Changing Worlds, Shifting Narratives

Films from Europe

The following events film series, open to the public, will be held in conjunction with the NEH Summer Institute. All films are German language with English subtitles with the exception of Germanin , which is not subtitled (see July 25). 

All films are free. Please consider a donation of $10 for films screened at the Academy of Music to help support this historic film theater.

For information, email Beverly Weber, bweber@complit.umass.edu or call 545-6685.

Subject to change. Please confirm event times and locations at this web page.

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Friday July 8 2:45 p.m. :Academy of Music
Head-on . [Gegen die Wand]. Germany , Fatih Akin, 2004. 121 minutes. 35 mm.

Cahit is a German Turk at his late 30's. He has given up after his beloved wife's death, and he's living a miserable life in the in the throes of cocaine and excessive drinking. One night, he intentionally drives into a wall, and barely survives. At the hospital he meets Sibel, another German Turk who's tried to commit suicide. Sick and tired of her family's control over her life, Sibel asks Cahit to marry her on the condition she have absolute freedom. This unconventional love story is also a complex urban ballad, providing a depiction of two Turkish Germans that Roger Ebert says "not only includes a car crash, but has the fascination of one." Winner of the 2004 Berlin Film Festival Golden Bear Award.

Sunday July 10 7:30 p.m. Weinstein Auditorium, Wright Hall, Smith College
Die Patriotin [The Woman Patriot], FRG , Alexander Kluge, 1979. 121 minutes. 16 mm.

“Gabi Teichert teaches history. In the course of her research, she concerns herself with air-raids, with the Social Democratic Party, convention, looks into the history of bodies, sees a department store being cleared, comes into conflict with her superiors and into contact with fairy tales, examines the relation of a love story to history, etc, etc.: in all this, she is direct and practical. She is trying out tools. How you work on a car or a piece of wood is common knowledge; but how do you work on the history of our beautiful country.” (Alexander Kluge) -- A ‘New German Cinema' classic by the acclaimed director, lawyer and writer Alexander Kluge, narrated in his usual highly self-reflexive and funny style.

Monday July 11 7:00 p.m. : Weinstein Auditorium, Wright Hall, Smith College
Wittstock, Wittstock . Germany , Volker Koepp, 1997. 117 minutes. 16 mm.

In 1974 Volker Koepp went to Wittstock for the first time and filmed life in the old Brandenburg town ,particularly the changes brought by the building of a big textile factory. The film focused on three women, Edith, Elsbeth and Renate. The films offered a fascinating glimpse into provincial life in the GDR and brought us close to the three women, who had to cope with constant problems at work, got married, had to the three women, who had to cope with constant problems at work, got married, had children and had come to terms with life in Wittstock. Now a new kind of normality has taken hold in Wittstock: The big factory is no longer there. Elsbeth goes from one retraining course to another. Renate has now been working for five years as a chambermaid in a small hotel, and Edith, who used to be so rebellious, has moved to the Heilbronn area and has become very tranquil. The film shows all this with an unexpectedly light touch, with a constant tension between sadness and comedy and with incomparably beautiful pictures.

Monday July 11 9:15 p.m. : Weinstein Auditorium, Wright Hall, Smith College
Grill Point [Halbe Treppe]. Germany , Andreas Dresen, 2002. 106 minutes. 16 mm.

A cineastic adventure featuring a small, intimate cast, Grill Point was shot without a script, and was completely improvised. Two couples in their thirties enact a bittersweet comedy in Frankfurt-Oder, a nondescript burg not far from the Polish border. The four subjects have slipped into the mediocrity of middle-age, and realize that their relationships with one another have become staid, and that the two marriages have sunk into banality. Each player determines to revolt against the mundane, and an explosive events result. Director Dresen has created a well-observed, small-scale character-based piece that possesses, in his words, “a jam-session character [that] makes it a form of cineastic jazz.” Like his award-winning films The Policewoman and Night Shapes, Dresen employs an almost documentary view. Here, however, he adopts a decidedly optimistic ethos—which suits his on-the-fly style amazingly well.  

Tuesday July 12 2:30 p.m. : Film Screening: The Academy of Music
Blind Spot. Hitler's Secretary . Austria , André Heller and Othmar Schmiderer, 2002. 90 minutes. 35 mm.

The astonishing true story of Hitler's private secretary coming to terms with working alongside unspeakable evil after remaining silent for nearly sixty years. In 1942, Traudl Junge was an apolitical 22-year-old chosen from a clerical pool to work as one of Adolf Hitler's private secretaries. Working day-in, day-out for Hitler, Junge viewed him as a surrogate father figure, private and polite, nothing like the crazed rhetorician of his speeches. Shielded from the knowledge of Hitler's acts of atrocity, convinced she was in the center of information, she was actually in a blind spot. As the Nazi regime plunged further into madness, Junge witnessed everything up to the final chaotic days in the bunker. Completed just months before Traudl Junge's death, Blind Spot: Hitler's Secretary is a riveting personal history.

Tuesday July 12: 7:30 p.m. Weinstein Auditorium, Wright Hall, Smith College
Downfall . Germany, Oliver Hirschbiegel, 2004. 156 minutes.

In the dead of a November night in 1942, SS officers escort a group of young women through the woods to Wolf's Lair, Hitler's headquarters in Eastern Prussia. They are candidates for the post of personal secretary to the Fuehrer. Among them is 22-year-old Traudl Junge, a fresh-faced girl from Munich . Traudl is chosen for the job, and she is overcome with joy at the thought of serving beside her Fuehrer. Berlin , April 20, 1940 : Hitler has retreated to a bunker system under the German Chancellery. Traudl Junge is asleep in her room, deep beneath the ground. She is awakened by tremors from artillery fire. The enemy is getting closer. Charting the last 10 days of Hitler's life, from his 56th birthday on April 20th, 1945 to his suicide on April 30th, the film uses multiple characters to show the chaos of a country coming apart at the seams, from Hitler's henchman under the streets of Berlin, to the soldiers and civilians fighting and dying as the Soviet Army ravaged the city above.    

Wednesday July 13 7 p.m. Weinstein Auditorium, Wright Hall, Smith College
Too Early, Too Late. France/Egypt , Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub, 1981. 100 minutes. 16 mm.

“Too Early, Too Late” is a politically charged experimental documentary that sets up a comparison between the French revolution and Egypt 's political state in the late 1980. The film is broken into two parts. The first, entitled “A: Friedrich Engels,” consists of images taken from Paris and its surroundings, with a voiceover that reads a letter written by Engels to Karl Kautsky. “B: Mahmud Hussein” is made up of images of Egyptian cities and countryside and accompanied by the reading of Hussein's “Luttes sociales en Egypt.” “Perhaps the greatest of all landscape films!” (Jonathan Rosenbaum)

8:45 p.m.
O logischer Garten. FRG, Ingo Kratisch & Jutta Sartory, 1988. 85 min. 16 mm. Experimental film exploring Berlin as a city in which the past always manifests itself both spirtually and physically in the present.

Thursday July 14 1:00 p.m. Graham Auditorium, Smith College.
Death is My Trade [Aus einem deutschen Leben] . FRG , Theodor Kotulla, 1977. 145 minutes.

“Theodor Kotulla presented the biography of the concentration camp commandant Rudolf Höß (called Franz Lang in the film – this is how he called himself when he went underground) in his Death is my Trade (1977) as an instructional film, in 15 chapters, from 1916, when Höß volunteered for the First World War, up to his command over the machinery of human destruction. In this Kotulla avoided “staging” Ausschwitz; there are very few such scenes, mostly only alluded to. Even though one might find Kotulla's low-key production rather didactic nowadays, Death is my Trade is still one of the best films about a fascist character. Because it analyzes. Because it makes ‘German virtues' such as diligence and love of order responsible. Because it shows how an average petit-bourgeois becomes a mass murderer. In this film there is not the usual, exonerating confrontation between the good German and the evil Nazi, there are only henchmen who try to perfect the means of killing.” (Rudolf Worschech)

Thursday July 14 7:30 p.m. Graham Auditorium, Smith College.
Verdict on Auschwitz. The Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial of 1963-65 . Germany, Rolf Bickel and Dietrich Wagner. 2004. DVD . 60 minutes. US Premiere!

Followed by panel discussion with Eva Brücker, Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe; Sigrid Bauschinger, UMass Amherst; Karen Remmler, Mt. Holyoke College and Katie Trumpener, Yale University. Moderated by Barton Byg, UMass Amherst.

In December of 1963 one of the most important and dramatic court cases to tackle the issue of the Holocaust came before a jury in a Frankfurt court: the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial. The accused were twenty-two members of the SS, who worked under Hitler's command at the Auschwitz concentration camp. They were charged with being complicit in the mass murder of millions of people. For the first time in twenty years, the survivors of the concentration camp came face to face with their captors once again and testified against them in court. In total, some 350 witnesses from 19 different countries were heard. This trial, like no other, brought to light the horrific reality of the Nazi extermination machinery, and for the first time since the end of the war, Germans were confronted directly with questions as to responsibility for the Holocaust. This was an important step towards counteracting the mentality of suppression that prevailed at the time. As a result, the focus was not restricted to punishing the culprits but also on casting light on the National-Socialist dictatorship and its crimes. How was it that Hitler managed to gain such support from broad swathes of the German population? And how should the courts of the fledgling FRG deal with the crimes of the Nazi past? This was also the first time in a German trial that the testimonies of the witnesses and the accused were recorded on tape. The authors of "Verdict on Auschwitz " have succeeded in tracking down these original tape recordings and have used them in conjunction with contemporary film and photo documents to reconstruct the investigations in Frankfurt .

Friday July 15 1:30 p.m. Weinstein Auditorium, Wright Hall, Smith College
Redupers . Helke Sander, FRG , 1978. 95 minutes. 16 mm.

Writing and directing as well as starring in her first film (shot on a minimal budget), German auteur Sander has come up with a highly personal, wonderfully observed tale of a West Berlin photographer trying to make sense of the walls (physical and psychological) around her. We follow her struggling as an artist and a single mother in a divided Germany , and as we become acquainted with her daily routine Sander's black and white film, shot in assured semi-documentary style, becomes painfully revealing as we become aquanted with her daily routine. Despite its lack of conventional plot, the film is always compulsively watchable, which is no mean achievement.

Friday July 15 3:15 p.m. Weinstein Auditorium, Wright Hall, Smith College
The Hunger Years . Jutta Brückner, FRG , 1980. 113 minutes. 16 mm.

In this story the word “hunger” refers to many things: loneliness, confusion, both physical and emotional pain, longing: everything but its literal definition. The story takes place in 1950's Germany – a time when the country was experiencing an enormous economic boom. For the Scheuner family this economic boom is reflected in the family members' struggles with themselves. Ursula, the teen-aged daughter, serves as a metaphor for the entire German state of mind at that time. Her discovery of her body, her unease with it (and her denial and mistreatment of it) stands for her own country's discovery, unease, denial and mistreatment of itself. Her personal needs such as love, sensuality, and autonomy, seem to have no place in her parents' constant striving for a “better life” by emphasising on the importance of a good education and prosperity. Ursula longs to become acquainted with something of this world but feels too estranged by her surroundings. She begins to question her parents' values but she is still being subconsciously assimilated into their world. And when nothing changes after her first experience with love, Ursula sees only one way out to escape from her suffering. Brückner's autobiographical film makes a dialectical connection between interpersonal relationships and the political events of the Adenauer era and deals with the difficult issues of Germany's coming to terms with its own past in the years following World War II.

Tuesday, July 19 7:30 p.m. Weinstein Auditorium, Wright Hall, Smith College
Good Bye Lenin . Germany , Wolfgang Becker, 2003. 121 minutes. DVD .

October 1989 was a bad time to fall into a coma if you lived in East Germany - and this is precisely what happens to Alex's mother, an activist for social progress and the improvement of everyday life in socialist East Germany . Alex has a big problem on his hands when she suddenly awakens eight months later. Her heart is so weak that any shock might kill her. And what could be more shocking than the fall of the Berlin Wall and the triumph of capitalism in her beloved country? To save his mother, Alex transforms the family apartment into an island of the past, a kind of socialist museum where his mother is lovingly duped into believing that nothing has changed. What begins as a little white lie gets more and more out of hand as Alex's mother, who feels better every day, wants to watch TV and even leaves her bed one day… In a wonderful, touching and comic manner, Good Bye, Lenin! tells the story of how a loving son tries to move mountains and create miracles to restore his mother to health - and keep her in the belief that Lenin really did win after all!

Wednesday July 20 2:30 p.m. The Academy of Music .
En garde. Ayse Polat, Germany 2004. 94 minutes. 35 mm. US Premiere!
Sixteen-year-old Alice was put into a Catholic educational institute for girls by her mother. She is quite different from the other girls: Because of her extreme sense of hearing she perceives the world around her differently from other people and prefers to stay pretty much by herself. In the home she meets Berivan, a Kurdish girl stranded in the same place hoping for a positive judgment from the German immigration authorities. Gradually, Alice opens up to Berivan and they become friends. But the situation between the two begins to dramatically get out of control after Berivan falls in love. En Garde is a moving story about two girls' friendship, their hopes and dreams and their favorite game: fencing. En Garde is the second feature by the highly acclaimed young Turkish-German director Ayse Polat and was awarded the Silver Leopard at the 57th Festival Internationale di Locarno.

Thursday July 21 7:30 p.m. Weinstein Auditorium, Wright Hall, Smith College
The Empty Center [Die leere Mitte]. Germany, Hito Steyerl, 1998. 64 minutes. DVD .

Before WWII, the Potsdam Square in Berlin used to be the centre of the city and of its power. Then it became a deadly minefield, enclosed between the borders of the Cold War. In 1989, the Berlin Wall came down. The empty center was open again. After German reunification, Potsdam square was rebuilt by transnational companies. In the same process, people were pushed out to the outskirts of the city and marginalized by the recentering of Germany´s political and economic power. The Empty Center closely follows the processes of urban restructuring that have taken place in the center of Berlin for the last eight years, from the 1990 proclamation of a socialist republic to the erection of the new headquarters of Mercedes Benz arose in the same location. The Empty Center focuses on Potsdam square to discover traces of global power shifts, and the simultaneous dismantling and reconstruction of borders.

Monday July 25 7:30 p.m. Weinstein Auditorium, Wright Hall, Smith College
Germanin – Die Geschichte einer kolonialen Tat . Max von Kimmich , Germany , 1943.
German language - No subtitles . 94 minutes. VHS. One of the most infamous Nazi propaganda films, Germanin features Black German actor Louis Brody and hundreds of unpaid Black extras from German and Italian POW camps whose fate after the production of the film is still unknown to historians. Germanin glorifies the achievements of German tropical medicine and the discovery of “Germanin” by depicting Africa as a disease-ridden continent.

Tuesday July 26 2:30 p.m. Film Screening: The Academy of Music
Nobi. GDR. Günter Rätz, 1963. Animation. 35 minutes. 35 mm. GDR. U.S. Premiere!
East-German DEFA animation-short about a young African boy who fights slave-traders who threaten his village. Its humanist and socialist message, however, is flawed by the stereotypical depiction of African life and an only slightly disguised Eurocentric notion of progress.
The Scout. GDR, Konrad Petzold, 1983. 102 minutes. 35 mm.
Between 1966 and 1985 the East German DEFA studios co-produced more than a dozen "Indian Movies" with studios in Yugoslavia , Romania , the former Soviet Union , Bulgaria and Cuba . These movies comprised DEFA's only continuously successful series devoted to a single genre and focused on the same theme. The historical facts and recorded stories on how the West was won and how Native American life was destroyed were perfectly in line with the self-legitimization of the GDR as a socialist state. At the same time, these films were part of a cultural tradition in Germany that reaches back to the late 19 th century: romanticizing Native American life had always served a sort of compensatory function in Germany, it made up for national and social shortcomings, losses, and repression, as well as lost ideals and dreams. The enthusiasm about Native American life seemed value-free, without limits and consequences, was appropriate both for young government loyals as well as would-be rebels. Kurt Petzold's The Scout , shot in East Germany and Mongolia , was one the last films of the series and features the tremendously popular Yugoslavian-born actor Gojiko Mitic in an heroic fight against the white settlers.

Wednesday July 27 3:00 p.m. The Academy of Music
Toxi . FRG , Robert Stemmle, 1952. 88 minutes. 35 mm.

One evening, a well-to-do Hamburg family finds a five-year old girl abandoned at the door of its villa. Her name is Toxi, and she's black, the daughter of a German woman (who died) and an African-American GI (who returned to the U.S.). Director Robert A. Stemmle effectively details the prejudices existing in Germany against mixed marriages, as well as against the children produced by these partnerships. In a series of extremely well scripted scenes, various German positions on race and racism are discussed with remarkable honesty and candor. Just as young Toxi has worked her way into the hearts of this German family, a resolution of sorts appears: her American father returns, hoping to take Toxi back with him.  

Thursday July 28 7:30 p.m. Weinstein Auditorium, Wright Hall, Smith College
Everything Will Be Fine. Fatima El-Tayeb and Angelina Maccarone, FRG 1998. 88 minutes. DVD

Nabou, an anti-establishment Afro-German slacker, desperate to win back her punk rocker ex-lover Katja, becomes a housekeeper for Kim, a workaholic on the corporate track. A refreshing romantic comedy with the ingredients of a classic lesbian feature: whimsical sexiness, mistaken identity, and general madness and mayhem. Audience awards at the New Festival, New York City; Inside Out, Toronto; Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, Los Angeles.