10 posts categorized "New German Cinema"

March 26, 2017

MOTHER KUSTERS GOES TO HEAVEN

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Mutter_kusters_fahrt_zum_himmelFassbinder is the German version of Lou Reed if Lou had been a German filmmaker.

Although the version of “Mother Kusters Goes to Heaven” currently being shown on FilmStruck does a fake-you-out move by spelling out, and including, two different endings, Fassbinder's complex movie presents a compelling case for autonomy of the individual.

In an age when the NSA utilizes the same data that social media crunches to decide the plot of the next Hollywood movie you sit through like a hungry cat sniffing fresh tuna in the air, “Mother Kusters” puts the media, politics, and familial trust in same trash bin.

MOTHER KUSTERS

Brigitte Mira’s elderly matriarch is a postfeminist every bit as fascinating as the outsider character she played in Fassbinder’s “Ali: Fear Eats The Soul.”

Screen Shot 2022-06-20 at 1.27.13 PM

Heaven is what you make it. The media just makes trash. 

Not Rated. 108 mins. 

5 StarsBMOD COLE2

Cozy Cole

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June 11, 2015

THE BITTER TEARS OF PETRA VON KANT — THE CRITERION COLLECTION

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Brecht meets Douglas Sirk and Joseph Mankiewicz (“All About Eve”) in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s delectable adaptation of his five-act stageplay, an exploration of a lesbian triangle of role-switching polarities between dominance and submission.

There’s a pinch of Billy Wilder’s “Sunset Blvd” thrown in for good measure.

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Repurposing his play’s original cast, Fassbender takes advantage of his skilled actors’ mastery of their tightly scripted roles.

Margit Carstensen works a high-wire act of emotional overreaching as the title character whose fetid teardrop of remorse is the result of her inability to master her ego and confused desires. Working in an image system of shadows, mirrors, and foreground objects, Fassbinder’s formal compositions convey the thin line between beauty and failure.

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It is winter in a remote German chalet in Bremen. The central narrative follows the haughty Petra Von Kant, a diva fashion designer of cottage-industry repute. A huge reproduction of Nicolas Poussin’s “Midas and Bacchus” hangs on the wall beside Petra’s bed. Nude costume mannequins stand at odd angles as a silent chorus of frozen female observers.

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Marlene (Irm Hermann) is Petra’s loyal live-in slave (admirer, secretary, maid, seamstress, and unacknowledged designer). Marlene is a true submissive. She never speaks a word, focusing her devotion to Petra via her domestic work like a nun sworn to silence. Petra likes to slow dance with Marlene to The Platters’ “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.”

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Fassbinder tears a page from the book of his Southern Gothic comrade Tennessee Williams with a credit sequence featuring two cats sitting on a staircase. The “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” allusion subtly primes us for the clawing, scratching, and biting to follow.

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Petra awakens in her prominently positioned bed to Marlene raising the blinds. Marlene’s upturned nose, cherry-kissed lips, and coiffed red hair accentuate Irm Herhmann’s poised portrayal, which conveys much of Fassbinder’s theme-rich subtext through body language. The film has the trancelike tone of a dance performance. Marlene brings Petra a glass of orange juice on a tray while her mistress puts on airs with her mother over the telephone. Petra is a neo-Gothic tyrant. She dons a brunette wig to go with her fur-lined robe.

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A discussion with Petra’s visiting cousin Sidonie (Katrin Schaake), about Sidonie’s recent divorce, exposes similarities about the women’s various troubles with men. Petra has been married twice; one husband died, the other left. Secretly, even to herself, Petra longs to live as a submissive. But she can’t see the forest for the trees.

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Sidonie says: “It’s the exception that proves the rule.” Petra glimpses her desires when she falls for the seduction con of a Karin (Hanna Schygulla), a young married Australian woman on vacation. Marlene types constantly on a manual typewriter during the film’s centerpiece sequence of seduction between Karin and Petra. Fassbinder uses the sound of the typewriter keys as a musical counterpoint to the would-be lovers’ conversation that runs the gambit to Marlene’s describing how her father and mother died.

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Their relationship puts Petra in a vulnerable state that allows Karin to humiliate her. For a moment the women live out their ideal sexual fantasy. The price of the experience will cost Petra Von Kant everything that she has.

Not Rated. 124 mins.

5 Stars Screen Shot 2023-03-28 at 12.26.56 PM

Cozy Cole

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October 16, 2013

PARIS, TEXAS — THE CRITERION COLLECTION

  ColeSmithey.com    Groupthink doesn't live here, critical thought does.

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ColeSmithey.comWim Wenders’s films encompass the rebellious nature of the New German cinema movement, and its maturing explorations into various narrative forms. Initially drawn to creating pensive road movies as variations on an ever expanding theme, Wenders’s early career took off in 1970 with “Summer in the City,” a 16-mm black-and-white college graduation film project about a freshly released ex-con searching for purpose and security in his new life of relative physical, if not psychological, freedoms.

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A soundtrack of rock ‘n’ roll music that prominently featured The Kinks played heavily into filling out Wenders’s unhurried storyline. It would take another 14 years before Wenders would arrive at the film that would most clearly define him as a filmmaker in love with American mythologies and displaced characters — this time with an equally haunting score [composed and performed by Ry Cooder).

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Written by Sam Shepherd, and adapted by L.M. Kit Carson, the linear story for “Paris, Texas” contains the hallmarks of Shepherd’s characteristic dramatic themes of brotherly relationships and of fatherhood as a metaphor for man’s quest for personal identity. In his first leading role, Harry Dean Stanton plays Travis, a lost soul out of time. His portrayal is tremendous.

Paris-Texas

We first see Travis walking in Terlingua, a barren and dusty region of Texas close to the Rio Grande. He wears a filthy suit and tie, along with a ragged red baseball cap that adds another anachronistic aspect to this odd emaciated man traversing a landscape made famous in Westerns created by John Ford and Howard Hawks. Indeed, the narrative shares something in common with Ford’s 1956 film “The Searchers,” about a cowboy (John Wayne) on a journey to rescue his niece from an Indian tribe.

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After collapsing from dehydration on a gas station floor, the tempor arily voiceless Travis is reunited with his brother Walt Henderson (played by Dean Stockwell in one of his finest performances). Four years have passed since Walt and his wife Anne (Aurore Clément) took responsibility for raising Travis’s young son Hunter (Hunter Carson) after an ugly split between Walt and his much younger wife Jane (Nastassja Kinski). Jane sends monthly checks to the Hendersons from a bank in Houston. Although initially happy to see Travis after thinking him dead, Anne worries that her husband’s emotionally injured brother will develop a bond with Hunter, and take the child away from she and Walt.

Paris  Texas

Wenders takes advantage of cinematographer Robby Müller’s poetic visual sense to contextualize the characters’ sense of looming, present, and past loss. Wide shot vistas of flat landscapes in Texas give way to Los Angeles’s hazy highways. Road sign billboards and neon-lit logos simultaneously mock and invite an American culture made up of hard edges.

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Through perseverance Travis wins Hunter’s trust and respect. Together, father and son set out to find Jane, the matriarchal and maternal figure both desire. When Travis finally finds Jane, she works in a sex club where he can only speak to her by telephone through a two-way mirror. The artificially imposed atmosphere of segregated intimacy facilitates a candid conversation between Travis and Jane that finally enables him to act in the best interest for his family.

Rated R. 147 mins.

5 Stars Screen Shot 2023-03-28 at 12.26.56 PM

Cozy Cole

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