Germany
james.woodall
The Palme d'Or at Cannes makes headlines. The Golden Bear in Berlin tends not to, and few films that win in competition at the German capital's annual film festival, the Berlinale, go on to command global clout, though that's no general reflection on the quality of entries. This year's winner, Bal ("Honey"), a lyrical story about a little boy and his father's beekeeping obsession, is the first, fully fledged Turkish film in recent memory to win; director Semih Kaplanoğlu might hope that Bal goes the same way as 2004's grim winner, Fatih Akin's Gegen die Wand, which, though German-funded and Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
In 2005, having completed the first act of his opera Phaedra and killed off his lead Hippolyte, Hans Werner Henze contracted a mystery illness. No one understood it or saw a way out of it. He stopped eating, then speaking. His eyes began to fail him. He fell into a coma. The musical world began to fly out to his Italian village outside Rome to pay their last respects and prepare for his funeral. Then, two inert months into the grief and the start of the obsequies, Henze "just stood up", and went back to work on the second act of Phaedra, in which Hippolyte returns from the dead.
Needless to Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The 22nd European Film Awards closed last night with Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon winning Best Director, Screenwriter and Film. Tahar Rahim was Best Actor for his breakthrough performance as a French-Algerian initiate into a prison’s brutal underworld in Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet, while the absent Kate Winslet won Best Actress for The Reader. Eric Cantona provided the night’s real star-power as he presented a visibly overcome Ken Loach with the Lifetime Achievement Award. But with The White Ribbon simply adding to its Cannes Palme d’Or success, and a quizzical Danny Boyle (pictured) Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It's over-egging it a bit to equate Krautrock with the entire rebirth of Germany. It's also slightly jarring to entitle the film Krautrock when its narrator then blames the World War Two-obsessed British music press for inventing such a disparaging term (cue supplementary evidence of Spike Milligan and John Cleese pretending to be Nazis.)Nonetheless, I liked this film so much I watched it twice. There were loads of insightful and entertaining interviews, and most of the music was great, though the extracts weren't long enough. In fact the whole film wasn't long enough, and how often do Read more ...
joe.muggs
It comes to something when the logic of a German act calling themselves “Gas” is the least troubling element of a perfomance. Not that Wolfgang Voigt's ambient music, or the slowly-evolving digital art of Petra Hollenbach projected on the Barbican's cinema screen, contained any obvious shock tactics – but the whole 80 minutes created just about as unsettling an experience as one could imagine from abstracted sound and image.As a club music producer and as one of the co-founders of Cologne's Kompakt label, Voigt has been responsible for some of the most emotive and lastingly affective techno Read more ...
james.woodall
Bertolt Brecht was probably made for them: Deborah Warner directing Fiona Shaw in Mother Courage and her Children is as desirable a coupling, surely, as the Warner-Shaw Richard II or Happy Days, both immensely satisfying showcases for the director's imaginative reach and the actress's fabled versatility. Brecht's saga of the Thirty Years' War demands a challenging cross between Shakespeare's rich historical dramaturgy and Beckett's relentless density; so the must-see urgency of the German-speaking world's best-known play at the Olivier by two such - well, is it rude to call them veterans? - Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The radical modern choreographer William Forsythe (b 1950) was celebrated in a week of events in London’s stages this year, marking his transition from mouldbreaking neo-classical ballet to a more collaborative, theatre mode.These transcripts come from 1997, before Artangel’s staging at London’s Roundhouse of what became instantly known as the white bouncy castle, Tight Roaring Circle, 2001 before the showing of two full-length ballet productions, Artifact and Eidos:Telos by his Ballett Frankfurt, then his company, and 2003, on the closing down by conservative civic authorities of Ballett Read more ...