German Film Review is part of German movie magazine Jump Cut, whose emphasis is not at all on German but rather on world cinema with a special interest in Asian film, from Bollywood to Japan. If you want to have a look - it's mostly German, though, - just go this way.

  

Hans Weingartner: Die fetten Jahre sind vorbei / The Edukators (Germany 2004)

Review by Ekkehard Knörer

All this, the idyllization, the insistence on sending messages without precise content, the half-conscious criticism that lacks analytical rigour but abounds in clichéd language and thought (to which the sloppiness of the film's cinematic language perfectly corresponds), the will to action that resorts to privatist escapism, all this may be read as an uncannily accurate (or accurately uncanny) - albeit unintentional - depiction of a current state of public and political affairs.
     

Angela Schanelec: Marseille (D 2004)

Review by Ekkehard Knörer

We learn more about Ivan, we learn more about Hanna. We see Ivan taking pictures of women workers in a factory, without an explanation. We just see and watch. We watch the women from a sidewards angle, then we watch Ivan taking the pictures, then we watch the women from Ivan's perspective. They talk, but not much. We just hear and see and watch. There is a lot we see - although it takes some time to realize how much.
 

Andres Veiel: Die Spielwütigen (Crazy for Acting, D 2004)

Review by Ekkehard Knörer

Life, no doubt, has to be formed to be presentable as a documentary, just the way characters have to be formed to be presentable on a stage, as actors. There is, it seems, a deep and most probably subconscious connection here between the film, which insists on having a form, and the training the acting pupils undergo in order to find a form, to be put into a form that resembles what the audience readily accepts as, recognizes as: the right form in which it is done. Making a documentary. Acting.
 

Jan Krüger: Unterwegs (On the Road, D 2004)

Review by Ekkehard Knörer

In the beginning there is darkness. And a lighter moving in the darkness. A tent, one person, two persons and a third one, perhaps. The positing of a beginning, in the darkness, confined, light and perception moving shakily. From here starts a story, or so we should assume. Three make a family: mother, father, daughter.
 

Mennan Yapo: Lautlos (Without a Sound, 2004)

Ekkehard Knörer

Mennan Yapo, a German director of Turkish origin, certainly has made one of the most broodingly unfunny movies you will meet in quite some time, but he very obviously knows what he is doing, using almost unobtrusive style to create an atmosphere of cold beauty. He is very ably supported in his endeavor by his set designer and, above all, by cinematographer Torsten Lippstock who tends to leave backgrounds out of focus in favor of what is immediately in front of his lense. And with good reason: he imbues his pictures with a brownish tint that gives them a painterly beauty in earthen colors and he manages to conjure up a kind of material yet transparent, palpable yet weightless light in his images.

Short Review: Iain Dilthey: The Longing (Das Verlangen; D 2002)

"The Longing" was awarded the Golden Leopard at the filmfestival at Locarno in 2002

Where is the place, the space of Iain Dilthey's "The Longing"? It is not the real world, this film forms and invents itself a sealed world, in which it is hard to breathe and speak and smile. The one person who almost can't breathe and speak and smile is Lena, the priest's wife, who is fucked by her husband without tenderness or even a remote interest in her person. She is tortured by her husband's paralysed sister, she plays the organ in a makeshift church. Lena falls in love with Paul the car mechanic but in a strange Dürenmattian turn of events a crime story intrudes the plot, a police officer intrudes the village and threatens to block Lena's way to happiness. This hell of a life is the habitat given to her by this film. It's a zone of spiritual hopelessness, invented, it soon seems, for no other reason than the filmmakers' will to sadism. (EK)