Film List New Wave 

The 80s began cool, distant and introverted. The New Wave aesthetic lets a cool wind of modernity blow. In a Mercedes convertible with an Armani suit and the soundtrack by Blondie Call me, Richard Gere as American Gigolo merges with his luxury outfit. Let the neon 80s begin! 

FREE ON CINEGEEK.DE Ingmar Bergman - The Seventh Seal 

A knight returns from the Crusades. He finds a church that is still open, even though the plague is raging all around him. He confesses. He speaks to a man with a frock about his indifference, which excludes him everywhere. He lives in a world full of spirits as a prisoner. He wants God to stretch out his hand and speak to him. He screams into the darkness, but there is no one there. The man in the frock turns around. It is death. Can anyone tell me a modern film that presents such pictures? Nobody. Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal has much more in common with a silent film than with modern cinema. A rugged, uncompromising film (some of you may find it ridiculous or outdated). Hardly anyone asks about the DVD in our video store. Bergman has gone out of fashion. The subject, the absence of God, interests no one. But I am addicted to Bergman. I watched all his films one after the other. And The Seventh Seal is not primarily about the absence of God. It's about our gossip. Our restlessness. Bergman, on the other hand, poses existential questions. In contrast to his films from the 60s he still asks these questions directly in the 50s and therefore I prefer The Seventh Seal. A straightforward Bergman movie like he wasn't supposed to do later. In most of his movies Bergman settles accounts with God. Who doesn't know the famous picture of the knight playing chess with death? The work ends with an equally famous picture: The macabre dance of death before the horizon. Once the knight (embodied by Max von Sydow) asks a girl about the devil, who must know whether God exists. "Look me in the eye"; the girl answers. She refers to the priest who could see him. She tells of it almost proudly. But the knight's squire discovers nothing but emptiness in the girl's eyes. There is nothing. So is there only death and God doesn't matter? Bergman's films deal with this spiritual search. They desperately seek answers to the big questions of life. With regrettable answers. But there is one thing in Bergman's work: love. It exists. Like a consolation.

FREE ON CINEGEEK.DE Baal 

Baal knows no consideration. He calls it living in the here and now, but in truth he is simply a drunk and a sex maniac. He knows no friendship, no loyalty, not even to his patrons. Ball doesn't know love either. He kicks his ‘lover’ Sophie (Margarethe von Trotta) into the dirt, and he spares his ‘lover’ Ekart (Sigi Graue) just as little. We know the play by Bertolt Brecht. He wrote it in 1918. In 1969, Volker Schlöndorff turned it into a screenplay and filmed it on 16mm with Rainer Fassbinder and several later stars such as Hanna Schygulla. The music was composed by Klaus Doldinger, who would later become famous with Passport. This is how Brecht's songs were reworked. This small TV sensation was shown in 1970 - but then not for several years. Brecht's widow Helene Weigel saw to that, arguing that a cigarette and a leather jacket do not a Brecht make. At some point, Bayrischer Rundfunk dug the film up again for the 70th birthday of Fassbinder, who died worthy of a Baal: of cardiac arrest caused by the combination of alcohol and coke. Baal is a difficult film for our modern viewing habits. You have to get involved!

CINEGEEK.DE Filmlist MINDGAME MOVIES III 

Is Angel (Carmelo Gómez) really an angel? Or has he been accompanied by an angel for quite some time? Is he good and bad at the same time? Anyway, Angel has just come out of the mental hospital to work. He works for a pest control company and ends up in a small village. Where the earth is red. Angel falls in love with two women: Mari (Silke Hornillos Klein), rebellious and red-haired and into the ethereal Ángela (Emma Suárez), domestic, good and blond. Is Angela also an angel? I'm sure a psychoanalyst could write a lot about it. But director Julio Medem stages fairy tales for adults. Complex, psychological dream games. He loves Spanish baroque literature just as much as the surrealists. His fishing rod is divided in two and perhaps not of this world. That's why he falls in love twice: with the sexual desire and worship of a woman. It's kitschy and romantic and intellectual. Because notice: it's best to watch a Julio Medem film twice in a row to penetrate it.