Notizie

Rotterdam this year has offered one certifiable giant discovery in international cinema: German filmmaker Dominik Graf, revealed in a simultaneously introductory and interventionist retrospective programmed by Christoph Huber and Olaf Möller. An incredibly prolific filmmaker beginning in the late 1970s, Graf has interwoven his cinema into the fabric of the German television industry, producing a body of work ranging from television episodes, made-for-tv films, essay movies, documentaries, and a handful of films intended for the cinema.

Yet despite Graf's prodigious output of nearly sixty works, its primarily creation for national television has meant that it has been essentially unavailable to English-speaking audiences prior to Rotterdam's 17 film retrospective. The first film of his I saw was Komm mir nicht nach (Don't Follow Me Around) in the middle of the Dreileben trilogy in 2010, notably another for-television project, but one which had festival and theatrical ambitions beyond German living rooms, perhaps due...

Between Yesterday and Tomorrow

The Berlinale rounds out its Forum program today with the announcement of a series of Special Screenings, a couple of world premieres and a batch of revivals. Combine this list with the titles announced last week and those in Forum Expanded and you're looking at the complete program.

World Premieres:

in arbeit / en construction / w toku / lavori in corso (in the works) by Minze Tummescheit/Arne Hector, Germany. The festival notes that this documentary project is "structured according to the principle of the chain interview, with the first interview partner leading the film team on to the second and so on. What all of their number have in common are the cooperative structures in which they work. Yet the most important question they debate is that of their own legitimacy: does it make sense or is it even possible to position oneself outside of industrial progress,...

Spiegel Online and the Süddeutsche Zeitung are reporting that character actor Jürgen Hentsch has died at the age of 75. Having made a name for himself at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin, Hentsch made his onscreen debut in the East German television production of Herrmann Zschoche's Carla (1965) and appeared in Konrad Wolf's classic antiwar film I Was Nineteen (1968).

Hentsch will probably be best remembered for his portrayal of Ernst Schultze, the psychiatrist who attempts to determine the psychological stability of the infamous serial killer who terrified Germany in the 1920s, Fritz Haarmann (Götz George) in Romuald Karmakar's The Deathmaker (1995). Hentsch also impressed German television viewers with his performances as the Social Democratic Party Chairman Herbert Wehner in Oliver Storz's Im Schatten der Macht and as Heinrich Mann in Heinrich Breloer's mini-series The Manns (2001).

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Three young German architects have created an entirely new sort of architecture, bending trees to their will.

For decades, people have been growing outdoor furniture using the trees themselves. A trio of German architects has taken that several steps further: They're designing entire structures using trees made to grow around a metal superstructure. They've already completed a few test buildings, including the bird-watching station pictured above. They're now designing a new, 1,290-square-foot concert pavilion for downtown Stuttgart.

The buildings start with a metal superstructure, erected at a test site on the grounds of the University of Stuttgart's Institute of Basics in Modern Architectural Design. Then, the architects--Ferdinand Ludwig, Oliver Storz and Hannes Schwertfeger--attach year-old willows to the scaffolding, bending them into shape. More trees are then grafted on, from root to trunk, so that they grow together. Over time, the growing trees take over the load-bearing duties. Finally, the supports...