Zeitungen, 6/2.

I'll try not to make a habit of clogging up the Daily with pointers to German-language pieces, but today happens to be another rich one.

Fritz Lang's Die Nibelungen

For two years, Lars von Trier, who openly admitted he knew next to nothing about opera, struggled with Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen. He was slated to direct the tetralogy in Bayreuth (i.e., Mount Olympus as far as Wagnerians are concerned) next year, but last June, he threw up his hands. He has now delivered to the Bayreuther Festspiele something of a letter of resignation, an explanation, and Der Tagesspiegel is running an abbreviated version of that letter. There is nonetheless enough here to see that von Trier had thought this thing through thoroughly, from his initial raw concept to the most minute details, such as how the leaves of the trees would be lit ("Greatness in detail and godliness in nature. That was my Wagner!"). To abbreviate even further, though, it comes down to this: "I'm not claiming it would have been impossible, but because of my sick drive for perfectionism, it simply would have been hell."

Also: Christina Tilmann talks with Imre Kertész about Fateless, the adaptation of his novel (he wrote the screenplay himself).

Andreas Kilb in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung: "Ten years of Dogme were enough, now we need a rebellion of the undogmatic."

Oskar Roehler, whose most recent film is Agnes und seine Brüder and who is now working on an adaptation of Michel Houellebecq's The Elementary Particles, in Die Zeit: "For me, Rainer Werner Fassbinder's In a Year With 13 Moons is the most impressive film in postwar German history."

In die taz, Dominik Kamalzadeh on the newly restored Modern Times. Mentions of Walter Benjamin are held off until the fifth paragraph.

Posted by dwhudson at June 2, 2005 9:38 AM