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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
Zufalls-Horizonte

Out of over 4,000 ordinance survey maps (scale 1:25,000) charting all of West Germany, 88 maps were selected by random generator. Then random intersections of two coordinates were determined. Between March 1979 and February 1980 I visited the places at these coordinates, going from south to north. If the random place was determined by with the help of the survey map in the landscape, then I set up the camera at eye-level and pointed it northwards. This first shot was followed by 23 other shots, with the camera turning 15 degrees to the right for each next shot. The length of the shots follows a simple pattern: in the beginning, the shots are 6-5-4-3-4-5-6-5...and so seconds long. Towards the middle of the film they become progressively shorter, reaching ¼ of a second before becoming longer again at the end of the film.

Zufalls-Horizonte

NR 1980
The Flamethrowers

Matthias Müller’s films are always about both the eternal and the volatile qualities of cinema. They exaggerate the unreality and clinical perfection of the Hollywood studio films of the 1950s, quoting its sets and colours (Home Stories, 1990; Pensão Globo, 1997) or even reconstructing them in minute detail (Alpsee, 1994). But, at the same time, these attributes, known in film jargon as the production values, are exposed to decay – a decay which on closer inspection proves to include wilful acts of creation. As his own lab technician, Müller is responsible not only for subsequent wear and tear, but also for the initial developing of his own film material.

The Flamethrowers

NR 1989
Aus Lust am Schauen

Years ago, SONY advertised with the slogan “The mobile memory”. We fell for it. The memory faded. The starting situation for the film was this crisis: The half-inch magnetic tapes dissolved and could no longer be played, they squeaked when trying to get them to work. We called it the squeak plague. Our archive threatened to disappear. We started talking about the future. How is everything supposed to go on, the whole thing here? Also the question of video or celluloid and whether we still feel like it at all. If you ask a lot, you get a lot of answers. A fan-like montage of images and sounds about the future was created. In search of social reality, the volume is also an answer, but without patent recipes.

Aus Lust am Schauen

NR 1983
Battle for Time

Documentary film about a research project that is promising at its time, with which the prerequisites for the production of a new generation of computer modules should be created. Especially in the case of common user computers, the introduction of the "X -ray lithograph" in the semiconductor technology can lead to an even unmistakable upheaval. The film describes the research work and reflects on the importance of such a development insertion. An unusual documentation about a work that has little external in itself. - from 16.

Battle for Time

10.0 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
Sabine Kleist, Aged Seven

Little Sabine has spent her childhood in an orphanage after her parents died in a car accident. When one of the women in charge at the orphanage, Edith, leaves to have a baby, Sabine runs away, because Edith was the only adult there she could trust. She then wanders through the city to find someone to take her in. She meets a lot of people on her journey, but she seems out of place everywhere she goes until, at last, she realizes that there is a special place where she belongs.

Sabine Kleist, Aged Seven

4.9 1982
The House on the River

1942. The members of the Voß family, mother, two daughters, a daughter-in-law, and a son-in-law, are living in a house at the river. A fellow soldier of son Paul, who fights at the eastern front, delivers his greetings and an embroidered Russian blouse for Emmi, Paul′s wife. Daughter Agnes, whose husband is also fighting in the war, receives a fur vest from the junior partner who is stalking her. Obviously, the vest is also loot from the eastern front. When the family receives news that Emmi′s husband has been killed in action, the war finally enters the house at the river. Emmi commits suicide while Agnes′s husband returns as a cripple from the war front. At home, he has to learn what a price his wife had to pay for the "Russian fur".

The House on the River

7.0 1986
Tagebuch für einen Mörder

Only a short time left until Max Telligan's diary is finished. Hollywood is already interested in the book's film rights. US producer Terry Wilde makes the successful British author a lucrative offer. But shortly after the negotiations, the American is found dead at the airport and a fierce battle for the diary begins. Telligan's wife Harriet and daughter Marsha also feel the effects. Terrorists, the CIA and Scotland Yard suddenly take an interest in the book. But Telligan's beautiful secretary Liz Ferber defies all threats and saves the manuscript from shady characters and brutal intruders. Will she uncover the secret of the book?

Tagebuch für einen Mörder

10.0 1988
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
Kali-Filme

The KALI-FILME are a compilation of 8 single short found footage films, which were composed of Hollywood war-, horror- and women in prison B-pictures, historical war documentaries and porno films. In the trivial films we find images of our own subconscious instincts, which are tabu in the official high culture. KALI is a mother goddess of the Hindu mythology. She is the birth giving mother and at the same time the killing and castrating woman. Since primeval times men do fear her power.

Kali-Filme

NR 1988
Sterne

What’s a star in a movie? A black dot in the film negative. In the nineteen eighties I enjoyed painting on 35mm blank film and painted a negative. That means every frame was painted in reverse color - black became white, blueish green became red, yellow was to be sort of blue. The result: all colors are on black background - like in the windows in old cathedrals. The music was improvised after the film was finished by Jasper van’t Hof, vocals by Eva Mattes. The film was premiered in competition at the Berlinale 1985.

Sterne

NR 1984
Reunion in Travers

The time is the French Revolution; the place is the village of Travers, ensconsed in neutral Switzerland. Prussian aesthete Herman Beyer is on the verge of divorcing wife Corinna Harfouch. Radical writer Uwe Kokisch, Corinna's lover, hopes to find a way of smoothing out animosities. What follows, however, is a nonstop drinking binge. The film subliminally addresses the then-prevalent issue of a divided Germany. Whether or not it succeeds is unimportant; Treffen in Travers (Reunion in Travers) has proven to be a crowd pleaser wherever it has been shown.

Reunion in Travers

8.0 1989
Hilde, das Dienstmädchen

In 1938, a young woman leaves Germany to search for her love, Erich, in Reichenburg, Bohemia. Erich is secretly fighting the fascists, so Hilde ends up becoming a housemaid in the home of a German joiner in order to carry on their relationship. The joiner's son notices the passionate love shared between Hilde and Erich. To him, the young lady embodies the feminine ideal. When Hilde receives news of Erich's death, she descends into an uninhibited lifestyle in an attempt to forget.

Hilde, das Dienstmädchen

9.0 1986
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