GERM 331: German Composition/Discussion: Films

Premiered in Germany in 1926 and is based on the stories from "The Arabian nights", this movie has been hailed as the first full-length animated film.

Story of Franz Biberkopf, just released from prison where he has served four years for an irrational act of violence. He returns to his Berlin neighborhood resolved to go straight...

A somnambulist commits murders under a hypnotist's influence. This film is an example of the German Expressionist movement.

Set in the impoverished back alleys of Victorian London, The threepenny opera follows underworld antihero Mackie Messer (a.k.a. Mack the Knife) as he tries to woo Polly Peachum and elude the authorities. Music by Kurt Weill. Play by Bertolt Brecht.

At the height of the Depression, Anni and her parents are evicted from their Berlin home and sent to Kuhle Wampe, a camp that now accommodates the ever-growing numbers of the dispossed. The only Communist film to come out of Weimar Germany, Kuhle Wampe was swiftly banned upon Hitler's rise to power.

When a serial killer is stalking the children of the city, everyone, including the criminal underworld, wants to see him brought down.

The story of a 21st century city run by a "super trustee" and his collaborators who live in a paradise-like garden. Workers are totally enslaved by machines and condemned to live underground. In the midst of this misery, a young woman, Maria, arises and attempts to inspire the workers to throw off their oppressors.

A cross section of life in Berlin from dawn to midnight on a late spring day. Uses montage, cutting, and editing to capture the pulse and tempo of this city.

The first film version of Bram Stoker's Dracula. The insatiable Transylvanian vampire, Count Orlock (Nosferatu), leaves his castle in the Carpathians and travels by ship to Bremen, bringing coffins filled with dirt and plague rats.

Jupiter takes the shape of Amphitryon in order to enjoy the love of Amphitryon's wife, Alcmene. Based on the play by von Kleist, this cabaret-style treatment was one of the most successful films of the 1930's.

This pseudo-logical, uncomfortably realistic and genuinely frightening documentary interprets Jewish life and history from the viewpoint of traditional European anti-Semitism and Nazi ideology.

Working at Germany's famed UFA Studios under the very noses of the Nazi authorities that would later force him into Hollywood exile and eminence, Sirk transformed a glossy musical vehicle for UFA's "new Garbo" into a dark and intimate anti-colonial melodrama.

The only Communist film to come out of Weimar Germany, Kuhle Wampe was swiftly banned upon Hitler's rise to power.

A series of improbably-embellished stories featuring the adventurer Baron Munchhausen. Produced during wartime defeats in Russia to show that Germany could produce a counterpart to Hollywood blockbusters

After being commissioned by the 1936 Olympic Committee to create a feature film of the Berlin Olympics, Riefenstahl shot a documentary that celebrates the human body by combining the poetry of bodies in motion with close-ups of athletes in the heat of competition.

The Testament of Dr. Mabuse appropriates slogans and ideas from the newly ascendant Nazi party and puts them into the mouth of a madman, warning the audience of the horrible menace that was rapidly becoming a reality.

This film, commissioned by Adolf Hitler to record the 1934 Nazi party rally in Nuremberg, is the "most powerful piece of propaganda ever produced".

A devastating, a portrait of an obliterated Berlin seen through the eyes of a 12-year old boy. Living in a bombed-out apartment building with his sick father and two older siblings, young Edmund is mostly left to wander unsupervised, getting ensnared in the black market schemes of a group of teenagers and coming under the nefarious influence of a Nazi-sympathizing ex-teacher.

In one of his very best roles, Cagney plays C.R. MacNamara, a brash, top-ranking cola executive stationed in West Berlin. When his boss's harebrained daughter Scarlett falls in love and marries a fierce young Communist named Otto Piffl, Mac must break up the union or risk losing his chance for advancement.

In the period of several days, Katharina's privacy and her honor are destroyed, first by the police who terrorize her, and then by the yellow press, which creates in her name the image of a politicized Bonnie Parker.

Maria marries Hermann Braun in the last days of World War II, only to have him disappear in the war. Alone, Maria uses her beauty and ambition to prosper in Germany's "economic miracle" of the 1950's.

Jonathan Harker, against the wishes of his wife, departs on a journey over the Carpathian Mountains to arrange a real estate transaction for Count Dracula, with tragic results.

Based on poems by Rainer Maria Rilke.
A romantic fantasy about an angel who wishes he were mortal and is willing to fall from the sky if it means a chance to fall in love. Set in modern day Berlin, the film follows angel Damiel's path from heavenly flight to earthly delight in a manner that's comical, touching and entertaining.

In 1977, Anna and Marcus are two teenagers in East Germany undergoing punishment by their high school principal. Inspired by terrorist kidnappings in West Germany, they kidnap the principal and hold him hostage in Anna's grandmother's basement.

Germany 1967: murderous bomb attacks, the threat of terrorism, and the fear of the enemy inside are rocking the very foundations of the still-fragile German democracy. The radicalized children of the Nazi generation, led by Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof, and Gudrun Ensslin, are fighting a violent war against what they perceive as the new face of fascism.

Rosa Luxemburg, a Polish Jewess was born on March 5, 1871. She became German through an unconsumated marriage and at the beginning of the century, played an important role in the political and moral fields.

The first German film devoted to life and death in a concentration camp tells the story of organized resistance by political prisoners in the Buchenwald concentration camp. Made in East Germany.

Danzig, 1924. Oskar Matzerath is born with an intellect beyond his infancy. As he witnesses the hypocrisy of adulthood and the irresponsibility of society, Oskar rejects both, and, on his third birthday, refuses to grow.

The battle of Stalingrad lasted from September 1942 to January 1943...the awesome battle that thwarted Hitler's Eastern Front conquests is told from the viewpoint of four German soldiers.

During World War II in the Battle of Berlin, two women find each other. One is single, Jaguar; the other, Aimée, is unhappily married and mother to four sons. In war-torn Germany it was not safe to be Jewish; it was just as unsafe to be a lesbian.

true tale of a Jewish family who flee the Nazi regime in 1938 and learns to cope with their new life, and each other, on a remote farm in Kenya.

Loosely based on her actual first-hand account, depicts the final ten days of Nazi Germany as seen through the eyes of Hitler's then-secretary Gertraud (Traudl) Junge.

Vividly depicts the lives of five young German friends forced to navigate the unconscionable moral compromises of life under Hitler A television miniseries that first aired in Germany and Austria in 2013.

Susanne is a concentration camp survivor who, despite unspeakable experiences, is filled with a new desire to live. She wants to move back into her apartment in war-torn Berlin where Hans has taken up residence. He is a former officer and surgeon in the German army who finds himself unable to deal with the haunting memories of his role in the war.

Portrays young people in East Berlin in search of their purpose in life a few years before the construction of the Berlin Wall.

Station Inspector Brock is witness to a robbery. When he fails to report one of the culprits, he experiences flashbacks of his earlier failure to take a stand against Nazi persecutions years ago.

A 19-year-old East German girl named Maria Morzeck is denied university admission because her brother is in jail for political reasons. She later has an affair with the judge who passed the harsh sentence on her brother and eventually confronts him.

Set on the Baltic Sea, is the lovin' and fightin' of 10 teenage boys and 11 teenage girls on vacation. A musical version of coming of age. This bit of fluff lit up the East German box offices in 1968.

Against the background of the East German society's prejudice against homosexual relationships, Philip, a high school teacher with a pregnant girlfriend, discovers he loves Matthias. This production, the first and last DEFA feature film about homosexuality, had its premiere on November 9, 1989, the evening of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

East Berlin, 1984. Capt. Gerd Wiesler, Stasi officer and surveillance specialist has a simple assignment: keep an eye on a respected playwright, and his actress girlfriend.

Six characters are drawn together by circumstances - an old man and a prostitute forging a partnership, a young scholar reconciling his past, two young women falling in love, and a mother putting the shattered pieces of her life back together.
German, English and Turkish dialogue with English subtitles.

Imprisoned during the East German regime in Brandenburg, Martin Schulz, a former East German citizen, attempts to adjust to life in unified Berlin. He meets old friends and his wife who now lives with his son, whom he has never met, and another man.

A fictionalized interpretation of an experiment by Stanford University in 1971 which asked for 24 male students to volunteer for a simulated prison experience as prisoners or guards to determine behavioral and psychological consequences

Cahit Tomruk is in his forties, a rock 'n' rolling boozer with a purposeless, dead-end job. Sibel Güner desperately wants to escape her conservative Turkish family. Both are German-born Turks equally ill at ease in either culture; seeking a new life, and a morality that will withstand the constant shuttling between codes.

Alex's proud, socialist mother falls into a coma for eight months. When she wakes, her heart is weak, so Alex has to keep the secret that the Berlin Wall has fallen and capitalism has triumphed.

Daniel, a young teacher, decides to spend his summer at home in Hamburg. At the local flea market, he meets Juli, who is immediately attracted to him, a fact to which Daniel seems oblivious. On the same day, Daniel meets Melek, a young Turkish girl, with whom he is immediately smitten. Ignoring his earlier plans, he sets out in pursuit of her across the Balkans...

Set in the underworld of contemporary Berlin, the video offers a rare glimpse into a Turkish immigrant sub-culture in which sixteen-year-old Murat is a voyeur to macho histlers and gay sex, torn between the pressures of his Muslim family and his need to experience this taboo arena.

A thrilling post-MTV, roller-coaster ride about two star-crossed lovers who have only minutes to change the course of their lives.

Master chef and workaholic Martha is a perfectionist who revels in the sense of power and control her career affords. Martha's finely-tuned life is upset when her nine-year old niece Lina comes to stay, and a free-spirited sous chef is hired at her kitchen.

An uptight ad executive becomes very jealous when he learns that his wife is having an affair, so he befriends her lover and becomes his roommate, with hilarious consequences.

When a twenty-year-old bomb explodes in an abandoned mansion in modern-day Berlin, the evidence points to a notorious late 1980's anarchist group. As the police start looking for them, the six former rebels reunite for the first time in 12 years to come up with a plan to protect themselves.