Manfred Blank Movies

Inspired by a letter by Friedrich Engels and a 1974 account of two militant Marxist writers who had been imprisoned by the Nasser regime, Straub-Huillet filmed this film in France and Egypt during 1980. They reflect on Egypt’s history of peasant struggle and liberation from Western colonization,...

A superb, moving and thrilling interview with American actor Sterling Hayden (1916-86), held in Besançon, France, on board a dilapidated barge, when he was 65 years old. An unparalleled portrait, in his own words and without any qualms, of a legendary Hollywood star, icon of film noir and the...

A tribute to Mallarmé that not only asserts the continuing relevance of his work but also confronts its literary ambiguities with political and cinematic ambiguities of its own. In outline, the film could not be more straightforward: it offers a recitation of one of Mallarmé’s most celebrated...

A young man, recently arrived in New York from Europe, becomes swept up in a series of events that are beyond his knowledge or control.

The child Ernesto doesn't want to go to school any more because, as he says, all he is taught there is things he doesn't know.

A woman meanders through the streets of Istanbul five years after the military coup. Something is amiss, and the air is filled with a strangeness that seems to plague everyone. Friendship, conversation, boredom, wonder and hopelessness lead the woman to head to the island in the hope of change....

This film is at once a self-portrait and an homage to Jean-Marie Straub, Farocki's role model and former teacher at the Film Academy.

A behind the scenes film of Class Relations.

A portrait cut for television using takes not used for the film “Leuchtturm des Chaos“. According to Bühler, the film was considered unsuitable: “A two-hour film with a drunk who constantly drinks and smokes in front of the camera and smokes hashish and speaks obscene words.”

Short documentary vignettes and interviews revolving around cinephile life in Paris.

Filmmaker Manfred Blank (director of the excellent Pharos of Chaos) interviews Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub at some length about their then-current production, Klassenverhältnisse (Class Relations), in which he, himself, performed as an actor.

Blank's TV documentary on Straub-Huillet.

Stuck in the German lands of “Yodelburg,” our hero Kidlat dreams of space and muses on humanity’s endless capacity for creativity, whether on the moon or at home in the Philippines. A delightful, self-proclaimed “third-world space spectacle.”

1. A modern Bavarian brewer, Emanuel Holzbauer, faces a sales crisis and targets his competitors to save his brewery. 2. In 1567, Protestant merchant Johann Christof Paumgartner—outlawed by church and state—compassionately aids the poorest in his town. 3. A fairy-tale rivalry: peasant boy...