East of War
Ruth Beckermann: Keep the Camera Rolling • 1h 52m
Dir. Ruth Beckermann - 1996 - Austria
White-tiled rooms, neon lighting, on the walls the black and white photographs of the exhibition “War of Extermination”, which documents the atrocities committed by the German Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front. Against this background, Ruth Beckermann films former soldiers talking about their experiences that exist beyond the realm of "normal" war. Never straying beyond the confines of the exhibition, Beckermann spent a month in the exhibition rooms of the Alpenmilchzentrale, observing and asking questions. An uncompromising film about remembrance and forgetting and which helped advance the destruction of the myth regarding the Wehrmacht's decency.
"It is a film that is ostensibly about speaking, literally a visual lesson in storytelling. But the even more valuable point of the film is: how it leads to a reassessment of silence" - Robert Menasse, 1998.
"Two oppressive hours about Hitler's war veterans: two hours about cowardice, weakness, ignorance, about fellow travellers and incorrigible perpetrators; two hours about a disappearing minority who are not furiously searching for excuses; two hours about a generation who escaped from themselves into a collective amnesia" - Hubertus Czernin, 1996
Up Next in Ruth Beckermann: Keep the Camera Rolling
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A Fleeting Passage to the Orient
Dir. Ruth Beckermann - 1999 - Austria
An essay film about Empress Elisabeth of Austria’s attempts to vanish from the picture. A film about Orientalism and of a woman on the road. Shot in Egypt, the film features a text written by the filmmaker and music from the Kronos-Quartet. The camera slips ...
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Homemad(e)
Dir. Ruth Beckermann - 84min - 2001 - Austria
Marc-Aurel-Street in Vienna: here you’ll find the few remaining Jewish merchants in the former textile quarter, the Iranian hotel keeper, and Café Salzgries with its regulars. Ruth Beckermann spent a year undertaking a series of small journeys in fro...
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Mozart Enigma
Dir. Ruth Beckermann - 1min - 2006 - Austria
MOZART ENIGMA is an ironic comment on biographical pseudo-documentaries. Envisioning a person? Is that possible? Why not go to a fortune teller, take off your wig and have your cards read?
We put together a photo collage for the film MOZART ENIGMA. W...
