The circus film is a genre that receives little attention, although it’s one of the oldest film genres. Studios started making them during the silent era (The Circus Man, Crown and Whip, and Circus Days) and the genre reached an apex during the first half of the fifties (The Road, Man on a Tightrope, and …
Category: Love
Life Together
Life Together (Leben zu zweit) is a romantic comedy with a plot that sounds like something straight out of Hollywood. Karin Werner (Marita Böhme) is the divorced mother in her mid-thirties, who's been secretly dating a mathematician named Peter Freund (Alfred Müller). She’s kept the affair secret because she worries how her fifteen-year-old daughter Nora …
Cyanide
Abortion as a hot-button topic is nothing new. Witness the German playwright Friedrich Wolf's play Cyanide (Cyankali). It debuted in 1929 and was made into a movie the following year. The play was first performed at the Lessing Theater and became the biggest hit of the theater’s season. When it was made into a movie …
Red Fox
The Red Fox (Rotfuchs) of the title is Eve Kolinauke (Angelika Waller), a postal worker in the small river town of Müritz (filmed in Tangermünde and at the Wesenberg Lock). Eve earned her nickname thanks to her bright red hair. She tootles around the town on an underpowered moped, delivering the mail and attempting to …
Camping-Camping
In 1991, less than two years after the Berlin Wall came down, a film called Go Trabi Go hit the cinemas in Germany. It’s the story of a man, his wife, and their bored teenage daughter who—taking advantage of the newly available European West—drive to Italy in their trusty old Trabant. While the husband is …
Were the Earth Not Round
Were the Earth Not Round (Wäre die Erde nicht rund) is the story of Christiane (Bożena Stryjkówna), an East German woman studying geology at a university in Moscow. The story is told in flashbacks while Christiane waits for her ailing daughter to leave the hospital. The flashbacks jump back and forth between the woman’s childhood …
Location Hunting
When documentary filmmaker Rüdiger Stein decides to make a film about an ordinary couple, he finds that he's bitten off more than her can chew.
Lotte in Weimar
In 1774, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther took Germany by storm. Goethe would go on to become the most important writer in Germany, and it started with this book. The book is told from the perspective of a young man, pining for his unrequited love, Lotte. He wrote the book in …
Biology!
In 1989, the government in the GDR had begun to relax its restrictions on artistic expression, allowing films to explore topics that would have been taboo a few years earlier. It was too little too late. The whole edifice came crashing down spectacularly on November 9th, 1989. The few films that were already “in the …
Marta, Marta
Every once in a while, a television movie comes along that becomes as much a part of media literacy as any feature film. It’s the one that everyone was talking about the next day at work and continued to talk about for years after. Think Duel, or Brian’s Song, or, if you’re from Britain, The …
East German Cinema Blog 