Heiner Müller

No description available.

"The Century of the Theater" - From the "birth of the director" to the "heroes of modernity" - an overview of the world of theater - illuminates the interaction with the history of the past hundred years is also shown.

Documentary by Thomas Heise filmed in East Berlin in 1987/88.

No description available.

Hamlet and Ophelia reckon with their doomed narratives. Adapted from the 1977 East German Heiner Müller play of the same name.

Documentary on Mão Morta's three sole concerts.

No description available.

An issue of the magazine Kino 81, designed for the film department of WDR by staff of FILMKRITIK

A series of poems.

In order to justify interpreting the Oresteia as a representation of the "birth of democracy" (P. Stein), one has to repress a lot, for example the sacrifice of Iphigenia or Elektra's feminist rebellion. The Oresteia represents an "Egyptian" material, situated between Europe and Asia, incomprehensible to both. That makes it interesting for a possible, currently necessary rapprochement between the two parts of the world. One would need, Müller says, to undertake a completely new translation, because in the existing ones the irrational elements have already been smoothed over.

Robert Wilson and the Civil Wars is an in-depth documentation of Robert Wilson’s ambitious attempt to stage an epic, twelve-hour, multinational opera for the 1984 Summer Olympics. Filmmaker Howard Brookner follows the avant-garde theatre director as he confronts a hectic work schedule, funding difficulties and relentless international travel in attempt to complete his preparations. The film examines Wilson’s unique theatrical style during The Civil Wars: A Tree Is Best Measured When It Is Down, which involves the continual creation of evocative stage sets, owing to a unique juxtaposition of movement, sound, text and image. Known for his precise, painterly images Wilson’s work derives more from visual art than the orthodox literary traditions of theatre. As a result, Wilson often challenges actors to perform in a boldly minimalist style, as well as collaborating with non-actors, such as young autistic poet Christopher Knowles in Einstein on the Beach.

One of Müllers's vocal cords was paralyzed as a result of a life-saving radical operation (1995). At the beginning of the discussion Müller observes that figures from Greek mythology live on today as trademarks for products (Ajax as a cleaning agent, Polydor as a record).

This film not only illuminates Heiner Müller's life and works, it is more about questioning the "Sphinx" of the East and its saying about the loss of utopias and examining whether Heiner Müller's texts, as he himself said, were messages in a bottle for the future or not.

Movie scenes, montages of images and text, as well as conversations between Alexander Kluge, playwright Heiner Müller and classicist Wilfried Stroh provide a multifaceted insight in the far-away world of Ancient Rome. The conversation with Müller revolves around Tacitus' representation of the Roman Empire around 112 AD. First, Müller reads passages from the historicist's annals that describe Tiberius' tragic death (37 AD). Kluge and Müller discuss the text's aesthetic qualities. Müller is interested in Tacitus for the aesthetic pleasures rather than out of historical curiosity. He describes Tacitus' style as "transition from chronicle to literature," which manifests in his "elliptical," sometimes laconic narration.

On the run from her criminal Italian husband, a young French woman meets a German lover in West Berlin who offers her shelter but who also gets entangled in her threatened life ever deeper.

On the one hand, the beyond-Tropicália surreal, wild, ecstatic universe of Khavn de la Cruz, the Philippines’ internationally most venerated underground filmmaker. On the other, the Frankfurt School dialectics of Alexander Kluge, self-proclaimed arrière-guard eternal of 1960s modernist moviedom, Gandalf of all essay cinema. For Happy Lamento, Kluge mixed some of his weirder TV skits on electricity, the circus, revolution and early cinema (featuring Fassbinder-regular Peter Berling, theatre genius Heiner Müller, and DaDaism’s last man standing, Helge Schneider, among others) with some of the more outrageous scenes from Khavn’s 2016 Ang Napakaigsing Buhay Ng Alipato. Some 2017 G20 shots of Merkel and Trump et al inject the already heady brew with current affairs urgency.

Documentary filmmaker Troller criss-crosses post-reunified “Transgermania” for a year, probing German identity through festivals (Carnival, Oktoberfest), films, small towns and big cities. He attends a Black–Bavarian wedding at an “animal fair,” chats with chimney sweeps, students, artists and elites (from Grass to Müller), and asks uneasy questions about unity, memory and the future - all from his outsider’s lens.

At the time of the conversation Heiner Müller was the president of the Academy of Arts - East. At the beginning he describes his daily routine to Kluge. He is an unwilling president who has to lead an academy - which will soon be absorbed into a "European Artists Society" - at a time of upheaval. As he is describing the only functional and innovative part of the academy, the "Music Section" that trains master's students, he starts talking about how he almost became a master's student of Brecht. In retrospect he is glad that he missed this chance and escaped Brecht's powerful influence, which took away the individual creative space of his collaborators. Müller describes how he got by with various jobs during his application period and afterwards in 1951: book reviewer, translator of Stalinist songs. When Kluge asks about the basic concept of an academy, the discussion returns to its starting point: Müller claims that the academy is a space that is free from the state.

A news magazine program on important aspects of the history of postrevolutionary Cuba, consisting of two documentary film sequences about Castro and two interview sequences with Heiner Müller. Castro speaks about his experiences in the revolution and about Che Guevara; he has himself filmed during the furnishing of a simple house. Heiner Müller, smoking, laments the decline in the quality of the "Davidoff" cigar following the American economic boycott against Cuba.

In this conversation, taking place shortly after the German reunification, Alexander Kluge and Heiner Müller discuss historical developments from the perspective of playwright Heiner Müller’s view on subjectivity. Among other things, they talk about the theoretical work of political philosopher Carl Schmitt, Russian literature, Müller’s play “Mauser” and an artwork by Anselm Kiefer.