Metamorphosis of a German Housewife

The German film poster for PART-TIME WORK OF A DOMESTIC SLAVE (German title: Gelegenheitsarbeit einer Sklavin, 1973)

When German director Alexander Kluge first burst upon the international film scene in 1966 with his debut feature Abschied von Gestern – (Anita G.) aka Yesterday Girl, he was at the forefront of the emerging New German cinema. The movie was proclaimed “Outstanding Feature Film” at the 1967 German Film Awards with Kluge also winning for “Best Direction” and it also won numerous awards at the Venice Film Festival. After such a glorious beginning, Kluge was soon overshadowed by R.W. Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, Wim Wenders and other rising German directors as their work enjoyed wider acclaim and distribution outside Germany. That certainly didn’t discourage Kluge from moviemaking and his filmography to date includes more than 100 shorts, features and TV movies, most of which have been criminally overlooked by the same film critics who embraced his more famous peers. Yesterday Girl earned him the moniker of “The German Godard” and you can see stylistic similarities between the two directors but Kluge forged his own personal brand of cinema and one of his most important and audacious works is Gelegenheitsarbeit einer Sklavin (English title: Part-Time Work of a Domestic Slave, 1973).

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Voyage of Doom

A former actor from Austria turned film director, Georg Tressler is not a name familiar to most American movie fans but for German filmgoers of the fifties he created a sensation with this 1956 feature film debut, Die Halbstarken (released in the U.S. as Teenage Wolfpack). As topical, incendiary and controversial in its day as The Wild One (1953), Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and Blackboard Jungle (1955), Die Halbstarken was a hard-hitting portrait of juvenile delinquency in post-war Germany and featured Horst Buchholz as a manipulative gang leader in a performance possibly inspired by James Dean. It was a huge hit and led Tressler to follow it up with two more youth-oriented films – Noch Minderjahrig (Under 18, 1957) and Endstation Liebe (Two Worlds, 1958). His fourth feature, Das Totenschiff (Ship of the Dead, 1959), was a complete departure from his trilogy in terms of content and was mostly ignored by critics and the public. But timing is everything and today Das Totenschiff looks like a lost classic from the pre-Berlin Wall era. And it may very well be Tressler’s finest achievement.    Continue reading