Five years earlier than his feature debut, Parting from Yesterday—(Anita G.), which launched one of the most important film movements, the New German Cinema, writer-director Alexander Kluge, with Peter Schamoni, co-directed a 12-minute black-and-white documentary short anticipating the movement-to-come. Brutalität in Stein gathers historical testimony to puncture his nation’s attempt to overlook its recent Nazi […]
Daily Archives: May 30, 2010
With parentheses around her name suggesting (in addition to her imprisonment) how bereft of context Anita G., a Jewish East German migrant, is left by the “parting from yesterday” that she is constantly impressed to pursue, writer-director Alexander Kluge’s Abschied von gestern—(Anita G.) launched the New German Cinema, which confronted West Germany’s attempt to deny […]
One of the finest American films of the 1940s, Gregory LaCava’s Primrose Path (1940), allows us to see how a shantytown environment draws by degrees the teenaged daughter of an aging prostitute into a facsimile of her mother’s fate; by the time a Hollywood-ending rescues Ellie May (Ginger Rogers, achingly good), our sense of damaged […]
Dennis Grunes 