Co-directed by Aleksandr Sokurov and Semen Aranovich, Dmitri Shostakovich: Viola Sonata is an emotionally lucid, understated, textural, and reverent biography of the highly influential, Soviet-era composer and pianist, Dmitri Dmitrievich Shostakovich. Using allusive, recurring imagery of a photograph of a young, physically fragile Shostakovich resting on his mother’s lap and a delirious shot of an […]
Category: Directors
Bucharest, Memory Lost, 2008
Like Boris Lehman’s autobiographical essay Looking for my Birthplace, Albert Solé’s Bucharest, Memory Lost is a search for identity – the reconstruction of a past that has been lost in the shadows of turbulent history, exile, and parental silence. For Solé, the ambiguity of his nationality as a young boy – his parents having alternately […]
The Growth of the Soil, 1921
Two of the earliest surviving silent films in the Norwegian Film Archives were included in the program, the first of which is Gunnar Sommerfeldt’s epic ode to rugged individualism and self-reliance, The Growth of the Soil, based on the Nobel Prize-winning novel by internationally renowned native author, Knut Pedersen Hamsun. Tracing the pioneering adventures of […]
The Murderers Are Among Us, 1946
The Murderers are Among Us is a haunting and indelible film on the process of healing and reconciling with personal accountability. The film opens to an imbalancing shot of a drunken Dr. Hans Mertens (Ernst Wilhelm Borchert) wandering through the bombed ruins of Berlin as he enters a disreputable cabaret. Once a successful specialist surgeon, […]
The Blue Angel, 1930
The Blue Angel is a desperate, emotionally unrelenting portrait of a man whose consuming love for a cold, manipulative woman leads to moral descent and ruin. Dr. Immanuel Rath (Emil Jannings), is a repressed, middle-aged high school professor who decides to confront Lola Lola (Marlene Dietrich), a cabaret singer, about her “bewitching” of his students. […]
These Encounters of Theirs, 2006
In its exaggerated formalism, idiosyncratic performance, and extended temps morts, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s These Encounters of Theirs is a rigorous and subversively irreverent, but thoughtful, sensual, and articulate meditation on the search for enlightenment, the rapture of divine inspiration, the intranscendable distance of gods, and the elusive quest for immortality. Composed of five […]