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What would Hong Sangsoo's films be without alcohol?
Scene from »The Writer, Her Film and a Happy Coincidence« from 2022
Photo: Grandfilm
Endless storytelling
When
Edgar Reitz
left his home village in the Hunsrück at a young age, his favorite teacher called after him: "Don't turn around." But that's exactly what he did from then on: look back, for decades.
It has become the source of his art.
The filmmaker Reitz, who turned 90 this year, is still the great man of longing of German television and cinema, an artist of remembrance who would love to tell endless stories.
Because what we don't tell each other, we forget.
His epic "Heimat" lasts more than 60 hours, a chronicle of the century, based on the fictional village of Schabbach in the Hunsrück.
It's about marriages and adulteries, famines and political upheavals.
The history of the Germans is reflected in the fate of the family.
The same now applies to his autobiography, which is also a mammoth work, almost 700 pages long.
It is the story of a life that tells the story of a whole country.
Tobias Becker
Edgar Reitz: »Film time, lifetime. Memories« Rowohlt Berlin; 672 pages; 30 euro.
men, women, alcohol
The many intellectuals in
Hong Sangsoos
Films, writes Sulgi Lie, always seemed slightly underprivileged.
Since they can never be seen at work, only hanging around aimlessly, one never finds out whether they are even capable of linguistic eloquence.
The opposite can be said of the Berlin film scholar Lie: his small study of Hong's extensive work, which includes 28 films to date, is evidence of eloquence and also of wit and circumspection.
The slim volume begins with a more general introduction to the Korean director's cinema, based on the alcoholic beverages that are consumed so much and enthusiastically in his films.
Four chapters follow on the films he has made since 2015, when he won the Locarno Golden Leopard with »Right Now, Wrong Then« and broke a new barrier of attention.
Like Hong's films, the book is all the more fun the more you know about his films: the continuous work on your own motifs, which Lie provisionally but aptly summed up with "Men, Women, Alcohol", makes the Charm from Hong's work.
How this ideosyncratic approach nonetheless points to more than itself, what Hong's films have in common with those of Rohmer, Buñuel and Renoir, Lie reveals with knowledgeable clarity.
Hannah Pilarczyk
Sulgi Lie: Hong Sangsoo. The Ridiculously Serious" Le Studio; 96 pages; 15 euros Available here
Resistant potential
In the Berlin Summer of Culture 2022, the exhibition »No Master Territories.
Feminst Worldmaking and the Moving Image” at the House of World Cultures was a highlight: Around a hundred film works by women were shown there, some documentary, some experimental, most of which were shown extremely rarely and all of which were worth seeing, because it was precisely the sum total of an impressive Panorama
of feminist filmmaking
the past 50 years together.
The beautifully designed book, which was published parallel to the exhibition, is less an accompanying catalog than an independent anthology that examines the resistant potential of feminist filmmaking beyond the classic narrative film: It combines current essays and discussions among contemporary publicists with classic essays such as »Outside In Inside Out« by Trinh T. Minh-ha, the influential Vietnamese-American director and theorist from whose writings the exhibition title is also borrowed.
In contrast to the exhibition, the book is much more academic, but as in the exhibition, thanks to the variety of texts, you can pick and choose what and who you want to pay attention to.
Hannah Pilarczyk
Erika Balsom, Hila Peleg (eds.) "Feminist Worldmakig and the Moving Image" HKW/MIT Press; 512 pages; 35.04 euros
Naked Discipline
The filmmaker, world explorer and eccentric
Werner Herzog
, born in Munich in 1942 and raised in a remote Bavarian mountain valley, tells in his autobiography of a unique life as an artist.
Of course, from legendary shoots in polar ice deserts or in the jungles of South America, from the roaring and violent attacks of the actor Klaus Kinski, but also from the women in his life.
Of soldierly virtues that have allowed him to shoot more than 70 films.
"A good part of my being is still nothing but naked discipline," writes the director.
With clear, poetic vocabulary, he describes a beautiful, strenuous childhood during the war and post-war years.
He did not finish his studies in theater studies, among other things, so he traveled to Greece, the USA and Mexico early on, where he earned money as a rodeo clown, among other things.
He came to film as an autodidact.
His gift for disasters is enormous.
He writes about a bad skiing accident that it happened to him out of "pure boasting".
Especially for his more documentary films, Herzog is celebrated as a great man in the USA and many parts of the world.
And yet, in this highly entertaining biography, he claims he doesn't care what is slandered about him or boasted about.
The filmmaker has no doubts about his own artistic power.
He always rejected teachers as useless, says Herzog: "There was something in me that Catholicism calls certainty of salvation."
Especially for his more documentary films, Herzog is celebrated as a great man in the USA and many parts of the world.
And yet, in this highly entertaining biography, he claims he doesn't care what is slandered about him or boasted about.
The filmmaker has no doubts about his own artistic power.
He always rejected teachers as useless, says Herzog: "There was something in me that Catholicism calls certainty of salvation."
Especially for his more documentary films, Herzog is celebrated as a great man in the USA and many parts of the world.
And yet, in this highly entertaining biography, he claims he doesn't care what is slandered about him or boasted about.
The filmmaker has no doubts about his own artistic power.
He always rejected teachers as useless, says Herzog: "There was something in me that Catholicism calls certainty of salvation."
Wolfgang Hoebel
Werner Herzog: »Everyone for himself and God against everyone: memories« Hanser; 352 pages; 28 euros.
burning paper
In honor of
Pier Paolo Pasolini
's 100th birthday , there was an almost unmanageable number of film series, special screenings and discussion rounds this year.
Appropriately, the most beautiful publications on PPP could not be limited and come in two volumes each.
The »Pasolini Bachmann« bundle comes from the editors Fabien Vitali and Gabriella Angheleddu.
The first volume brings together for the first time in German the 15 interviews that the German-Jewish journalist and director Gideon Bachmann conducted with Pasolini over the course of his career.
In the second volume, the Romanist Vitali comments and annotates the conversations so comprehensively and knowledgeably that the part functions almost like an independent exhibition of works by both Pasolini and Bachmann.
»Writing on Burning Paper«, edited by Annabel Brady-Brown and Giovanni Camia Marchini, combines a volume of poetry with a volume of essays.
The first contains a new English translation of Pasolini's long poem »Who is me/Dichter der Asche«, the second a graphically extremely attractive collection of statements, essays, notes and sketches by contemporary directors such as Radu Jude, Angela Schanelec or Mariano Llinás, like Pasolini has influenced her own filmmaking.
While history can be traced based on »Pasolini Bachmann«, »Writing on Burning Paper« leads into the present and beyond: the limits of the influence of the artist of the century Pasolini are still not foreseeable.
Hannah Pilarczyk
Annabel Brady-Brown, Giovanni Camia Marchini (eds.): "Writing on Burning Paper" Fireflies Press; 40 and 160 pages; 32 euros Obtainable here
Fabien Vitali, Gabriella Angheleddu (ed.): »Pasolini Bachmann« gallery of eccentric arts;
854 pages;
64 euros