New German Cinema

Fitzcarraldo is a dreamer who plans to build an opera house in Iquitos, in the Peruvian Amazon, so, in order to finance his project, he embarks on an epic adventure to collect rubber, a very profitable product, in a remote and unexplored region of the rainforest.

On location in Portugal, a film crew runs out of film while making their own version of Roger Corman's The Day the World Ended (1956). The producer is nowhere to be found and director Munro attempts to find him in hopes of being able to finish the film.

Plot Summary for
Parsifal (1982)
Richard Wagner's last opera has remained controversial since its first performance for its unique, and, for some, unsavory blending of religious and erotic themes and imagery. Based on one of the medieval epic romances of King Arthur and the search for the holy grail (the chalice touched by the lips of Christ at the last supper), it recounts over three long acts how a "wild child" unwittingly invades the sacred precincts of the grail, fulfilling a prophecy that only such a one can save the grail's protectors from a curse fallen upon them. Interpreters of the work have found everything from mystical revelation to proto-fascist propaganda in it. Hans-Jurgen Syberberg's production doesn't avoid either aspect, but tries synthesize them by seeking their roots in the divided soul of Wagner himself. The action unfolds on a craggy landscape which turns out to be a gigantic enlargement of the composer's death mask, among deliberately tatty theatrical devices: puppets, scale models, magic-lantern projections. The eponymous hero is sung by the specified tenor voice (Reiner Goldberg) but mimed on screen by a male and a female performer alternately, reflecting what the director takes to be the creator's own sexual conflicts. Syberberg's pacing, dictated by the majestic pace of Wagner's score, is slow, but enlivened by constant subtle shifts in point of view, and memorable performances by actress Edith Clever as the villainess/heroine Kundry (sung by Yvonne Minton), orchestra conductor Armin Jordan as the remorseful knight Amfortas (sung by Wolfgang Schoene), and Robert Lloyd (the faithful retainer Gurnemanz).
Summary written by Roger Downey

During the 1982 Cannes Film Festival, Wenders asks a number of global film directors to, one at a time, go into a hotel room, turn on the camera and answer a simple question: "What is the future of cinema?"

In a totalitarian society of the future, in which the government controls all facets of the media, a homicide detective investigates a string of bombings, and finds out more than he bargained for.

A documentary on the shooting of Kamikaze 1989 and Querelle, it contains an interview with Fassbinder prior to his death.

1982 film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder

In Wittelbacherpalais, Munich's prison and Gestapo center, middle-aged Else Gebel awaits trial for carrying anti-Nazi material. She serves as a clerk in the Gestapo office. On Thursday, 18 February 1943, two youths arrive at the prison, arrested for carrying anti-Reich pamphlets and suspected of dropping leaflets from the university tower and painting anti-Hitler signs along Ludwigstraße: Sophie, 21, and her brother Hans, 24 and back from the Russian front. Sophie is housed with Else, and for five days, as Sophie is interrogated and charges brought, the women form a bond based on simple interactions: poetry, tea, shared clothing, courage, love of freedom, and a promise Else gives Sophie.

Olga and Ruth become friends. Olga is independent, separated from her husband, living with an immigrant pianist, and teaching feminist literature. Ruth is withdrawn, a painter, possibly mentally ill. Ruth dreams in black and white, sometimes of her suicide. Olga lectures on a 19th-century writer, von Günderrode, a suicide after the breakup of her intense friendship with Bettina Brentano. Ruth's husband Franz encourages the women's friendship, then, as Olga draws Ruth out and the friendship deepens, he becomes jealous. After the women travel to Egypt, Franz has a tirade. Ruth seems crushed between her husband and her friend, and how she responds is the film's climax.

Nightmares of the past haunt the beautiful, mysterious Olivia, a London resident who begins a passionate affair with American businessman Mike. Trapped in a loveless marriage and traumatized by memories of her mother's brutal murder, Olivia hopes her lover will offer a chance at a new life. However, ghostly voices and brutal murders ignite a fiendish, twist-filled story of double identities, deception, and erotic terror.

The Power of Emotion explains that emotion isn't to be confused with sentimentality. Emotion is ancient and more powerful than any art form. The film looks at young couples who run into difficulties as they try to translate their experiences of love into clear decision-making. A woman who has shot her husband provides a judge with a puzzle. Those who love can bring the dead back to life by means of co-operation. That's the focus of the opera, "The Power Plant of Emotions" and the "Opera of the 20th Century" cinema.
Alexander Kluge: The Power of Feeling
When I started working on The Power of Feeling, I was not in a rational state. I did not say, I have a subject and now I will make a film about it. Instead I was spellbound and observed in my direct surroundings, for example, how feelings move. I have not really dealt with the theme of my mother's death and the fact that she was the one who taught me "how feelings move." Nor have I dealt with how she died. That was an entire palette of feelings: "All feelings believe in a happy end," and everyone believes tacitly that they will live forever: The entire palette is somehow optimistic, a positive attitude towards life having been put on the agendaas long as she was young, as long as her body held out, from one day to the next she collapsed. She just suddenly collapsed, like in an opera where disaster takes the stage in the fifth act. It felt as if I had observed an air raid or a disaster.
The film The Power of Feeling is not about feelings, but rather their organization: how they can be organized by chance, through outside factors, murder, destiny; how they are organized, how they encounter the fortune they are seeking.What is all this organization of feelings about? Generally feelings tend to be a dictatorship. It is a dictatorship of the moment. The strong feeling I am having right now suppresses the others. For thoughts this would not be the case. One thought attracts others like a magnet. People therefore need affirmation by other people to be sure about their own feelings (to counteract the acquisition of their feelings through outside forces). Through the interaction of many people, for example, in public, the various feelings also have a magnetic attraction to one another just like thoughts do. Feelings communicate through their manifestation in public.
The cinema is the public seat of feelings in the 20th century. The organization is set up thusly: Even sad feelings have a happy outcome in the cinema. It is about finding comfort: In the 19th century the opera house was the home to feelings. An overwhelming majority of operas had a tragic end. You observed a victim.
I am convinced that there is a more adventuresome combination: Feelings in both the opera and traditional cinema are powerless in the face of destiny's might. In the 20th century feelings barricaded themselves behind this comfort, in the 19th century they entrenched themselves in the validity of the lethal seriousness.

In Belle Époque Paris, a 19th-century Parisian aristocrat falls in love with a lower-class prostitute who seduces him but never loves him.

A man wanders out of the desert not knowing who he is. His brother finds him, and helps to pull his memory back of the life he led before he walked out on his family and disappeared four years earlier.

"The Boat" is the story of the crew of one of the hundreds of U-boats deployed by the Germans in World War II. Subject to countless hours of claustrophobic confinement and unending assault by enemy ships, the crew struggles for survival.

A plump Munich mortuary worker tracks down and seduces a married subway conductor.

A salesman faces a crisis as he's about to lose his job, struggles with bills, and feels disrespected by his sons, who haven't lived up to their potential. He reflects on where things went wrong and how to fix his family.

A mentally unstable woman and her son move to a sprawling mansion in Portugal to grow roses.

1986 film by Margarethe von Trotta

Documentary about the shooting of BOURBON STREET BLUES.

Two angels, Damiel and Cassiel, glide through the streets of Berlin, observing the bustling population, providing invisible rays of hope to the distressed but never interacting with them. When Damiel falls in love with lonely trapeze artist Marion, the angel longs to experience life in the physical world, and finds -- with some words of wisdom from actor Peter Falk -- that it might be possible for him to take human form.