An Alternate Cinema: Four Films from the Deutsche Kinematek Archives
Bringing together such works as Pia Frankenberg's tongue-in-cheek charmer "Ain't Nothin' Without You" (1985), Michael Brynntrup’s punky avant-garde Super 8 Biblical epic "Jesus – Der Film" (1985), and Christoph Schlingensief’s splatterhouse reunification era satire "The German Chainsaw Massacre" (1990), “An Alternate Cinema”—adapted from a program that played the 74th Berlin International Film Festival—is a tribute to German films made outside mainstream production channels, brimming with outsider adventurousness and anything-goes daring.
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The German Chainsaw Massacre
Directed by Christoph Schlingensief | 63 mins | 1990
Called “one of the greatest artists who ever lived” by Austrian novelist and playwright Elfriede Jelinek, Schlingensief—who died in 2010 at age 49—was a multihyphenate whirling dervish of chaotic creative energy and relentless provocation, the ... -
The Endless Night
Directed by Will Tremper | 82 mins | 1963
A dense fog has grounded all flights out of West Berlin’s Tempelhof airport in Tremper’s episodic naturalist melodrama, which tracks the chance encounters between the handful of passengers stranded overnight in the terminal’s central hall, including an Af... -
Ain't Nothin' Without You
Directed by Pia Frankenberg | 91 mins | 1985
A screwball comedy shrewdly observing the manners, mating habits, and class hang-ups of upwardly mobile 1980s West Germany, "Ain’t Nothin’ Without You" stars director Frankenberg as Martha, a filmmaker and single mother wracked with guilt over her back... -
Jesus – Der Film
Directed by Michael Brynntrup | 128 mins | 1985
A punky black-and-white Super 8 telling of the life and afterlife of the Nazarene, this iconoclastic underground epic stars project initiator Brynntrup in the title role, seen in 35 episodes taken from the New Testament interpreted by 22 different f...
