Gerd Kroske

Comments

Portrait of Jason

A portrait of the impartiality, insistence and exposure of Jason, who uses the question of directing in a new way, for himself. A person in the plural.

Writing in the Sand

A sound-rich documentary that captures the bustling beach life of the North East of England. With photographs in intense graduation (pictures by Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen) and in the midst of the metamorphoses of life.

The Tree of Life

This film tells a family tragedy. Fragmented and in dramaturgical interuptions. The drama becomes completely undogmatic, with spiritual borrowings from deep religiosity. The film remains admirable in its freedom of stylistic devices.

Blowup

When asked in a 1978 interview what he would have done in a world without film Michelangelo Antonioni replied succinctly, "Movies!". My favorite scene: the fight for the guitar neck of the Yardbirds, whose loss of importance occurs outside the club on the street.

Two-lane Blacktop

Hellman shot the film against all Hollywood conventions: no stringency, no climax, no finale, no character development. There is not even a score. His protagonists don't even have names: The Driver, The Mechanic, The Girl and G.T.O. And in the first four minutes, only the engines speak. A film which ends as brusquely as it begins.

Le Cercle rouge

Film noir master Jean-Pierre Melville behaves just like his characters: calmly, confidently, with as little dialogue as possible, enthusiastically demonstrating his craft. You can watch his gangsters at work – and smoking.

Martha

Fassbinder ignores cinematic conventions. He takes away the safe ground from us viewers and cleverly illustrates the maelstrom of humiliation and self-sacrifice into which Martha's willingly enters – her marriage.The film presents Fassbinder's version of a psycho-thriller.

Hunger

Hunger is for me not a pamphlet on the Northern Irish struggle for independence. It is also a touching film. It shows as drastically as it does sensitively what the mechanics of authority and resistance do to people, and it shows this above all with bodies. For all its visible prison brutality, Hunger is also a beautiful film.

Touki Bouki

This film stages the loss of innocence as an initiation ritual, as a foolhardy rampage between trance and drought, violence and magic, archaism and modernity. The film tells of a journey never taken and is more than the turbulent finger exercise of a debutant. Again and again, I try to understand the film. It keeps overwhelming me.

Cheyenne Autumn

John Ford does not force a view on the viewer: no moralism, but questions of responsibility for Native Americans who in the film become a mirror of America and its contradictions. Those who can see the film in 70mm will be delighted with the best film format ever.

Further remarks

Thank you for your invitation.

Gerd Kroske