Three days to the kick-off of our holidays!! Pucci-style silk, Hawaianas, lots of bangles, a funky Fahrrad, lots of friends to meet…
Of course we are not heading to Ibiza, but for parties on the Spree!
(better bring an anorak too?).
source: Dr Oetker
Tonight at the Goethe Institute we saw “Spur der Steine”, a 1966 DEFA film. It was censored immediately after its first screening and it became available in theaters in the DDR only from november 1989…not surprisingly!
As per IMDB: “Hannes Balla is the foreman of a group of building construction workers at the large construction site “Schkona” in the GDR. They spend most of their time working hard and drinking harder – to some they are fun, to some they are a public nuisance. Things get more complicated when the good-looking Kati Klee is employed as a young technician, and the ambitious new Party Secretary, Werner Horrath, aims to boost work efficiency and downsize Balla’s ego. A contemporary movie about work, love, and everything in between”.
Interesting film about “carreerism”, with an almost critical view on the SED party, with Walter Ulbricht portraits and the like. A bit of a Peyton Place film too. And the foreman…he’s got a great presence. In between 1960’s Alberto Sordi’s “spaccone” characters and today’s Ben Affleck equally “spaccone” characters. Manfred Krug is groβartig in this role. The film is weird too…where women engineers remove their tights in the middle of a building site in order to avoid the dust, widows are mad for Eilikör, carpenters wear an earring with a pearl and swim naked in the middle of ducks.
Sophie Scholl – The last days. This is one of those movies that I could see over and over, as if I were at the theatre, and discover every time a sentence, an expression that I didn’t notice before.
I had missed this film on Sophie Scholl and the White Rose movement at the cinema when it was released in 2005 and it was on my movie ‘to do list’ since a while. I found the DVD on my desk in the office yesterday, after a friend had told me that the film was impressive.
The first thing you notice in the film is the detail. The brown flowers on the wall paper. The clothes. Not “oh so 40s!” but normal. The locations, enormous buildings, resonating with echo. Offices and buildings, not “standard nazi” but still imperial, with a smattering of nazi decoration (portraits, geographical maps of Third Reich Germany) scattered about the rests of three layers of systems of power.
When you exit from your reality, your living room, and start to dive into the plot, the theater comes out. The actors have long takes and they act in front of you as if they were on stage. Julia Jentsch is grossartig and really magnetic.
The beauty of the DVD is the special content, and in the interviews you can understand the great deal of preparation that both the director and the actors put in the film. Preparation is the most recurring word. The story is well-known in Germany, and they wanted to convey all the new material emerged from the archives in order to bring new angles to this important episode of German history.
Conscience versus an illegal legal system. The paranoia of power. These are the elements which stand out from the police interrogations.
Yesterday I finished reading an incredible book, where the paranoia of power, the conscience of a woman against the aberrations of an illegal legal system stand out. But I will talk about that in another post.
Tomorrow is April 25th, the Liberation anniversary in Italy. And the scrap of paper left by Sophie Scholl on her bed before going to trial had one word scribbled on it: “Freiheit”.
Tomorrow I will be disgusted, once more, by those who will tarnish once more the meaning of liberty and the memory of those who died for it, be them partisans, military or civilians, just like Sophie Scholl. Because in Italy the paranoia of power is back. In a cushioned, muted, sometimes obscenely farcical way, it is here. And also in a brutal way, let’s not forget about it.
You may have heard that not only in Tibet but also in Italy we now have soldiers on the streets.
I hadn’t the chance to see one single soldier during my daily chores in Rome this week. But this morning as I woke up I heard bangs and noises coming from our street. I looked down and…they were shooting in the street!!
This is one of the most enjoyable activities in Rome: stopping in the middle of the road and gazing at a movie troupe shooting something. A hollywood big production blockbuster? a racy independent film? Even the dumbiest fic’scion (tv series) becomes suddently interesting when you are watching it on the street, in the making, rather than in the domestic appliance called tv. In this case, in between the Ambasciata di Calabria students’ sandwich shop and the lovely chinese-managed Alimentari (selling Chin8!).
BerlinRomExpress goes on holiday together with AFlatinBerlin… ICE trains and books.
Will be back in September!
Roma di notte and has absolutely nothing to do with Rome by night.
Notte conveys the sense of dark, of dense ink sky. Of cool breeze after blazing sun. Notte, clipped and shut down. Like shutters. When the sun sets and gives us a break.
If it’s still too hot, and there is no ponentino wind, escape to Quattro Fontane. It’s one of the few cinemas who stay open also during the summer, when arenas blossom in the piazzas and villas (=city parks). The Quattro Fontane has a nice foyer, where you can sit down, wait for your friends to park their motorino, have coffee, peruse movie magazines of buy a book. Foto exhibitions line the walls.
I love this cinema…and I love the little jingle of Europa-Cinemas before the film starts. In that moment, I totally forget what movie we came to see, I am just mesmerized by all those names of european cities dashing fast on the screen. And the music, that’s really groovy.
