#gottfried john

[sephiroth1926]

Julius Caesar - Gottfried John #8

My favorite Julius Caesar from the 1999 film Astérix et Obélix contre César. This nose is too good, and I can't draw it properly.

Julius Caesar's favorite option, or Asterix and Obelix's favorite option, is almost like a favorite ice cream option.

[ofimaginarybeings]

Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1975)

Brigitte Mira and Gottfried John in Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven 

Cast: Brigitte Mira, Ingrid Caven, Karlheinz Böhm, Margit Carstensen, Irm Hermann, Gottfried John, Armin Meier, Matthias Fuchs, Peter Kern, Kurt Raab. Screenplay: Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Kurt Raab, based on a story by Heinrich Zille. Cinematography: Michael Ballhaus. Production design: Kurt Raab. Film editing: Thea Eymèsz. Music: Peer Raben.

It’s a too-familiar story in the United States: A disgruntled employee attacks his place of work and then kills himself. It may have had a more ripped-from-the-headlines feeling in West Germany during the recessionary times of the 1970s, which is my way of saying that Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven feels a little more stuck in time and place than Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s films usually do. The setup is familiar: A man goes berserk at his workplace and commits suicide, leaving his family to face the aftermath. The follow-through is predictable: Tabloid reporters and politicians flock, milking what they can from the family’s pain. But Fassbinder being the satirist that he was couldn’t simply play the story for conventional domestic drama. He treats the family from the outset with a sardonic tone: The soon-to-be widow (Brigitte Mira) does piecework, assembling electric sockets on her kitchen table, as her son and his wife squabble over their coming vacation. Helene (Irm Hermann), Emma Küsters’s pregnant daughter-in-law, is given to putting on airs about healthy living, preparing salads for dinner when Emma’s husband and son want meat. Ernst (Armin Meier), the son, who works as a butcher, is so under his wife’s thumb that he submits to her every wish, including a vacation in Finland when he would really prefer to go somewhere warmer. When news comes of the crime committed by Herr Küsters, we meet the daughter, Corinna (Ingrid Caven), who fancies herself a singer, is sleeping with the owner of the bar where she works. When the whole family gathers, the reporters flock to get the dirt, which is immediately swept up by Niemeyer (Gottfried John), a writer and photographer, who starts sleeping with Corinna. In the background, their initial presence never quite explained, are a well-dressed couple, the Thälmanns (Karlheinz Böhm, Margit Carstensen), who turn out to be members of the Communist Party, eager to find a recruit in Frau Küsters, who becomes “Mother Küsters” for them. And so the unsavory game of exploitation begins. The problem comes when the film has to end: Fassbinder provided two endings, in both of which Mother Küsters becomes a pawn in a game between the Communists, who are really just bourgeois radical-chic types, more interested in election victories than revolution, and the anarchists, who want headline-grabbing action. The ending shown in Germany and Europe culminates in the death of Mother Küsters – though the bloodshed isn’t acted out, but just narrated in end titles. In the other ending, shown only in the United States, the action, a sit-in in the offices of the newsmagazine for which Niemeyer works, fizzles out because nobody really cares that much. Mother Küsters goes home with a janitor who has to close up the place and invites her to join him in a dinner of “Himmel und Erde” – apples and potatoes with blood sausage. Both endings make the point, the first by refusing to dramatize the outcome of the protest, the second more directly: There’s no real political conviction anymore. I rather like that both endings are available together now, not only because they reinforce one another nicely, but also because there is nothing definitive to be said about the plight of Mother Küsters in a post-ideological context. Fassbinder, that great admirer of Douglas Sirk, seems to be saying that life itself has been reduced to melodrama, and the choice of a bloody ending or a happy one is completely arbitrary. 

[spockvarietyhour]

Oh it's Caesar from Astérix & Obélix contre César!

[notesonfilm1]

EIGHT HOURS DON’T MAKE A DAY: EPISODE FOUR – HARALD AND MONIKA (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, West Germany, 1973)

View On WordPress

[proustiansleep]

Eight Hours Don’t Make A Day /  Acht Stunden Sind Kein Tag (1972), dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder

[goldeneyedossier]

Thirty years ago today, an ill-fated attempt to depose Mikhail Gorbachev fell apart amidst a climate of violence in Moscow, leading to the fall of the Soviet Union. What's GOLDENEYE got to do with it? Read here: https://goldeneyedossier.wixsite.com/bond/post/goldeneye-and-the-1991-soviet-coup-of-1991

[rwpohl]

[hamoimproviso]

My Fassbinder season continued with his 5 part 1971 “Family Series” Eight Hours Don’t Make A Day. There is every reason to be doubtful about this; from the fashions, to Gottfried John’s peculiar physiognomy, to Hannah Schygulla’s wig, to its factory setting, socialist pontification about owning the means of production, right through to its comical grandmas. It looks like something to be endured rather than enjoyed in the age of swift stylish beautiful TV. But oh, how lovely it is. So warm, so unlike the work of Fassbinder. More like Coronation Street when it was about character more than events, or Play For Today, or films by Ken Loach. Human beings, living and loving and laughing through their lives. And beautifully restored, with real affection for the material and the desire to preserve art. Highly recommended.