We Have a Name for This Sort of Thing, and It's Awkward

Get Your Man Ray On

Berlin Ecke

Merry Christmas

Inselfieber

A 1979 Short Film by Christoph Doering shot in West-Berlin featuring outliers starting in the music scene.

Mapping the Wall

Home movies made by Peter Guba from 1959-62 when he was an East German border soldier can be seen online at the website of the Deutsche Historiches Museum. Oneonly wonders how he got away with it.

„Barbara”

Christian Petzold’s film „Barbara” takes an unsentimental look at the DDR from the perspective of a Doctor who sought an exit visa.



Be warned, though. The place never looked that good.

Saturday Dada

Dreams That Money Can Buy, 1947: Collaborators included Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Alexander Calder, Darius Milhaud and Fernand Léger.

Soviet Films: 17 Moments of Spring (1973)

Presented here with English subtitles for all of you ugly Kulaks.

Film: Allemagne année zéro

Directed by Roberto Rossellini in 1948, it's offers a sense of life after war and disaster.



The playlist for the entire film can be found here.

A desperate thirteen-year-old boy scrambles for survival in the nightmarishly dilapidated remains of 1945 Berlin, trying to support his sick father by thieving and scavenging in the streets. When he encounters a kindly former schoolteacher, the old man reveals himself to be a devious Nazi sympathizer capable of exacting a terrible influence on his erstwhile charge.

Another Charmer of an Anglo-American Film

From 1951, it's No Highway In the Sky

Eins, Zwei, Drei

“Is everybody in this world corrupt?”

“I don’t know everybody.”

Our silver screen meltdown marches ever forward in something familiar to European political observers, that is to say in goose steps. We present Billy Wilder’s 1961 madcap tale of Commie Berlinalia called One, Two, Three, which also happened to star Jimmy Cagney who brilliantly shows his comic timing and skill, even as Wilder turned the pace of the film up to 11.

Oddly enough, one of the many things that points out the humorlessness of “progressive” activist to this day is the fact that some of them still campaign cheerlessly and sadly unaware of irony against “Coca-Cola Imperialism”, as if their own not drinking the stuff wasn’t enough. I wonder if they realize that the concept was just one of Wilder’s jokes.



I strongly recommend renting or downloading this film! Not only will you not know where the time went, and possibly regret it, but you’ll find strange hidden gems in it, like a Messerschmitt micro-car that keeps appearing in the background, and momentary references to Carney’s “Little Caesar” character by an untitled supporting actor playing to Cagney, and another play on it with him asking for “Rico”. Along the way, look for a Khruchevesque banging of the shoe on a table, and a chillingly accurate portrait of the shambolic ruin that was East Berlin long AFTER this film was shot.

Layering it even more is the appearance of wonderful players like Leon Askin, (born Leo Aschkenasky) who sent up the temperament of a Soviet apparachik in this film, much as he later sent up the comically greedy Nazi General Burkhalter in the television comedy series, Hogan’s Heroes. Those mere moments in his long and rich career which included politically provocative cabaret as only the Viennese could do. Immigrating to America in 1940, he enlisted in the US Army, was stationed in Britain, and upon return to New York having been unable to find his parents who were sent to a Concentration Camp, he started a theater group made up entirely of Army veterans. Like Mel Brooks who served as a combat engineer and fought in the Battle of the Bulge, he seems to have understood that the most humiliating defeat an enemy can face is mockery.

What they share with Wilder, a Berliner transplanted to America himself, wasn’t just comic ability, creativity, but a keen sense of observation, matched to a functioning moral compass.

When, Oh When

Will the DSM-IV recognize my puerile fetish for old British fillums ?

"That was Quite an Outburst"

I've Found it!

The World's Very Worst Made-for-TV Movie...



Wake Me When the War is Over (1969)

Secret Agent (Hitchcock, 1936)

"Der Einbruch" (The Robbery) 1920

The Rather Distant Ago

When Britons used to still occasionally give birth...

REVIEW OF THE YEAR 1946

"Ich war Neunzehn"

"Ich war Neunzehn" (I was Nineteen), a DDR DEFA film production from 1968

Description:

Based on the biography of its director, Konrad Wolf, this film chronicles the closing days of the World War II through the eyes of a young German who is a Red Army translator with a front line propaganda team. He must deal with weary Wehrmacht officers, opportunistic politicians, frightened civilains, surviving political prisoners and apolitical intellectuals, as well as the pressures of battle. Wolf was the older son of one of DEFA's founders, as well as the brother of a head of East German Intelligence. Directed by Konrad Wolf; featuring Jaecki Schwarz, Wassili Liwanow, Alexej Ejboshenko, and Galina Polskich. East Germany, 1968, B&W, 115 minutes

Brit Flick: Gasbags (1941)

Meet The Crazy Gang