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1-15 of 15
- Director Hans-Jurgen Syberberg examines the rise and fall of the Third Reich in this brooding seven-hour masterpiece, which incorporates puppetry, rear-screen projection, and a Wagnerian score into a singular epic vision. Syberberg, who grew up under Nazi tyranny, ruminates on good and evil and the rest of humanity's complicity in the horrors of the holocaust.
- Richard Wagner's last opera has remained controversial since its first performance for its unique, and, for some, unsavory blending of religious and erotic themes and imagery. Based on one of the medieval epic romances of King Arthur and the search for the holy grail (the chalice touched by the lips of Christ at the last supper), it recounts over three long acts how a "wild child" unwittingly invades the sacred precincts of the grail, fulfilling a prophecy that only such a one can save the grail's protectors from a curse fallen upon them. Interpreters of the work have found everything from mystical revelation to proto-fascist propaganda in it. Hans-Jurgen Syberberg's production doesn't avoid either aspect, but tries synthesize them by seeking their roots in the divided soul of Wagner himself. The action unfolds on a craggy landscape which turns out to be a gigantic enlargement of the composer's death mask, among deliberately tatty theatrical devices: puppets, scale models, magic-lantern projections. The eponymous hero is sung by the specified tenor voice (Reiner Goldberg) but mimed on screen by a male and a female performer alternately, reflecting what the director takes to be the creator's own sexual conflicts. Syberberg's pacing, dictated by the majestic pace of Wagner's score, is slow, but enlivened by constant subtle shifts in point of view, and memorable performances by actress Edith Clever as the villainess/heroine Kundry (sung by Yvonne Minton), orchestra conductor Armin Jordan as the remorseful knight Amfortas (sung by Wolfgang Schoene), and Robert Lloyd (the faithful retainer Gurnemanz).
- The story of the legendary King Ludwig II of Bavaria (1845-1886), his opera interest and friendship with theatre personalities such as Richard Wagner and Joseph Kainz, and at the same time a reflection of the German 1800s.
- A Teutonic lecher on vacation has a wager with some local peasants that he can't make a walking circle from sunrise to sunset to secure some coveted land. The middle-aged businessman embarks on his journey only to be slowed down by the beautiful reporter Scarabea. With thoughts of drunkenness and sex on his warped mind, the man tries to circumnavigate the parcel of property. The story is a retelling of an ancient folk tale told by Tolstoy where the initial victim bets his soul to Satan against the land he desires.
- This ethereal, three-hour biopic is the middle film in Hans-Jürgen Syberberg's "German Trilogy" on the mythological foundations of the Third Reich.
- A six hour long monologue performed by Edith Clever, who reads texts by Syberberg, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Heinrich von Kleist, Plato, Friedrich Hölderlin, Novalis, Friedrich Nietzsche, Eduard Mörike, Richard Wagner, William Shakespeare, Martin Heidegger, Samuel Beckett and chief Seattle.
- Hans-Jürgen Syberberg's epic interview with Winifred Wagner in 1975.
- Edith Clever recites the complete text of The Marquise of O. by Heinrich von Kleist.
- This surrealistic experimental film finds the son of a young nobleman staying with hash-smoking hippies in a seamy section of Munich. He falls for a hippie girl who is involved in shaking down the young man's parents for money.
- Life and death, love and war, self and community, are reflected.
- A requiem for the now-defunct German state of Prussia.