Andre (Ronald Zehrfeld) and Barbara (Nina Hoss) try to retain their humanity under difficult conditions in 1980 East Germany
BARBARA (Christian Petzold, 2012)
MoMA Film, Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Saturday, November 23, 7:30, and Friday, December 6, 7:00
Series runs November 20 – December 6
Tickets: $12, in person only, may be applied to museum admission within thirty days, same-day screenings free with museum admission, available at Film and Media Desk beginning at 9:30 am
212-708-9400
www.moma.org
www.adoptfilms.net
Christian Petzold’s Barbara is a gripping, eerily slow-paced psychological thriller that explores fear, paranoia, and responsibility. Nina Hoss, in her fifth film with writer-director Petzold, gives a subtly powerful performance as Barbara Wolff, an East German doctor who has been shipped off by the government to a country hospital run by Andre (Ronald Zehrfeld). It is 1980, and Barbara has done something to get on the GDR watch list, causing her to be under near-constant surveillance. She carefully looks around everywhere she goes, wondering if the woman on the bus, the man out for a smoke, or the person on the pay phone is working for the Stasi. She is most suspicious of Andre as he attempts to get close to her, asking her personal questions and trying to spend more and more time with her. Meanwhile, Barbara has secret meetings with various people, including her West German lover, Jörg (Mark Waschke), who wants to get her out of the east. But as much as Barbara wants to live a free and open life, she is also a dedicated doctor who has become attached to two patients: Stella (Jasna Fritzi Bauer), a pregnant woman who does not want to be sent back to a labor camp, and Mario (Jannik Schümann), who has suffered a potentially fatal head injury following a suicide attempt.
Barbara (Nina Hoss) has to watch her every move in powerful cold war drama
Petzold (Something to Remind Me, Wolfsburg, Yella), inspired by the likes of Claude Chabrol, To Have and Have Not, and The French Connection, drapes Barbara in a compulsive feeling of paranoia and dread, creating a blanketing atmosphere of mystery and imminent danger in which one wrong move can result in capture, imprisonment, or worse. Wrapped in a cloak of suspicion, Barbara evokes for the viewer what living in 1980 East Germany might have been like. The complex relationship between Barbara and Andre is handled with great skill by Petzold, balancing their individual needs with their responsibilities to their profession and the state. Germany’s official submission for the 2012 Best Foreign Language Film, Barbara is a tense tale that examines the cold war in unique and fascinating ways. Barbara is screening on November 23 at 7:30 and December 6 at 7:00 as part of the MoMA series “The Berlin School: Films from the Berliner Schule,” with Petzold and Hoss on hand to introduce the November 23 show. The series continues through December 6 with such other works by directors associated with the Berlin School as Thomas Arslan’s Brothers and Sisters and Gold, Ulrich Köhler’s Sleeping Sickness, and Christoph Hochhäusler’s The City Below.
Special effects master Douglas Trumbull, who worked on such sci-fi classics as 2001: A Space Odyssey, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Blade Runner, made his feature directorial debut with the environmentally prescient Silent Running. Bruce Dern stars as Freeman Lowell, one of four men stationed on the space terrarium Valley Forge, which is charged with protecting forests that can no longer grow on Earth. While it’s just another assignment for John Keenan (Cliff Potts), Marty Barker (Ron Rifkin), and Andy Wolf (Jesse Vint), it’s become an obsession for Lowell, who sleeps under a “Conservation Pledge” on the wall next to his bed and only eats food from his massive garden. But when the captain of the Berkshire (voiced by Joseph Campanella) informs them that the forests must be destroyed and they are to return home, Lowell takes matters into his own hands, fighting to protect what he has helped create. Soon he is alone on the Valley Forge, tending to the forest with drones Huey (Cheryl Sparks) and Dewey (Mark Persons), as Louie (Steven Brown) is no longer with them. At first Lowell thinks he is in his own private paradise, but extreme loneliness awaits him, along with some other shocks. Written by Deric Washburn and Michael Cimino (The Deer Hunter) and Steven Bochco (Hill Street Blues, L.A. Law), the low-budget Silent Running is a deserving cult classic, a worthy influence on such films and television shows as WALL-E, Moon, Mystery Science Theater 3000, and Red Dwarf. Emerging from the late-1960s Flower Power movement, the film’s ecological theme is boosted by environmentally friendly folk songs sung by Joan Baez, with overly melodramatic music by Peter Schickele. Dern gives a beautifully nuanced performance as Lowell, going from calm and meditative to distressed and angry in a heartbeat, and his paternal relationship with Huey and Dewey is both heartwarming and heartbreaking. A film that could only be made in the 1970s, with bright, bold colors and cheesy futuristic sets, Silent Running is screening on November 21 as part of the BAMcinématek series “Hot Dern!” which pays tribute to the seventy-seven-year-old Dern, the father of Laura Dern and former husband of Diane Ladd, on the occasion of the U.S. theatrical release of Alexander Payne’s Nebraska, for which Dern was named Best Actor at Cannes. The series continues through November 27 with such other wide-ranging Dern films as Psych-Out, Wild Bill, The Laughing Policeman, and Smile. In addition, Dern will be at BAM on December 4 for “An Evening with Bruce Dern,” which will include a screening of Nebraska followed by an extended Q&A with the actor.
Akira Kurosawa’s marvelous reimagining of Macbeth is an intense psychological thriller that follows one man’s descent into madness. Following a stunning military victory led by Washizu (Toshirô Mifune) and Miki (Minoru Chiaki), the two men are rewarded with lofty new positions. As Washizu’s wife, Asaji (Isuzu Yamada, with spectacular eyebrows), fills her husband’s head with crazy paranoia, Washizu is haunted by predictions made by a ghostly evil spirit in the Cobweb Forest, leading to one of the all-time classic finales. Featuring exterior scenes bathed in mysterious fog, cinematographer Asakazu Nakai’s interior long shots of Washizu and Asaji in a large, sparse room carefully considering their next bold move, and composer Masaru Sato’s shrieking Japanese flutes, Throne of Blood is a chilling drama of corruptive power and blind ambition, one of the greatest adaptations of Shakespeare ever put on film Throne of Blood is screening November 21, November 24, and December 1 as part of the Anthology Film Archives series “The Middle Ages on Film: Shakespeare,” consisting of ten cinematic adaptations of several of the Bard’s history plays, set in the Middle Ages, including Laurence Olivier’s Henry V, Roman Polanski’s Macbeth, Orson Welles’s Chimes at Midnight, and Peter Brook’s King Lear. The twelve-day festival was curated in collaboration with professor and scholar Martha Driver, who notes, “Through film, Shakespeare’s Middle Ages are not lost but revived and revitalized in translation. And much of what we think we know about the medieval period has been shaped by Shakespeare, the plays and film adaptations living on in our memories more vividly perhaps than the history books’ accounts.”
