Writing
Some months after the fall of the Berlin wall, during the time of federal elections in Germany in 1990, Chris Marker shot this passionate documentary, reflecting the state of the place and its spirit with remarkable acuity.
Berlin in the 1930s - Adolf Hitler comes to power, communists and social democrats are persecuted, books are burned and Jewish citizens are ostracized. The outwardly shiny façade of Berlin, the capital of the Reich, reveals nothing of the unequal struggle of young people against the increasing oppression...
After the workers’ revolt on June 17th, 1953 this film disappeared in the archives until 1997.
Documentary on the master composer, from a GDR point of view.
The love story between Magda and Rudolf Neubert illuminates the fate of German anti-fascists in emigration. The Vichy regime in France offers them hardly any refuge, let alone protection in 1942. Like a provincial Casanova, the prefectural official Dufour recreates the young woman who is submerged as a Jewish woman without valid papers. With false documents, her husband gets into the catches of the police chief and his Gestapo spy Giacometti...
The young officer Count Yorck von Wartenburg - he bears one of the most famous names of the German past - awaits his execution as a participant in the conspiracy of July 20, 1944. Von Wartenburg, together with his comrades, suffers infinitely long days of terrible torture, disrespect and humiliation as a death candidate. In a dream, he experiences his escape and the real continuation of his fight against fascist barbarism, for which he must detach himself from his class and is involved in the anti-Hitler front by communists and the Soviet army.
Together with Stephan Hermlin, H&S examine two five-minute film documents in this film, which were shot in 1941 on behalf of the Gestapo. The comparison with a written eyewitness account exposes the first film - "about the dazzling supply of food to the Jews" - as a propaganda lie, while the second - made 14 days later - conveys a complex picture of the Nazi extermination bureaucracy.
