Miroirs No. 3 [2025]

 Miroirs No. 3, with its beguiling set-up, eerily tranquil tone with an underlying disquietude that gently builds, disarming and economical narrative that defies complex people and themes, and exploration of identity and memory, was immediately recognizable as a Christian Petzold film. The recurrence of automobile accidents in his filmography, and his sparing use of haunting, off-kilter music, were also present. It channelled two of his films in particular – the sunny, rustic setting and an understated human story that evolves through stray, low-key interactions reminded me heavily of his ravishing last film Afire; however, the one that it formed the closest companion piece to was his unnerving earlier film Yella, as both featured what can perhaps be called “hyperreal/quasi ghost stories”. Like the latter film, this too begun with a shocking road accident; while her partner, with whom her relationship was already faltering, instantly dies, Laura (Paula Beer), the emotionally drifting heroine and music student, emerges largely unscathed from it. She’s provided accommodation by Betty (Barbara Auer), a kindly older woman with whom Laura had fleeting eye contacts earlier and whose house is located adjacent to the accident site, and they promptly settle into a peaceful domestic routine – cooking, painting fences, grocery shopping, having coffee, etc. Betty, unbeknownst to Laura, harbours a past trauma, and that – along with what catalysed this bond – starts surfacing when Betty’s husband (Matthias Brandt) and son (Enno Trebs), both expert car mechanics and seemingly estranged from her, arrive in the scene. Classical and pop tracks delightfully featured in the diagetic score of this work marked by a lovely interplay between being restrained and emotionally charged. The performances, led by the two women, were particularly remarkable.

Director: Christian Petzold

Genre: Drama/Psychological Drama

Language: German

Country: Germany

World on a Wire [1973]

 Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 2-part 206-minutes-long television miniseries World On A Wire – the German wunderkind’s sole foray into science-fiction, adapted from Daniel F. Galouye’s novel Simulacron-3, and recently restored after years of obscurity – was a gloriously trippy, luscious, paranoid and prescient work where the dystopian future is here and now. Flamboyantly blending the sci-fi genre with noir, melodrama, conspiracy, philosophical meditations, existential anxieties, and distinctive Euro-arthouse sensibilities, and with cold, sleek, metallic and modernist décor complemented with disco-tinged sensuality, it recalled Godard’s magnificent Alphaville in its evocation of one non-compliant individual’s battle against a supra-national techno-totalitarian society, and presaged the Wachowskis’ The Matrix in positing that we might be trapped inside a simulated, hyper-real, virtual reality environment. The film’s protagonist, cybernetics engineer Fred Stiller (Klaus Löwitsch), succeeds as the technical director of a powerful government-corporate mainframe program called Simulacron which has created an artificial world with thousands of “identity units” and has the ability to predict industry trends well into the future, when his boss, Professor Vollmer, dies under mysterious circumstances. He goes on to sense and uncover a massive corporate conspiracy with monomaniac zeal, and before long becomes a hunted fugitive as he gets into loggerheads with the institute’s malicious CEO Siskins (Karl-Heinz Vosgerau). Along the way he gets close to two duplicitous women – Stiller’s personal assistant Gloria (Barbara Valentin) who’s essentially been plugged in to spy on him, and the deceased super-scientist’s sultry daughter Eva (Mascha Rabben) who Stiller becomes enamoured with. Co-written by Fassbinder, this deliciously ominous and tantalizingly foxy film – photographed in lush, grainy 16-mm by Michael Ballhaus, and featuring a rich soundtrack, including Fleetwood Mac’s hypnotic ‘Albatross’ – was populated with RWF’s regular gang of actors.

Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Genre: Sci-Fi/Thriller/Mystery/Romance

Language: German

Country: Germany

Lessons of Darkness [1992]

 Werner Herzog’s hypnotic essay Lessons of Darkness was an assemblage of two strikingly contrasting facets. It was an intensely grim and fatalistic meditation on warfare, carnage, the abyss of human folly and madness, and their infinite capacities for cruelty. This bleak meditation was accompanied by spectacular aerial photography of the ecological disaster wrought upon by the 1991 Gulf War, and these were made even more viscerally arresting through slow-mo shots, long takes, Herzog’s distinctively clipped style of speaking, and grand Wagnerian score. This, therefore, was akin to an apocalyptic tone poem on derangement and destruction by a filmmaker who’s been classified as a “poet of doom”. No wonder, some viewers were offended by it upon its release – alleging that this was akin to aestheticization of wars – and which Herzog angrily countered by quoting examples of Hieronymous Bosch and Goya who’d also made breathtaking artistic works foregrounded on violence and grotesquerie. Broken into thirteen short chapters, the moody docu shows us scarred and damaged landscapes, and in particular nightmarish images of the Kuwaiti oil fires, albeit largely without any political or geographical contexts. In his typically ironic tone, he even shows us how the expert fire extinguishing team reignited the fires – by throwing torches into the gushing oil flows – so that they have something more to extinguish. These flamboyant, widescreen and “obscenely beautiful” vistas were briefly interspersed with sobering chronicles of torture and trauma experienced by the locals, and shared by a couple of women. The film’s ominous undercurrents, vivid abstractions, and counterpointing of sparse and lurid expressions made it a fitting member of the German filmmaker’s oeuvre that’s filled with similar exercises across both narrative fictions and essayistic nonfictions.

Director: Werner Herzog

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film/War

Language: German/Arabic

Country: Germany

Prison Images [2000]

 If seeing, prying and witnessing were the running motifs in Harun Farocki’s filmography, then his analytic video montage Prison Images can well be his most emblematic work. Through this hour-long essay, he delved into a pointed examination of the carceral society through images of prisons from two parallel streams – viz. representation of prisons in cinema, interspersed with actual camera footage from American prisons. While he sourced sequences from multiple films for the former, two particularly stood out in their imagery – Jean Genet’s unnerving Un Chant d’Amour, where the prisoners adopt performative roles for the gratification of guards peeping into their cells, and Robert Bresson’s masterful A Man Escaped, where the protagonist meticulously stages an escape – as these two thematic tropes have recurred in countless films. These were juxtaposed with CCTV camera footage, and the message underpinning them was one of power, control, and the transformation of societies into surveillance states. In a mordant comparative analysis, Farocki posited that prisons, departmental stores and shopfloors are bound by their shared obsession with endless surveillance both as a means and an end. We therefore see how inmates are made to wear tracking devices so that their every movement can be monitored and inspected. In the essay’s most disturbing sequences, we see footage of how the authorities deliberately instigate prison fights – e.g. by placing antagonistic groups or inmates in closed spaces – and then stopping them through violent means. Through these, the Marxist director’s disdain for what prisons embody was unequivocally evoked. Hence, though not expressed in as many words, the underlying tenor was emphatically analogous to Joan Baez’s battle cry “raze the prisons to the ground” in her powerful protest song ‘Prison Trilogy’.

Director: Harun Farocki

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film

Language: German

Country: Germany

Images of the World and the Inscription of War [1989]

 The German word “Aufklärung”, as Harun Farocki informs in this intellectually rigorous meditation and exceptionally dialectical video essay, means both “enlightenment” and “reconnaissance”. This paradoxical implication intrinsically informed the work and what it posited – viz. scientific reasoning and technological progress are intimately related to the military-industrial complex and warfare. The specific technology under Farocki’s forensic investigation, here, was that of photography, and in turn a branching into how perception of an image and the contexts and meanings that one infers from it, are heavily influenced by what we’re trying or intending to see. These complex aspects were clinically evoked, principally, through the examination of an aerial photograph of the IG Farben industrial plan that was taken by an American aircraft in 1944, as a precursor to bombing it (though that wasn’t ultimately carried out). It was only 30 years later that 2 CIA analysts realized that it had also captured the Auschwitz extermination camp – the barracks, gas chambers, crematoria and even trucks delivering poison pellets disguised as a Red Cross vehicle – but which remained a “blind spot” until then. Hence, if the American bombers had destroyed IG Farben it, ironically, wouldn’t have been for its role in the Holocaust. The essay also covered enquiries into surveillance and camouflage – from WW2 to police identikits – which makes images inherently political and induces image manipulations. In perhaps the film’s most haunting moment, Farocki showed an inmate at a Nazi concentration camp – a beautiful woman – instinctively striking a pose for the camera. The docu was especially fascinating in the massive ground covered in its slender length, and also how it turned out to be such a riveting work despite its highly analytic form.

Director: Harun Farocki

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film/War

Language: English

Country: Germany

Videograms of a Revolution [1992]

 Prolific experimental German documentarian Harun Farocki’s dazzling masterpiece Videograms of a Revolution, which he co-directed with Romanian documentarian and scholar Andrei Ujică, was both a riveting historical reconstruction of the 1989 Romanian Revolution and a powerful analytical thesis on the role of formal and informal media in both revealing and shaping political history. On the former aspect, its post-facto documentation of one revolution – one that, in around 5 days, witnessed Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu from getting ready to deliver what turned out to be his final public speech (the thrilling climatic moment in Bogdan Mureșanu’s The New Year That Never Came) to being executed after a summary trial – made it a fascinating companion piece to, on one hand, Patricio Guzmán’s The Battle of Chile and My Imaginary Country, which were immersive reportages of mass uprisings, and on the other Chris Marker’s A Grin Without A Cat, which was an expansive essay that navigated through multiple global revolts. As for the latter aspect, it underscored the role of cameras and images in mobilizing public actions and as sources for historiography. It accomplished that by meticulously piecing together those 5 days from a myriad sources which included state television broadcasts, which transitioned from Ceaușescu’s lackeys to those seizing control, and ‘found footage’ secretly shot by citizen journalists that Ujică had unearthed through his contacts. Accompanied by a narration analysing and interpreting these images, thus creating a distancing effect from the immediacy of the upheaval, this magnetic work strikingly elucidated how mass and alternative media had been both observers and participants in recording and constructing epochal political changes far before the advent of 24/7 television channels, mobile phone cameras and social media.

Director: Harun Farocki & Andrei Ujica

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film/Political History/Reportage

Language: German/Romanian

Country: Germany

Wolfsburg [2003]

 Christian Petzold’s spare and chilling psychological thriller Wolfsberg carried the weight of Germany’s political history, even if that wasn’t explicitly laid out; the titular city’s past is intertwined with the Nazi era as, founded by Hitler in 1938 as the seat for Volkswagen’s massive automotive factory, it became a military-industrial complex during WW2 during which it produced armaments and freely utilized slave labour. Car as a symbol of modernity, class hierarchy and commodity capitalism, unsurprisingly, played a pivotal role, and the film’s themes of grief, guilt and moral crisis hinged around it. Additionally, like The State I Am In which preceded it and Yella couple of films later, it also culminated with a shattering car crash. The film began with an unsettling hit-and-run incident as Philipp (Benno Fürmann), an auto salesman having an argument with his fiancée over the phone while driving his luxury car, accidentally hits a kid on a bicycle. He leads an entitled life, but at the cost of tolerating his domineering boss – the owner of the auto dealership where he works – and his self-obsessed girlfriend who’s his boss’ pampered sister. The kid’s mother Laura (Nina Hoss), meanwhile, is a single mom and exploited supermarket worker. While Philipp is silently racked with contrition upon being unable to confess – more so when the kid dies – Laura is crushed to the point of contemplating suicide as well as seeking vengeance. Guilt, grief, secrecy and wrath make for a messy cocktail; consequently, when these two lost souls get drawn into a tender romantic relationship, it’s bound to lead to damaging repercussions. Hoss and Fürmann were both magnetic in Petzold’s icy portrayal of dread, three-way class conflict and societal alienation.

Director: Christian Petzold

Genre: Crime Thriller/Romantic Drama

Language: German

Country: Germany

Ghosts (Gespenster) [2005]

 Christian Petzold delivered haunting inquiries into the questions of individual and collective identity in reunified Germany, and underlying unresolved political and social fault-lines, in his remarkable ‘Ghosts Trilogy’. The trilogy delved into that through estranged outsiders who were left in the margins during this assimilation exercise. Ghosts, the trilogy’s moving central chapter – and much more loosely-strung vis-à-vis the two films it’s bookended by, viz. The State I Am In and Yella – had a particularly spectral and disenfranchised protagonist in Nina (Julia Hummer), an orphaned, alienated and pathologically shy teenaged girl whose job as a trash collector and stay at a public home are contingent on her ability to fit in. The isolated life of this intensely lost and lonely girl is briefly upended by two dramatic encounters. On one hand she befriends Toni (Sabine Timoteo) – a slightly older brash, impetuous and rebellious girl who snatches what she needs and lives outside the law – upon accidentally witnessing a violent attack on her by a couple of guys; they form a tender relationship as Toni temporarily takes Nina under her wings, while Nina becomes profoundly entranced by Toni. Meanwhile, Françoise (Marianne Basler), a beautiful, upper-class and grief-stricken middle-aged woman – who’s just been released from a mental hospital, as she’s been struggling with the trauma of losing her daughter who’d been stolen as a toddler many years back – starts aimlessly wandering across Berlin while her husband is tied up in business matters, and is convinced that Nina is her long-lost daughter upon bumping into her. Hummer and Timoteo were superb in revealing their emotional vulnerabilities and scars as social misfits in this bleak and melancholic tale co-written by the great Harun Farocki.

Director: Christian Petzold

Genre: Drama/Psychological Drama

Language: German

Country: Germany

The State I Am In [2000]

 Christian Petzold, having earlier made three TV features, made a striking theatrical debut with The State I Am In. With this first chapter in his “Ghosts Trilogy” – it was followed by Ghosts and Yella, two similarly glacial and elliptical inquiries into Germany’s complex and asymmetric reunification process – he boldly combined political cinema, formal exactitude and genre exercise wherein each informed the others. It began on a languid note as teenager Jeanne (Julia Hummer) selects Tim Hardin’s plaintive song “How Can We Hang On to a Dream” on the jukebox at a seaside café and sits down for a smoke; young surfer Heinrich (Bilge Bingül) approaches her for a cigarette, joins for a chat, and the two lonely souls strike a mutual chord. What seems like a coming-of-age love story gets a genre spin when we meet her edgy and secretive parents – Hans (Richy Müller) and Clara (Barbara Auer) – who embody archetypal lovers-on-the-lam. However, as we gather – even though the script was shrouded in ambiguity – the couple are former Red Army Faction members, the disbanded left-wing group which’d dreamt of violently reshaping Germany during the 1960s and 70s; they’ve been hiding under false identities for years now, hoping to escape to Brazil. When their covers are blown at a small Portuguese town, they decide to return to Germany with hopes of cajoling and coercing help from old comrades. Jeanne, however, craves for a different escape – hanging out with Heinrich and listening to pop music – increasingly oblivious of the fatal risks that pose for her parents. Co-written with influential political film essayist Harun Farocki, it delivered a wry jab at fading political memory through Resnais’ powerful Holocaust documentary Night and Fog.

Director: Christian Petzold

Genre: Drama/Political Thriller/Road Movie

Language: German

Country: Germany

Dying (Sterben) [2024]

 Matthias Glasner, in his first theatrical release in 12 years, made his two key influences amply clear through a poster of Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise and clippings from Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander, alongside a wry quip on the latter masterwork’s questionable suitability for Christmas viewings. Dying, therefore, was a movie awash as much with bleak meditations on mortality and troubled familial dynamics as with ironic and darkly funny portrayals of these weighty issues. The film’s seemingly depressive title, consequently, was a demonstration of the director’s sardonic sense of humour. Further, while the 3-hour runtime might appear a daunting proposition, it’s narrative brilliance, marvellously etched characters, nuanced depictions of messy complications, and meticulous balancing between crushing seriousness and deadpan levity made this a sharply observed, brutally unsentimental and thoroughly engrossing watch. The exceptionally dysfunctional Lunies family was at the heart of this grand soap opera, and it comprised of Tom (Lars Eidinger) – a composed but heavily stressed conductor who’s rehearsing the titular musical composition by his volatile friend Bernard (Robert Gwisdek) and playing surrogate dad to his ex-wife Liv’s (Anna Bederke) infant daughter –; his emotionally wrecked siter Ellen (Lilith Stangenberg) – a full-blown alcoholic who loves singing and is having an injurious affair with a married colleague ((Ronald Zehrfeld) –; and their aged parents, viz. Lissy (Corinna Harfouch), the cancer-afflicted and music-loving mother, and Gerd (Hans-Uwe Bauer), whose disintegration on account of Parkinson’s disease was heartbreaking to watch. All actors were terrific in this work set over five loosely overlapping episodes with shifting POVs, and two of its scenes – a catastrophic orchestral performance and a searingly candid mother-son conversation – underscored the film’s glorious interplay between high tragedy and low comedy.

Director: Matthias Glasner

Genre: Family Drama/Black Comedy/Ensemble Film

Language: German

Country: Germany

Paris, Texas [1984]

 Good road movies are often less about reaching a specific destination; rather, they’re more around where the characters are ostensibly headed to, even if they never end up reaching there, and what they’re escaping from. Wim Wenders, who’d already made the acclaimed ‘Road Movie Trilogy’ with Alice in the Cities, The Wrong Move and Kings of the Road (the 1^st and 3^rd films, in particular, were exceptional New German Cinema gems), magnificently blended his European arthouse aesthetics, understated voice and love for loners trying to get somewhere (or nowhere), with the quintessential, taciturn and weather-beaten texture of the “American Road” – the mythic vastness, desolate structures, endless freeways, neon-lit billboards, solitary motels, and the underlying existentialism, loneliness and ennui that they physically manifest and which was powerfully evoked by towering American playwright Sam Shepard’s script – in his moving and melancholic masterpiece Paris, Texas. At its core is Travis (Harry Dean Stanton), who was lost for four years, and has become an aimless near-mute drifter shorn of home and identity upon his scarring marital collapse with his beautiful estranged wife Jane (Nastassja Kinski), who presently works at a seedy peepshow in Houston. Upon being fortuitously located by his brother Walt (Dean Stockwell) and brought back to Los Angeles, he attempts to reconnect with his young son Hunter – being brought up by Walt and his wife (Aurore Clément) – and find his wife whose memories and absence – and the reasons that led to their devastating separation – continue to profoundly haunt him. In Robby Müller’s moody lens and accompanied by Ry Cooder’s plaintive score, the film took a fatalist tenor that was a mix of meditative Western, Edward Hopper paintings and Charles Bukowski’s poetry.

p.s. This is a revisit of this film. My earlier review can be found here.

Director: Wim Wenders

Genre: Drama/Marriage Drama/Road Movie

Language: English

Country: Germany

Music [2023]

 It’s rare for a filmmaker to remain steadfastly committed to their politics or form or both over the entire stretch of their career, and to defiantly walk a rigorously crystalized path unconcerned with what’s considered de rigueur for the times. Angela Schanelec – co-founder of the “Berlin School” – belongs to the dwindling group of such outmoded giants as Ken Loach, Patricio Guzmán, Philippe Garrel, Hong Sang-soo et al. Music – the sexagenarian’s 10^th feature – is a spare, elliptical, elusive, experimental and characteristically Bressonian exercise exactly along the lines of her abstruse filmography. In other words, it definitely isn’t a film that one should approach either uninformed or expecting conventional storytelling. On paper, it’s an interpretative modern-day retelling of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex; however, it’s defined as much by its references to the Greek play as its departures from it. As a reviewer pithily remarked, it’s “a postmodern expression of a premodern text”. In its barest essence, it’s a tale of tragic union between Jon (Aliocha Schneider), an orphaned guy who serves a prison sentence upon inadvertently killing a man, and Iro (Agathe Bonitzer), a guard in that same prison where they get acquainted. Their seemingly contented marital life is short-lived as he starts losing his vision, though that’s partly compensated through his passionate vocation for singing. Their union, unfortunately, is based on a dark coincidence unbeknownst to either, which eventually and inevitably leads to suicide when that gets uncovered. Composed of sparse, austere and muted tableaux, and with long stretches of dialogue-free sequences interspersed with evocative classical diegetic music, this fleeting, exacting and stripped-to-bones work obliquely elucidates how a terrible price can be extracted by both knowing too much and too little.

Director: Angela Schanelec

Genre: Drama/Experimental Film

Language: German/Greek

Country: Germany

Afire (Roter Himmel) [2023]

 Afire, Christian Petzold’s smouldering and mesmeric exploration of artistic aspirations/inadequacies, creative process and self-discovery, might well be his most beguiling film to date. The Rohmeresque conversational style, languid intimacy of its setting, and unfolding relationships that’re charged yet mellow – attributes which likened it to a dry comedy of manners meets lazy hangout film, and therefore decidedly removed from his prior films – stunningly pivoted into a more melancholic, moody and elusive work by its end with hints of ecological commentary, splashes of bittersweet unrequited yearning and dazzling metafictional elements that infused new meanings into the proceedings thus far. The second chapter in his planned trilogy on mythical elements transposed into contemporaneous settings – Undine had water as its motif, while it’s fire here – and his third collaboration with the effortlessly effervescent Paula Beer (their first film together was Transit, an exquisite interpretation of Anna Seghers’ extraordinary novel of the same name), it’s centred on grumpy, irascible and self-centred writer Leon (Thomas Schubert) who’s come over to a summer holiday lodge on the Baltic Sea, along with his friend Felix (Langston Uibel), for an artists’ retreat of sorts where he plans to complete his second novel before meeting his editor while Felix works on his photography portfolio. With a nature alternating between edgy and pompous, he becomes subliminally conflicted upon finding himself in the company of the vivacious and nonchalant Nadja (Beer), who sells ice creams, has noisy romping sessions in the night, and harbours a hidden literary side; meanwhile, the ominous foreshadowing of forest fires looms in the backdrop. Buoyed by sun-kissed photography and a sparingly used score, this is a deceptively electrifying work by a filmmaker breaking new artistic grounds.

Director: Christian Petzold

Genre: Drama/Psychological Drama/Romantic Drama

Language: German

Country: Germany

The Teachers' Lounge [2023]

 Packed with paranoia, anxiety, angst and outrage, amidst a rapidly escalating scenario and multipolar confrontations, İlker Çatak’s The Teachers’ Lounge is a rare pulsating thriller that’s set rigorously within the confines of a school. And this dynamic, variegated, ostensibly hallowed and supposedly tightly controlled space, in turn, served as microcosmic representation of the broader society, and a sharp critique of it too. Carla Nowak (Leonie Benesch) is a young teacher recently hired at a junior high school, where she teaches math and PE to 7^th graders. She’s passionately committed to her pedagogy, idealistic in her world-view, and – given her Polish origin and therefore aware of the challenges at integration faced by foreign-born persons – possesses an innate protectiveness towards social outsiders. The film begins with an uncomfortable scenario wherein, on account of a series of small thefts, Carla witnesses her colleagues manipulating a couple of young students into denouncing their classmates, which soon extends towards false accusations being levelled at a student of Turkish origin. Fuelled by her idealism and intent on getting to the bottom of this issue, she decides to entrap the culprit; however, by doing so, she herself indulges in an ethically dubious act, and inadvertently sets loose an uncontrolled chain reaction that puts her in conflict with many of her fellow teachers, some of the students and nearly all their parents. Benesch put in a stunning performance, rippling with emotional turmoil, arresting intensity, and a growing sense of helplessness, as did Leonard Stettnisch as a gifted but increasingly troubled student, in this taut work that, despite its narrative brevity, touched upon quite a few themes, including bullying, misinformation, systemic racism, privacy rights, censorship and cancel culture.

Director: Ilker Catak

Genre: Drama/Thriller

Language: German

Country: Germany

The All-Round Reduced Personality (Re-dupers) [1978]

 Helke Sander, who was a pioneering feminist activist, influential voice on the left and experimental filmmaker, existed in the overlapping intersections between cinema, politics and womanhood. Edda, her alter-ego in her brilliant feature-length directorial debut which she herself essayed, also had to similarly juggle between artistic impulses, political activism, low-paying job, economic survival, subaltern status as woman, and role as a single working mother in BDR. She works as a freelance photo-journalist that necessitates navigating through multiple assignments to make ends meet, wherein she mustn’t imbue any progressive political meanings into her stunning B/W images; she has a little daughter who loves clinging to her; she often has to work out of her tiny flat – which she shares with her lover and a friend – thus coalescing her personal, political and professional spaces; and she’s a member of a collective of politically minded women artists like herself. When they win a coveted government commission to create open-air photographic installations across West Berlin – a public album to further the city’s glamorous consumerist conception, and in turn undermine the socialist associations of their counterparts in the East – they decide to push the envelope by presenting a sardonic critique of the city’s self-image and subversive interpretations of the ubiquitous Wall. Unsurprisingly, their project elicits unfavourable reactions among the establishment and men. The film’s tone was one of tenderness and empathy, despite its spare aesthetics and stark monochromatic visuals, which were counterpointed by its mock-serious nature – wryly underscored by its ironic title which was a play on a communist maxim –, urgency, solidarity, and modernism. Its long tracking shots of the city, interestingly, reminded me of Akerman’s haunting News from Home from the previous year.

Director: Halke Sander

Genre: Drama/Political Drama/Feminist Film

Language: German

Country: Germany

The Bitter Tears Of Petra Von Kant [1972]

 The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant established a radical and decisive shift in Fassbinder’s cinematic form and grammar – from austere, low-budget, experimental films to the kind of flamboyantly conceived, lusciously mounted and heavily stylized melodramas that he’s associated with. During an eight-month hiatus that he took from filmmaking after making a staggering 10 films between 1969 and 1972, he devoured Douglas Sirk’s movies and even met the then retired filmmaker at his residence in Switzerland, which catalysed this transition. It also searingly mirrored his left-wing politics and homosexuality, alongside an intensely auto-fictional evocation of his own relationships with actor Günther Kaufmann and his assistant Peer Raben. The resultant work, consequently, combined formal exactitude, sensational stylistic flourishes and fervid passions with sharp political subtexts – on power, privilege and class – and stirring self-expression, thus making this a ravishing, complex and turbulent accomplishment. Adapted from a play written by RWF himself, it manifested the theatre through its structure – viz. four acts and an epilogue – and by rigorously setting it entirely within the confines of a single room, which interlaced both artifice and claustrophobia into the emotional upheavals demonstrated by its stunning all-female cast. The film’s three central characters were the eponymous heroine (Margit Carstensen), a haughty and famous fashion designer recovering from yet another marital break-down; a strikingly captivating, nubile and icy ingenue (Hanna Schygulla) who the older woman falls crazily in love with; and Petra’s silent and suffering assistant (Irm Hermann). This ferocious chamber drama, that provoked controversy upon its release, was further underpinned by its gorgeous cinematography by Michael Ballhaus, resplendent ensembles, idiosyncratic props, campy dialogues, evocative use of music, and a giant print of Poussin's Midas and Bacchus.

Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Genre: Drama/Psychological Drama/Romantic Drama

Language: German

Country: Germany

Rabiye Kurnaz Vs. George W. Bush [2022]

 Turning grim, serious and incredibly tragic historical incidents/episodes into funny and idiosyncratic comedies is either a very brave creative choice or a very stupid one, as they can either turn into blazing, if provocative, works (Wertmuller’s Seven Beauties, Holland’s Europa Europa, Menzel’s I Served the King of England, etc.) or films that divide its viewers right down the middle (Benigni’s Life Is Beautiful, Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, etc.) or despicable pieces of trash best suited for the garbage bins (Waititi’s Jojo Rabit, etc.). While this docufiction by German filmmaker Andreas Dresen didn’t belong to the inherently complex sub-genre of Holocaust films, its focus on extra-judicial measures, nefarious subversion of due processes, and colossal travesty of justice that the US freely carried out under the guise of “war on terrorism” – which included racial profiling, kidnapping, illegal detentions for indefinite periods, limitless tortures, etc. – did make for a bleak, solemn and intensely sensitive subject. Hence the director’s formal choice – alternating between deadpan and bouncy – could’ve easily led to flippancy and trivialization of the matter. Fortunately, he was careful and empathetic enough to avoid that, and in turn succeeded at making a film worth watching, despite some of its broad brushstrokes and crowd-pleasing flaws. The film catalogued the relentless efforts of Rabiye Kurnaz – a super gregarious and effervescent Turkish-German housewife living in Bremen, memorably played by Meltem Kaptan – in order to get her eldest son Murat released from the notorious Guantanamo Bay hellhole. Over nearly 5 years, and with massive help from soft-spoken but dogged human rights lawyer Bernhard Docke (Alexander Scheer), she must defiantly battle through the opaque, murky and Kafkaesque world of post-9/11 geopolitics if she hopes to achieve the impossible.

Director: Andreas Dresen

Genre: Black Comedy/Political Satire/Docufiction

Language: German/Turkish/English

Country: Germany

The American Friend [1977]

 Wim Wenders’ exhilarating adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s brilliant Tom Ripley novel Ripley’s Game – with the script infused with few elements from the preceding novel Ripley Under Ground too, even though he had rights for only the third Ripley book which was an unpublished manuscript at that point – was strikingly laced with melancholic, impressionistic and existential flavours that his best narrative features abounded in. The sense of urban desolation and nihilism that it evoked – through fabulous picturization of Hamburg’s grimy waterfront, New York’s gritty landscape, Paris’ modernist buildings, and bleak interiors – turned this sparse, fatalist, deliberately paced tale of crime and deception into a work of haunting poetic realism, existential disaffection and stylish bravado. While Wenders made multiple creative changes to the novel – impregnation of transnational spirit and industrial grunge, ironic reversal of the principal locations (France vis-à-vis Germany), wryly playful departures at the climax, etc. – none were as radical as Ripley’s characterization, in which a Stetson-wearing Dennis Hopper brought manic impulsiveness and anarchic edginess into the anti-hero’s personable disposition. The other key character Jonathan, too, was subtly transformed – from a despondent, luckless British expat into a solemn, taciturn German picture framer and restorer who has a deadpan and individualist streak, even if he gets swayed by Ripley into committing two murders for money – by Bruno Ganz’s terrific portrayal. The two crime sequences – one at a Paris Metro station and the other in a high-speed train – were masterfully captured, while the sparingly used operatic score accentuated the moody atmosphere. Wenders, interestingly, cast several fellow filmmakers, including Nicholas Ray as an impersonating painter, Samuel Fuller as a henchman, Gérard Blain as a smooth-talking criminal and Jean Eustache as a do-gooder physician.

Director: Wim Wenders

Genre: Thriller/Crime Thriller/Existential Drama/Urban Drama

Language: German/English/French

Country: Germany

Mr. Bachmann and His Class [2021]

 Maria Speth, in her remarkably expansive, quietly radical and deeply intimate 3 ½ hour documentary Mr. Bachmann and His Class, covered serious and urgent topics that’ve become enormously relevant today in a world fraught with right-wing populism, nationalism, majoritarianism, parochialism and religious prejudices – viz. embracing of pluralism and multiculturalism through acceptance and assimilation of immigrants from diverse ethnic and religious backgrounds, along with transparent discourses on discomfiting historical memories. But – and such is the quiet beauty and warmth of this big-hearted work – these complex political themes were never at odds with its profoundly personal and enchantingly unassuming nature. This foregrounding of everyday stories – organically enmeshed with the above themes through an unhurried, observational form – reminded me of Wiseman’s magnificent In Jackson Heights (and City Hall too), even if the scope was significantly more compact vis-à-vis the latter films. The setting here is a public school in the town of Stadtallendorf – where Nazis used slave labour for their war industry, and thereafter West Germany brought in “guest workers”, a euphemism for low-wage labourers who can be easily exploited by the capitalist market – where the students belong to blue-collar immigrant families from different countries and are struggling to get integrated because of social, cultural and linguistic barriers. Dieter Banchmann – an extraordinary, bohemian and rockstar teacher approaching retirement – imparts a progressive form of pedagogy where inclusiveness of diverse cultural backgrounds and socio-economic hurdles through music, transparent conversations, empathy and humour are as important as math and language skills. Speth, who’s known Bachmann since many years, followed him and his students – each of whom we get to know closely – for around 2 years for this immersive work with an underlying streak of resistance.

 

 

 

 

 

Director: Maria Speth

Genre: Documentary

Language: German

Country: Germany