Category: Film Essay
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Ich bin ein Teenager
The Juvenile Delinquent Films of Germany In March of 1955, a film titled Blackboard Jungle opened to the raucous strains of Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock” and blew moviegoers out of their seats. The film was a hit with teenagers and led to feeding frenzy in Hollywood to make more films about juvenile delinquents…
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The Flying Dutchman
East Germany’s most ambitious film project. There is no other film quite like The Flying Dutchman (Der Fliegende Holländer). Part opera, part experimental sound collage, and part avant-garde cinema, it’s a surrealistic take on Wagner’s opera that pushed the boundaries of filmmaking on both sides of the border. Although there were silent films that used Wagner’s…
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The Successive Slidings of Alain Robbe-Grillet
Note: This article originally appeared on my Film-to-Film site, which was devoted to comparing two different versions of the same story. I decided to discontinue this site because the amount of work that went into each article was well beyond the response they received from the public. I’m republishing this one here as a taste…