Heinz Emigholz
Director · b. 1948 · Achim, Germany
Born in 1948 near Bremen in Germany, Heinz Emigholz trained first as a draftsman before studying philosophy and literature in Hamburg. He began filmmaking in 1968 and has worked since 1973 as a filmmaker, artist, writer and producer in Germany and the USA. In 1974 he started his encyclopaedic drawing series The Basis of Make-Up . He looks back on numerous exhibitions, retrospectives, lectures and publications. In 1984 he started his film series Photography and beyond. He has held a professorship in Experimental Filmmaking at the Universität der Künste Berlin from 1993 to 2013, and co-founded the Institute for Time-based Media and the program Art and Media, there. Since 2012 member of the Academy of Arts in Berlin. In 2003 Filmgalerie 451 started an edition of all his films on DVD. Publications a.o.: Krieg der Augen, Kreuz der Sinne (War of Eyes, Cross of Senses), Seit Freud gesagt hat, der Künstler heile seine Neurose selbst, heilen die Künstler ihre Neurosen selbst (Since Freud Said That the Artist Heals His Neuroses Himself, Artists Have Been Healing Their Neuroses Themselves), Normalsatz – Siebzehn Filme (Ordinary Sentence – Seventeen Films) and Das schwarze Schamquadrat (The Black Sqare of Shame) (all four books at Verlag Martin Schmitz); Die Basis des Make-Up (I) and (II), Der Begnadete Meier (Grace Jones), Kleine Enzyklopädie der Photographie (Little Encyclopaedia of Photography) and Die Basis des Make-Up (III) (in Die Republik No. 68-71, 76-78, 89-91, 94-97 and 123-125); Sense of Architecture with more than 600 photographs.
Movies13
Movie7.3DramaHistoryA German Platoon is explored through the brutal fighting of the Battle of Stalingrad. After half of their number is wiped out and they're placed under the command of a sadistic captain, the platoon lieutenant leads his men to desert. The platoon members attempt escape from the city, now surrounded by the Soviet Army.
Stalingrad
1993 · 655 votes
Movie8.0An experimental German film
Movie6.7DramaIn the beginning of the 19th century, Johannes Elias Alder is born in a small village in the Austrian mountains. While growing up he is considered strange by the other villagers and discovers his love of music, especially rebuilding and playing the organ at the village church. After experiencing an "acoustic wonder", his eye color changes and he can hear even the most subtle sounds.
Movie8.0DramaStylized, black and white biography of Frances Farmer by author Lynne Tillman and Sheila McLauglin.
Committed
1984 · 2 votes
MovieDocumentaryContemporary cinema’s preeminent chronicler of architecture and its intersection with the ever-present crisis of 20th-century modernity, Heinz Emigholz returns with an alternately mournful and sly treatise on how the presence—and, in some cases, absence—of municipal and communal building architecture is inseparable from capitalist ideology. Focusing mainly on cities and provinces in Argentina, Germany, and Bolivia, Emigholz’s latest film is a work of quiet observation and historical excavation. From slaughterhouses in Salamone to the flooded former spa city of Epecuén to the newly built Humboldt Forum in Berlin, the film demonstrates the effect of capital on public spaces, where creation and destruction go hand in hand, and as always, Emigholz makes the journey one of intellectual force and cinematic beauty.
Movie6.5DramaMax Taurus, a sort of amateur detective, pursues the traces of general omni-present crime back to a partially demolished house. There, the remaining tenants try to gain pleasure and power from progressive abandonment in order to tear down their own conventionalities.
Macumba
1982 · 2 votes
Movie7.0A German TV movie
Der Ort der Handlung
1977 · 1 votes
Movie7.5HistoryDramaThis film is in effect a slideshow of exquisite single photographic images in sparkling black and white, representing Mikesch’s own version of Mary Stuart. “The drama of a woman who attempted a kind of liberal emancipation in a time of upheaval, but got caught in the snares of men,” in her words. Confronted with layers and layers of conflicting information about “how it really was” Mikesch decided not to try to be a historian, but to radicalise the narrative and condense it into striking images of passion, power, love, pain and death.
Exekution: A Study of Mary
1979 · 2 votes
Movie6.0Clonetown 1974 to 1979: a terrorist defector named Charon sits on the edge of oblivion and commentates on the imminent putrification of an abducted car dealer.
Movie7.0Four four-minute image sections and four four-minute sound sections are linked in all combinations of the sound sections with each of the image sections. This established affinities between each of the image sections to the others, and the sound sections to each other. The image sections are: surveyors measuring the land near my house as seen through an old window, a family of Siamang Gibbon apes in the Washington zoo, an industrial site, and a page turned from a book on Cézanne’s composition showing a diagram of his painting Mardi Gras, filmed against bright leaves. The sound sections are: a dramatic scene from Debussy’s opera “Pelléas et Mélisande”, a passage from William Wordworth’s autobiographical poem “The Prelude,” sounds from rowing on a lake at night, and the sounds of the apes vocalizing.
Four Shadows
1978 · 2 votes
Movie5.5DramaLucy, a privileged North American in contemporary Berlin, living a life of post Punk hedonism, roams the streets with her best friend, Derek. Together they use the city like a playground, a stage, and a never ending party. Into their lives enters Galia, a young Israeli woman carrying the promise of a better, cleaner way of living. A tribute to Punk underground films turns into a melodrama in "Saturn Returns", mirroring Lucy and Galia's modulating states of mind. Our and their look into each other's life and culture, becomes an investigation of empty facades. The film was constructed by both improvised and pre-scripted scenes, as required by the nature of each scene.
Saturn Returns
2009 · 7 votes
Movie10.0A woman on a train.
Die blaue Distanz
1983 · 1 votes
MovieDocumentary on the city of Berlin and a personal essay on alienation and being an alien in that city. Cynthia Beatt raises questions and provokes reflection on a wide range of issues concerning language and culture, politics and history.