All Slights Deserved

For those who believed that the horror portmanteau format originated with Ealing's Dead of Night in 1945 might be intrigued to discover this entertaining progenitor from Weimar Germany a quarter of a century earlier. Indeed Unheimliche Geschichten , which shouldn't be confused with a 1932 film of the same name also directed by Richard Oswald, utilises many of what became standard devices in this sub-genre. For starters there's a framing device; set in an antiquarian bookshop, where paintings of three archetypal figures - a Harlot (Anita Berber), the Devil (Reinhold Schünzel), and Death (the great Conrad Veidt) - come to life, much to the terror of the shopkeeper. They proceed flicking through the books, whereupon we embark on a series of five short dramatisations starring the same three actors. In the first of these Veidt plays a man who rescues a young woman (Berber) from her lunatic husband (Schünzel). The pair check into a hotel and Veidt begins contemplating havin...

Leni Riefenstahl: evil Nazi film-maker or pioneering genius of pre-war cinema? Or perhaps both? Either way Riefenstahl remains probably the most influential woman film-maker ever. That's perhaps all the more remarkable because her reputation is principally due to two films, both documentaries. The first, Triumph of the Will is an account of the 1934 Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg; a chilling work of propaganda that showcases Hitler's hypnotic genius and the spell he was casting upon the German people. Although a certain mystique has built up around this film and its sinister subtext in truth it's not the most compelling viewing to a contemporary audience. The more innovative of Riefenstahl's techniques - such as the use of telescopic lenses and aerial photography - were assimilated by the wider film-making fraternity, but many scenes drag interminably and lack subtlety. Her second, Olympia is generally viewed more sympathetically. An epic three and a half hour accou...

Those of you of a certain age may recall The Singing Ringing Tree , a bizarre childrens' fairy tale that was serialised by the BBC and shown several times during the sixties and seventies and sometimes cited as one of the scariest things ever shown on television. I was born a little to late to catch these screenings and only became aware of it several years ago, my interest piqued by the many vivid recollections people had. It's certainly a very strange production and probably best avoided if you've a penchant for hallucinogenics. Before it had been split up into episodes for broadcast purposes, The Singing Ringing Tree had actually been a feature film produced in 1957 by the mighty East German state studio DEFA. Notwithstanding the folkloric traditions of central Europe, fairy tales were the ideal means for priming kids with wholesome communist values and DEFA churned them out at a fairly prodigious rate. The year after they followed The Singing Ringing Tree with an ...

Coincidence is a strange thing. I only read about the death of John Paul Getty III this morning and was completely ignorant that he had a small role in today's film, The State of Things , until I saw his name in the closing credits. Getty, who presumably knew director Wim Wenders through his German wife Gisela Zacher, shot the part of a troubled screenwriter not long before the overdose and stroke that left him paralysed. In truth he doesn't seem entirely compos mentis and it could be little acting was required. Fortunately there's rather more to recommend Wenders' film than that, although had I been asked to draw any conclusions after the first hour it wouldn't have been nearly so favourable. It's one of the most schizophrenic films I've ever seen but so skillfully accomplished that at the end I wished I had time to sit through it all over again. Just as Fellini had 8½ and Truffaut Day For Night , The State of Things is Wenders' film about fil...