mikyle

Rolf Dieter Brinkmann was a German poet and writer. He lived mostly in Cologne and died in a car accident in London in 1975.

The new filmed material of actors playing Brinkmann and his family is dubbed over by original spoken recordings of the author and his surroundings. Fascinating material and very convincing acting combine to bring to life this extraordinary icon of German 70s-culture with his own voice: vibrant, radical, obsessive, sometimes desperate, detailed descriptions and accusations of everything and everyone.

Alternatingly touching and funny, the film was for me a great eye-opener to an important personality of German pre-MTV popular culture.

9/10

Andreas Dresen's precise touch for achingly realistic East German drama doesn't fail in "Willenbrock". Magdeburg's urban scenery is modern and cold, the characters are hopelessly human, the situations and dialogs are sadly comic at times, and suspense is everywhere.

Axel Prahl (again!) and Inka Friedrich shine effortlessly as the well adapted well-off couple, with all their little and not so little troubles and secrets. Lovely, if it weren't a bit depressing.

After the touching "Halbe Treppe", "Willenbrock" is another hint that Andreas Dresen might just become an East German Mike Leigh. Concerned with small town real people, not always consistent in story and quality, but true to reality and always trusting his actors, which he chooses wisely.

Where does technology lead us? Ted Kaczynski, the ex-Mathematician who lived a secluded life in the woods until he was arrested and convicted as the "Unabomber", believes that it will be our doom.

Lutz Dammbeck confronts us with a puzzle, looking for connections between technological positivism, mind control experiments and the hippie movement, all traced back to state power interests developing as results of World War II. However, the links are weak, and instead of presenting us with a final conclusion resulting from his research (as other documentarists would eagerly do), Dammbeck simply leaves us to solve the puzzle by ourselves, strengthen or break the links as we find appropriate, raising interesting questions on science, technology and human's role in society along the way.

Thus the movie's subject reaches far deeper than the "Unabomber's" biography, which is, in Kaczynski's own words, irrelevant. The movie provides a platform for Kaczynski's critique on technological positivism, which Dammbeck seems to at least partially sympathize with. However, the final decision is left to the viewer, who is aided by additional background and research material on the movie's website.

Dammbeck is coming from an artistic point of view, consciously and deliberately breaking the limits between what is art and what is "real life", creating a disturbing, thought-provoking documentary. It is admirable and a sign of true plurality that publicly financed institutions such as SWR and arte stand behind an unconventional project that handles such a provocative subject seriously.