudeville and movie theater, where the rehearsals for Anton Chekhov's play "Uncle Vanya" are supposed to be taking place. Without any visible break, without make-up, costumes or other visible preparations, the actors (including Wallace Shawn and Julianne Moore) submerge themselves in their roles and move from one realm into the other.
LE DERNIER METRO (The Last Metro, François Truffaut, France 1980, 9. & 18.3.) Paris 1942: At the Theater Montmartre the (cinematic) reality of the German occupation meets the genuine place of fiction production: the theatrical stage. But staging, role plays and changes, deception and theatrical trickery don't just dominate the volatile relationship between inside and out, but also increasingly form the foundation for the dynamic within the theater itself, or between the stage and the cellar to be more precise, where the theater's Jewish director Lucas Steiner has hidden himself from the Nazis. The only person aware of this secret is Steiner's wife Marion (Catherine Deneuve), who purportedly carries out the theater business herself. Her husband is able to follow the rehearsals for the new play through a heating vent and intervenes in Marion's directorial work again and again. His ability to influence events diminishes however when Marion begins to flirt with a promising young actor (Gérard Depardieu).
PARIS NOUS APPARTIENT (Paris Belongs to Us, Jacques Rivette, F 1958–61, 10. & 16.3.) A student from the provinces comes to Paris and is confronted with the strange behavior of a group of intellectuals rehearsing for a production of Shakespeare's Pericles. The mysterious deaths in their circle lead them to feel threatened by a worldwide conspiracy, just as they see themselves in the sights of a secret organization. Philip, an American who has fled McCarthyism, seems to think that the organization wants to liquidate the young, idealisticFrench people. The film tells the story of an idea, that of a conspiracy, as well as saying that it's too simplistic to want to explain the world with a single idea. Rivette's feature debut was made under difficult circumstances and already assembles his favorite motifs: theater, conspiracy, a maze and the city of Paris.
LA RONDE (Max Ophüls, F 1950 | 12. & 20.3.) In this virtuous round dance of love based on the eponymous play by Arthur Schnitzler, Ophüls creates a social panoptican in fin-de-siècle Vienna. The game master (Anton Walbrook) gathers pairs of lovers around him, from the soldier to the maid, the count to the actress, the husband to the little miss, resulting in an unbroken circle by the end. The hovering camera brings movement to this carousel of love, affairs and seduction, alternating between comic and melancholy.
WAS TUN PINA BAUSCH UND IHRE TÄNZER IN WUPPERTAL? (What Are Pina Bausch and Her Dancers Doing in Wuppertal? FRG 1982, 15. & 24.3.) In a former cinema in Wuppertal, Pina Bausch and her ensemble are rehearsing for "Walzer". Klaus Wildenhahn observes the rehearsals, the way gestures, movements, positions are elaborated and tested and how a piece gradually emerges. At the same time, Wildenhahn places the dancers in context so that the industrial city of Wuppertal and the people who lived and live there are also portrayed.
NARAYAMA BUSHIKO (Ballad of Narayama, Kinoshita Keisuke, Japan 1958, 17. & 28.3.) The Japanese Kabuki theater, characterized by its strictly stylized form, was an important point of reference in the development of Japanese cinema. In astoundingly colorful studio sceneries, Kinoshita tells the story of a village in which tradition says that all 70 year olds must go to Mount Narayama to die. "What is most fascinating and timeless in this - in the best sense - idiosyncratic film is the play with artificiality that expressly avoids realism. The allusion to theater is quite obvious. At the same time, Kinoshita utilizes filmic means to break through the space of the stage and let the individual scenes engender each other in a grandiose manner, flowing, as if he were simply switching stages." (Walter Ruggle)
MUEDA: MEMORIA E MASSACRE (Mueda, Memory and Massacre, Ruy Guerra, Mozambique 1979, 22. & 30.3.) depicts an anti-colonial work on memory, a re-enactment played by amateurs of the massacre of Mueda that was carried out by Portuguese soldiers on 16th June 1960 when they opened fire on demonstrators, killing hundreds. This was the catalyst for the anti-colonial movement and popular theater started exploring it in 1968, while the war of independence (1964 - 1974) was still going on. Not only is the brutality of the colonial power depicted, but the stupidity and ridiculousness of its representatives too, as well as the ignominious role played by their collaborators.
TO BE OR NOT TO BE (Ernst Lubitsch, USA 1942, 26. & 31.3.) A theater group in Warsaw rehearses the anti-Nazi play "Gestapo" whose main protagonist is Hitler. When the Germans invade, reality supersedes fiction. The actors join the resistance and their costumes come in very handy. Lubitsch's comedy of mistaken identity, which holds the Nazis up to ridicule, is a film of appearances and exits, of costume and masquerade, of role play and exchanging roles. The "world" enters the theater, just as many small and bigger stages crop up outside of the theater. (mg/al)
