Documentary filmmaker Troller criss-crosses post-reunified “Transgermania” for a year, probing German identity through festivals (Carnival, Oktoberfest), films, small towns and big cities. He attends a Black–Bavarian wedding at an “animal fair,” chats with chimney sweeps, students,...
On the run from her criminal Italian husband, a young French woman meets a German lover in West Berlin who offers her shelter but who also gets entangled in her threatened life ever deeper.
Robert Wilson and the Civil Wars is an in-depth documentation of Robert Wilson’s ambitious attempt to stage an epic, twelve-hour, multinational opera for the 1984 Summer Olympics. Filmmaker Howard Brookner follows the avant-garde theatre director as he confronts a hectic work schedule, funding...
The central topic of the interview is the ancient concept of a necessary balance between the dead and the living, which also assumes the notion of a constant potential for force in the world. Müller and Kluge examine this mythical conception of life with reference to personal, historical, and...
Here Müller and Kluge explicitly address a theme that is latently present in many of their conversations: the relation of intellectuals to reigning political power. Given his many writings on Frederick the Great, it is not surprising that Müller begins the discussion with the “love-hate”...
“Wastage” of humans / Comrade Mauser / “Victim of History”
01991HD
In this conversation, taking place shortly after the German reunification, Alexander Kluge and Heiner Müller discuss historical developments from the perspective of playwright Heiner Müller’s view on subjectivity. Among other things, they talk about the theoretical work of political philosopher...
A few months before his death, Müller responded to the keywords "breathing" and "smoking" with an anecdote that interprets breathing as an indiscretion towards the dead. In his view, smoking is a means of practicing stoicism: "Whoever smokes looks cold-blooded" (Brecht) and "Whoever smokes becomes...
Kluge here presents a portrait of Friedrich the Great by means of quotations, film clips, historical images, and film documents. The program is a contribution to a public discussion about the role of the Prussian king in German and European history that unfolded after the transfer of the...
Movie scenes, montages of images and text, as well as conversations between Alexander Kluge, playwright Heiner Müller and classicist Wilfried Stroh provide a multifaceted insight in the far-away world of Ancient Rome. The conversation with Müller revolves around Tacitus' representation of the...
From August 1989 to March 1990, Heiner Müller and the Deutsches Theater ensemble develop “Hamlet/Maschine” amid East Germany’s peaceful uprising. Actors help organize the November 4, 1989 Alexanderplatz demonstration. After the wall falls, artists split between a “third way” and...
This "music magazine" is a montage of visually alienated historical film clips of tanks and soldiers (First and Second World War), pictorial reminiscences of Russian avant-garde art, and excerpts of interviews with Heiner Müller accompanied by heavy metal music (the "death & grind" music of the...
At the time of the conversation Heiner Müller was the president of the Academy of Arts - East. At the beginning he describes his daily routine to Kluge. He is an unwilling president who has to lead an academy - which will soon be absorbed into a "European Artists Society" - at a time of upheaval....
Quoting from historian Tacitus' Annals, Alexander Kluge and Heiner Müller delve into the Roman Iron Age, talk about the modern style of Tacitus' prose, and debate borderline cases of legally sanctioned injustice. After Müller reads a passage about Tiberius' death (37 AD) and his successor...
This portrait of Heiner Müller on the occasion of his 60th birthday is devoted for the most part to having Müller recount events and memories from the first quarter of his life, starting with his birth on January 9, 1929 and closing with his immediate postwar experiences in the mid-1940's. This...
Ich will nicht wissen, wer ich bin - Heiner Müller
02009HD
This film not only illuminates Heiner Müller's life and works, it is more about questioning the "Sphinx" of the East and its saying about the loss of utopias and examining whether Heiner Müller's texts, as he himself said, were messages in a bottle for the future or not.
The horizon of this conversation is marked by Müller's personal memories, reflections about ongoing themes in his work, thoughts about his current production and the nearness to death that has been brought by his illness.
Citing Nietzsche, Müller defines intellectuals as the "ploughshares of evil," whose task it is "to create chaos, to destroy conceptions of order." Not "trace elements of reason," but rather chaos can perhaps bring about enlightenment.
