Film starts of the week: David Bowie, Alice Schwarzer and East Germans who only talk about the weather

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Film frame from the documentary "Moonage Daydream" about David Bowie's creative voltes

Photo: Universal Pictures

In cinemas from September 15th

»Moonage Daydream«

You can see in this film director Brett Morgan struggling in the editing room not to get lost in all the great documentary footage he found of David Bowie.

»Moonage Daydream« has become a sprawling work about the star's meandering stream of life and his tremendous creativity.

Bowie, who over the decades reinvented himself again and again, who created art figures and wandered between the sexes, who was a pop star, actor and painter, could hardly walk for sheer creativity.

Morgan, who had access to the star's estate, tries to do justice to that diversity by zipping through Bowie's career for 140 minutes.

That makes this film fascinating and unsatisfying at the same time.

There is a lot and almost everything falls short.

Unfortunately, Morgan couldn't resist the temptation to create his own artwork from the material.

He constantly edits images that have more or less to do with Bowie into supposedly psychedelic montages, the meaning of which is not really revealed.

»Moonage Daydream« always comes to rest when Bowie talks about himself and his art.

It is almost always gripping to listen to him.

It's also extremely amusing how talk show moderators try in vain to get hold of him in interviews.

He's just as unsteady and unpredictable as a grasshopper, he says.

When trying to follow the star on his leaps, this film also fails.

»Moonage Daydream« USA 2022. Written and directed by Brett Morgan.

140 minutes

»Alice Schwarzer«

At almost 80 years old, Alice Schwarzer is still extremely active, gets involved in current debates about abortion rights and the war in Ukraine - and thus continues to knit her own myth as the most important feminist in Germany.

The film portrait »Alice Schwarzer« by Sabine Derflinger is also intended to secure her political and intellectual legacy.

And at first glance, the friendly, conventional documentary does the same.

Schwarzer's biographical stations are migrated, her most sensational appearances on television are brought out of the archives and her most important comrades-in-arms are questioned.

You can see harmonious scenes from the everyday editorial work of »Emma« and also from the relationship with the photographer Bettina Flitner.

At second glance, however, a misery is revealed.

At 55, the singer and actress Jasmin Tabatabai is probably the youngest of the black fans interviewed.

A new generation of feminists is not directly questioned - possibly because they would rub Schwarzer's positions on the headscarf, transgender and prostitution.

Instead, unnamed women at pro-sex work demos are briefly used by Derflinger as cues to give black people the final say in debates about themselves.

It's not just a generational conflict that's raging around black people.

Even when »Emma« was founded, the magazine was controversial among feminists because of its simplistic worldview.

In 2020, an anthology was published about the polemical magazine »Die Schwarze Botin«, which impressively documents the intellectual counter-positions that already existed in the 1970s, for example by Elfriede Jelinek.

There is nothing to be found out about this in the film »Alice Schwarzer«.

Ultimately, feminism appears to him as a movement that lacks young talent and intellectual acuity.

If that's not a reason to worry.

»Alice Schwarzer« AT 2022. Written and directed by: Sabine Derflinger.

100 minutes

»Everyone talks about the weather«

German cinema regularly fails because of two challenges: realistically depicting university life and impartially capturing everyday provincial life in East Germany.

Annika Pinske also takes on the former in her debut film »Everybody Talks About the Weather«, which celebrated its highly acclaimed premiere at the Berlinale in February.

Her main character, the somewhat older Berlin philosophy doctoral student Clara (Anne Schäfer), involves her in academic power relations that have a lot of dramatic potential - such as an affair with a much younger male employee - but little reference to reality - doctoral students do not have their own employees .

The fact that Clara wrote her doctoral thesis on "the concept of intersubjectivity in Hegel's conception of the family and bourgeois society" anticipates in a not very subtle way that

that it will be about understanding between the milieus and within families.

Then do it.

As soon as the film leaves the capital with Clara to celebrate the 60th birthday of mother Inge (Anne-Kathrin Gummich) in the Mecklenburg provinces, "Everyone is talking about the weather" becomes more sensitive and precise - and thus masters the second challenge.

While Clara helps Inge with the preparations for the festival, picks up sandwich plates and meets old acquaintances, everyday life unfolds that is neither exciting nor joyless.

But simply is.

Because you don't want to worry about alternatives.

In comparison, Clara's decision to live in Berlin and study later seems literally absurd - like a wrong path that has led her far away.

Pinske repeatedly captures the alienation that this means in seemingly irrelevant words and gestures, in eloquent silence and averted looks.

The realization that Clara comes to at the end of the short time with her mother is more painful: she may never find her way back from far away again.

»Everyone is talking about the weather« D 2022. Director: Annika Pinske, script: Johannes Flachmeyer, Annika Pinske.

With Anne Schäfer, Judith Hoffmann, Anne-Kathrin Gummich, Max Riemelt.