Summary: After many years in prison, with friends and family petitioning for his pardon, Prisoner 28 (Jannings) tells of his crime to a judge. In flashback, we learn that he is Boss Huller and that, years before, he had a carnival trapeze act along with his wife, Berta-Marie (de Putti). Invited to collaborate with Artinelli,…
Tag: German Movies
Redupers / The All-Round Reduced Personality – Summary, Analysis
Summary: Edda Chiemnyjewski is a freelance photographer and single mother in late 1970s West Berlin, struggling to make a living from small commissions to photograph public events. Alongside her professional work, she has her own artistic projects – both individual and as part of a women’s photography collective – which try to capture the reality…
Nosferatu (1922): Summary & Analysis
Summary: In the town of Wisborg, a demented estate agent called Knock sends his employee Hutter to a remote Balkan castle on a mission to sell a vacant property opposite Hutter’s house to the mysterious Count Orlok. In an inn, a book titled Nosferatu that warns of supernatural perils is left for Hutter by an…
M (1931 Movie) – Summary & Analysis
Summary: With a child-murderer in their midst the people of a German city are gripped by fear. The police crack down on known criminals in an effort to find the killer. This disrupts crime in the city, and so, the criminal fraternity set out to find the offender themselves. They track him down and the…
Run Lola Run – Summary & Analysis
Summary: Lola receives a phone call from Manni asking for her help to replace 100,000 Marks that he has misplaced on the subway. The money is for his gangster boss, who is certain to kill Manni if he doesn’t receive it. Lola has 20 minutes to find the cash and reach Manni before he resorts…
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari: Summary & Analysis
Summary: Francis tells in flashback the story of how he and his friend, Alan, had competed for the love of Jane. He recounts the way in which he and Alan saw Dr Caligari and the somnambulist, Cesare, at a carnival in Holstenwall and how Cesare accurately predicted Alan’s brutal death. In the story Francis tells,…
Kings Of The Road (1976): Summary & Analysis
Summary: In a pre-title conversation between Bruno, a travelling film projector engineer, and the elderly de-Nazified owner of cinema, the film cuts to Robert, a newly separated depressed paediatric psychologist, who is driving his iconic Volkswagen Beetle at high speed into a West German border lake. Surviving the half-hearted suicide attempt he hitches a lift…
Gegen die Wand / Head-On – Summary, Analysis
Summary: Cahit and Sibel, two Germans of Turkish origin, encounter each other in a psychiatric hospital after having made separate suicide attempts. Trying to escape the restrictions of her conservative family home, Sibel spontaneously proposes a marriage of convenience to Cahit, which gives her the (above all sexual) freedom she so desperately desires. But Cahit…
Europa Europa – Summary, Analysis
Summary: Europa Europa offers a picaresque tale of the childhood and adolescence of the German Jewish Solomon ‘Solly’ Perel during the Nazi regime, the Holocaust, and the Second World War. Solly lives happily with his family in Peine, Germany, but, when the persecution of Jews commences, they flee eastward, where he eventually becomes separated from…
Pandora’s Box (Film): Summary and Analysis
Summary: Lulu is a beautiful woman with a mysterious past. Raised by the drunkard Schigolch, a pimp and possibly her father, she becomes the mistress of a wealthy and respectable newspaper editor, Dr Ludwig Schön (Fritz Kortner). Schigolch introduces Lulu to Rodrigo Quast, who offers her a role in his variety show. Dr Schön gets…