• Home
• Bayer Arts & Culture
  • Intro
  • Vision
  • Commitment
  • Ensembles and Clubs
  • Venues
  • Partnerships
  • Team
• Programme
• Projects
  • stART
  • Berlin
• In Focus
  • The Arts and Power-The 2009/10 season
  • Inaugurating the second century of Bayer Arts & Culture
  • Archive
• Tickets
  • Buying single tickets
  • Sales outlets
  • Subscription
  • Pick-and-mix subscriptions
• leer

The Arts and Power in the Community Cinema

After winter comes spring – Films presaging the fall of the wall

1/5Go to image

In collaboration with the "Deutsche Kinemathek” foundation we are screening five films that presaged the downfall of communism in Europe. In Helke Misselwitz’ 1988 movie Winter adé (After winter comes spring) eight women speak more openly of their hopes, desires and disappointments than would previously have been possible in East Germany. The film thus foreshadows the fall of the wall. In Chuchelo (The scarecrow – USSR 1983/1986) Rolan Bykov depicts the collective mechanism of power in an idyllic small town. Lena moves to the town to live with her grandfather and soon finds herself the victim of systematic mobbing. Igla / The needle (Raschid Nugamanov, 1999) is regarded as a central work of Kazakhstan’s new wave cinema. In this film, the most successful of the Soviet Union’s perestroika era, Moro takes up the battle against the local drug mafia on the shores of the Aral Sea. Krótki film o zabijaniu / A short film about killing (1988) is the fifth of ten films in which Krzysztof Kieślowski explores the ten commandments. The film is a radical humanist essay on the futility of killing. Rainer Simon’s film Jadup and Boel (1981/1988) was the last film produced by the East German film studio DEFA that was banned by the censors after it was completed. It depicts a society that is paralyzed by ritual and has not the slightest desire to face up to its history.

American and African testimony

The German perspective

1/5Go to image

Alfred Weidenmann gave German actress Hildegard Knef her first movie role in Verdammt zu Sünde ( Damned to sin) in 1964. She stars alongside Tilla Durieux, to whom Bayer Arts & Culture is dedicating a separate project this season. Der Verlorene ( The lost one), the only work directed by actor Peter Lorre, is set in Hamburg in 1943. Despair drives renowned serum research scientist Dr. Roteh to commit a crime which is then covered up by the Nazis because of Roteh’s value for the war effort. Wir Kellerkinder ( We Cellar Children; Jochen Wiedermann, Wolfgang Neuss 1960) is a film about attitudes to history, opportunists and turncoats in the two German states. Helmut Käutner’s film In jenen Tagen ( Seven journeys) relates the story of a car that was used through the Nazi dictatorship.

Artists and the power of their work