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American Zoetrope's filmography is kind of mind-boggling. Co-founded by "Movie Brats" Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas in 1969, the distributor and production company has stayed pretty true to its mission statement of backing not just projects by Coppola and his family, but also experimental and international cinema. The list of directors that've had American Zoetrope in their corner at some point or another is just as extraordinary. There's Jean-Luc Godard, Akira Kurosawa, Wim Wenders, Paul Schrader, Agnieszka Holland, Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, Godfrey Reggio, Carroll Ballard, and, of course, Tim Burton. Wait, what?

It's true: At the peak of his powers in the 1990s, the ringmaster of the "macabre funhouse" (as /Film's Bj Colangelo has aptly put it) teamed up with Coppola's American Zoetrope for 1999's "Sleepy Hollow." 

When you think about it, it's not so surprising that Coppola got in on Burton's creep-tastical revamp of Washington Irving's 1820 short story "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.

The Berlin Film Festival has revealed the 28 titles selected for its Forum strand and the 26 projects at the Forum Expanded platform.

In the Forum strand, documentaries stand alongside personal essay films, while the films and installations that make up the Forum Expanded program revolve around political and personal legacies.

The festival takes place Feb. 16-26.

Forum Titles

“Allensworth”

by James Benning

U.S.

“Anqa”

by Helin Çelik

Austria/Spain

“About Thirty”

by Martin Shanly | with Martin Shanly, Camila Dougall, Paul Dougall, Esmeralds Escalante, Maria Soldi

Argentina

“Being in a Place – A Portrait of Margaret Tait”

by Luke Fowler | with Margaret Tait

U.K.

“The Bride”

by Myriam U. Birara | with Sandra Umulisa, Aline Amike, Daniel Gaga, Fabiola Mukasekuru, Beatrice Mukandayishimiye

Rwanda

“Cidade Rabat”

by Susana Nobre | with Raquel Castro, Paula Bárcia, Paula Só, Sara de Castro, Laura Afonso

Portugal/France

“De Facto”

by Selma Doborac | with Christoph Bach, Cornelius Obonya...

In a major shift one of the nation’s premier arthouses, Karen Cooper will be exiting as director on June 30 after 50 years running the Film Forum in New York City. Deputy Director Sonya Chung will assume the role.

Cooper has led the nonprofit cinema since its first iteration in 1972 as a 50-seat loft space on the Upper West Side open only weekends, to a multi-million dollar operation with four screens and 500 seats in lower Manhattan. She’ll remain an advisor to Chung with a focus on programming premieres and fundraising

“To say this is a transitional moment would be a vast understatement – for virtually all of its history, Film Forum has been energetically and most ably guided by Karen, not least during the very challenging pandemic period from which we are emerging. My board colleagues and I are extremely grateful for her tenure, and excited that in Sonya we have...

Peter Cowie recalls that time in 1992 when Samuel Fuller was introduced to Hans-Jürgen Syberberg. Also in today's roundup of news and views: Giancarlo T. Roma talks money with James Schamus, an assessment of Errol Morris's work, a profile of Adam Curtis, Matías Piñeiro on a scene from The Princess of France—and it's Steve Buscemi Day at DC's. Plus a David Lynch exhibition, a Frank Capra retrospective and notes on forthcoming work from Kenneth Lonergan, Pedro Almodóvar and Scarlett Johansson. And remembering René Vautier. » - David Hudson...

Peter Cowie recalls that time in 1992 when Samuel Fuller was introduced to Hans-Jürgen Syberberg. Also in today's roundup of news and views: Giancarlo T. Roma talks money with James Schamus, an assessment of Errol Morris's work, a profile of Adam Curtis, Matías Piñeiro on a scene from The Princess of France—and it's Steve Buscemi Day at DC's. Plus a David Lynch exhibition, a Frank Capra retrospective and notes on forthcoming work from Kenneth Lonergan, Pedro Almodóvar and Scarlett Johansson. And remembering René Vautier. » - David Hudson...

We can’t imagine what you do with your spare time and quite frankly it’s best we never find out, but the good folks over at The Seventh Art are often scouring the internet for hidden video gems. The stuff that they’re able to find is rarely disappointing and this video in particular is quite the find. They have uncovered a 1970s BBC documentary called “Signs of Vigorous Life” which explores the then-bourgeoning New German Cinema movement. The doc includes Werner Herzog, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Volker Schlöndorff, Wim Wenders, and Hans-Jürgen Syberberg. “Signs of Vigorous Life” captures this special time in cinema history just as it started to rise, right when each of these directors were in their prime. We’re talking before Herzog made “Stroszek” or Schlöndorff made “The Tin Drum.” Or, better yet, years before Fassbinder would embark on his Brd trilogy. These young German filmmakers...

Abdellatif Kechiche’s Palme d’Or winner to open T-Mobile New Horizons International Film Festival; competition titles announced.Scroll down for competition titles

Poland’s T-Mobile New Horizons International Film Festival (July 18-28) is to open with this year’s Palme d’Or winner, Blue is the Warmest Colour (La vie d’Adèle - Chapitre 1 & 2) by Abdellatif Kechiche.

The closing film will be the Polish premiere of Malgoska Szumowska’s Berlinale competition title and Teddy Award winner In the Name of.

Festival organizers also announced the films in competition at this year’s event.

The New Horizons International Competition consists of 12 Polish premieres including Rotterdam competition title Noche by Leonardo Brzezicki, Locarno Fipresci award winner Leviathan by Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel, as well as this year’s Cannes’ Un Certain Regard title Stranger by the Lake by Alain Guiraudie.

The Jury for this competition will be announced next week.

The Films in...

“When history is what it should be, it is an elaboration of cinema.” —Ortega y Gasset

“The key for me is finding some rhythm of the film, not so much in the plot from a traditional sense but, rather, from its internal rhythm.” —Matías Piñeiro

1

There are works of art that affect in bulk, all at once; these are the aesthetic experiences that unify, that impose boundaries on the license of eye and ear. Other works of art achieve a dissociated and dissociating stylistic program; these are the works that cannot be experienced or understood as feats of synthesis, or as products of a single point of view.

While much of the art of the past century might be described as an effort toward a radical disaffiliation of elements—word and image, depth and surface, form and content—awareness of a quarrelsome relationship between two presumably incompatible ways of making...

Peter Przygodda, the renowned editor who worked with Wim Wenders, Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, Volker Schlöndorff, Hans W Geissendörfer, Reinhard Hauff, Klaus Lemke, Peter Handke and Romuald Karmakar, has died at the age of 70. He was, as Ekkehard Knörer writes in die taz, the most important editor — a term he preferred over another commonly used in Germany, "Cutter" — of the New German Cinema of the 70s and early 80s.

Though he'd originally intended to become an architect, Przygodda founded a small theater with Rolf Zacher and shot his first short film in 1969, Der Besuch auf dem Lande (The Visit to the Country), with Zacher taking on the lead role. Later that same year, he began working with Wenders on Summer in the City, striking up a friendship and professional partnership that would see them all the way through Palermo Shooting in 2008. Przygodda won the German Film Prize (Gold) for his work on...

"The most experimental and radical of the New German Cinema bad boys, Hans-Jürgen Syberberg makes movies about German history and its decay into genocidal mania and nothing else, if you consider that he makes 'movies' at all, as we normally define them." Michael Atkinson for the L Magazine: "The behemoths that make up his most famous 'trilogy' — Ludwig: Requiem for a Virgin King (1972), Karl May (1974), and Our Hitler (1977; also called Hitler: A Film from Germany) — are more like evidentiary stockpiles, antiqued PowerPoint presentations on the alpha-wave undulations of Prussian consciousness. Forever roping in the poisoned spirit of Wagner, the films vie for gesamtkunstwerk but without drama, dreamily and endlessly questioning history and never daring to answer."...

Werner Herzog Brings The Music Back

By

Alex Simon

Academy Award-nominated German film director, screenwriter, actor and opera director Werner Herzog was born Werner H. Stipetić on 5 September 1942 in Munich. His family moved to the remote Bavarian village of Sachrang in the Chiemgau Alps after the house next to theirs was destroyed during bombing towards the close of World War II. When he was twelve, he and his family moved back to Munich. The same year, Herzog was told to sing in front of his class at school and adamantly refused. He was almost expelled for this and until the age of eighteen listened to no music, sang no songs and studied no instruments. He would later say that he would easily give ten years from his life to be able to play an instrument. At fourteen, he was inspired by an encyclopedia entry about film-making which he says provided...

One of the world's great film culture apostates, Hans-Jürgen Syberberg is mostly notorious for the seven-hour-plus 1977 film "Our Hitler," and for Susan Sontag's rocket-to-Mars essay, ambitiously praising it to the heavens, and for being the most recalcitrant of the New German Cinema's unholy four (with Wenders, Fassbinder and Herzog).

Finally, two of his famous earlier films have been released on video to contextualize that later behemoth, "Ludwig: Requiem for a Virgin King" (1972) and "Karl May" (1974), the three of which supposedly comprise a "German trilogy." Syberberg hardly seems disposed to ever make films about anything else, and it's an unassailable career project, especially in light of the last decade or so of Holocaust movies produced in Germany and elsewhere, which have tried to straitjacket and even romanticize the horrifying mystery of German culture's evolution.

Syberberg has always regarded it as a monstrous enigma, and his movies reflect his position in every frame.