Discover Movies

3,549 Matches Found

The Malady of Death

In the space of a short 65 minutes, a woman enters the luxury apartment of a wealthy man with an eccentric fascination for the female form and is paid both for her sexual favors and for lying there naked and letting him examine the aesthetics of her body. For most of the hour, as the concise narration of Marguerite Duras' novel on eroticism and aesthetics fills the aural gaps, actress Marie Colbin's form fills the visual gaps. But unless viewers consider the feminine eyeball or microscopic views of skin exotic and worth lingering over, the eroticism lies more in the imagination than on the screen. In fact, the female body lying on the bed, taken away from the spirit that animates it, is really just a corpse -- raising the question, exactly what is the "malady of death?"

The Malady of Death

NR 1985
Feuer für den großen Drachen

Berlin Kreuzberg at the beginning of the 80s. Lawyer Hanna, daughter of a good family and working as a scientific social worker, gets caught between two sides. Her conservative fiancé Konrad wants to avenge the murder of his friend Theo on the Turks, but she loves a young Turk and wants to help the foreigners with their problems. There are also gray wolves and right-wing radicals, there is xenophobia and pressure creates counter-pressure - rebellion, bomb attacks and prison riots are the order of the day. An almost predictable catastrophe is on the horizon.

Feuer für den großen Drachen

NR 1984
Immensee

Young Elisabeth goes on a country trip with her mother, her friends Reinhard and Erich, their parents and the pastor. While the adults prepare a picnic lunch, the three youngest members of the group are asked to look for berries for dessert. The dutiful Erich eagerly collects them, while Elisabeth and Reinhard set off together in search of fruit. They find a hiding place they had built years ago. Although they still love each other, Elisabeth is sad. Reinhard will leave the next day to study in another city and will only visit her rarely. She doesn't know how she will go on living without him. She picks him a water lily as a memento and he gives her a goldfinch in a cage.

Immensee

10.0 1989
What We Remember

Nine very private encounters with different people of the post-war generation and their memories of childhood and youth. Among others, the guitarist and singer Peter "Caesar" Gläser and the actress Christine Harbort. Roland Steiner asked his contemporaries about - "What we remember ...". All interviewees are as old as the state they live in. Nine CVs from the GDR are described. They have different professions, from skilled worker and scientist, nurse and saleswoman, actress or rock musician, even a minstrel is included. They remember what shaped them: Family, school, birthdays and hot summers, the happy moments and their own failures.

What We Remember

8.0 1984
My Wife in 5

In MY WIFE IN FIVE, Schlingensief composes tracks and takes to a shimmering cinematic music piece. The playlist changes constantly between the styles, as if this record had a jump – Irving Berlin's This Is The Army, Mr. Jones, an Ave Maria Variation and Jacques Offenbach's world-famous Infernal Galop can be heard. Equally to the music the pictures also have scratches. The music film MY WIFE IN FIVE was created during a sound seminar by Christoph Schlingensief with students of the Hochschule für Gestaltung Offenbach. It already contains all forms of cinematic means and alienation, which he later used in his theatre and opera productions.

My Wife in 5

4.0 1985
Falsche Bilder

Valeria hates commissioned photos such as passport or wedding photos because, in her opinion, they are dishonest. She looks for honest faces. Valeria scares the customers with them, so she has to earn her money as a waitress. She begins to have doubts about her own pictures because they are not accepted. In the café, she is offered a job with a fashion photographer. Through their acquaintance with Valeria, Paul and Poupoune realize that their projections have little to do with reality.

Falsche Bilder

NR 1980
Potz Millione

Martin Hugentobler is "full of oil" when he gets home. You could also say he is "full to bursting". But this time, for once, there's a good reason: he and his three fellow Jass players have been playing the lottery for years, always with the same numbers. Finally, their perseverance is rewarded: five correct numbers mean a thousand francs each. However, this time Martin's wife Leni has filled in the slip instead of him - and made a mistake. A stroke of luck, because the "wrong" number helps the Hugentobler family win the main prize - one and a half million.

Potz Millione

NR 1981
Satan ist auf Gottes Seite

A top-level meeting of the Eastern secret services is taking place in Prague. Martin, an agent who knows all the tricks of the trade, is tasked with obtaining the minutes of the conference for the West German intelligence service. And he does so via Zimra, his former lover. She is now the right-hand woman of the GDR intelligence chief. A life-threatening assignment, but Martin accepts it. His condition: Zimra is to be taken to the West. The ageing West German spy chief accepts. He has only one goal in mind: to finally defeat his opponent in the East. He coldly plans to use Martin and Zimra for his purposes...

Satan ist auf Gottes Seite

7.0 1983
Das Singen im Dom zu Magdeburg

Jewish and Christian music merge in this film about one of the oldest choirs in Germany, the choir in Magdeburg Cathedral, which has been performing together with the head cantor of the Jewish community in West Berlin, Estrongo Nachama, since 1980. The choir already existed when Walther von der Vogelweide celebrated Christmas here; the cathedral has survived devastation and wars, most recently the bombing of Magdeburg in January 1945. The choir sings "Oh, how the city lies so desolate, which was full of people". The choir now rehearses and sings together with Estrongo Nachama.

Das Singen im Dom zu Magdeburg

NR 1988
The Boat Is Full

During World War II, Switzerland severely limited refugees: "Our boat is full." A train from Germany halts briefly in an isolated corner of Switzerland. Six people jump off seeking asylum: four Jews, a French child, and a German soldier. They seek temporary refuge with a couple who run a village inn. They pose as a family: the deserter as husband, Judith as his wife, an old man from Vienna as her father, his granddaughter and the French lad, whom they beg to keep silent, as their children. Judith's teenage brother poses as a soldier. The fabrication unravels through chance and the local constable's exact investigation. Whom will the Swiss allow to stay? Who gets deported?

The Boat Is Full

6.1 1981
Obituary of a Beast

Between 1962 and 1966, sex murderer Jurgen Bartsch cruelly tortured and killed four children in an old air raid bunker in Germany. This documentary examines the personality of the killer who died in 1976 during voluntary castration surgery at the age of 30. Vilified by the press for his heinous crime, Bartsch also became a case study for famous found criminal psychologists like Alice Miller (who maintains that no one abuses without being abused as a child, and murderers tend to have their own childhood abuse denied by the adults around them). Bartsch never met his birth parents, he was raised in a clinic and later adopted by a cold, unaffectionate couple. By the age of 15, he tortured and killed his first child victim. This informative, fact-filled documentary provides enough details for viewers to come away with a broader understanding of the nature of the criminally insane and society's role in their formation.

Obituary of a Beast

8.0 1985
Augenblick

With 'AUGENBLICK' (the 'space of an instant'), Franz Reichle has given us a highly unusual work. During turbulent times, two young people find each other, fall in love, fight and ultimately separate. They are looking for new directions and ways of life, taking things one day at a time and squeezing the fulfilment of their desires out of every moment. The 'space of an instant' is surprising in form and style: Reichle positions himself against conventional ways of seeing, and takes an almost anarchic approach to the rules of drama. His point of view is shaped by interior processes: sensations, rather than events, are portrayed in the images appearing on screen. One of the few films which attempts to expand the language of the cinema. Urs Jäggi in Zoom-Filmberater, March 1986.

Augenblick

9.0 1986