Monday 10 September, 2007

Frankfurter Rundschau 10.09.2007

It is good and cheap, writes Daniel Kothenschulte, that Ang Lee's "Lust, Caution" won the Golden Lion, but he is more excited about the special prize going to Nikita Mikhalkov's "12", a new version of Sidney Lumet's courtroom drama "12 Angry Men" in Russian. "Criminologically speaking, Mikhalkov follows the original 1957 film almost exactly. But the young defendant whose fate seems sealed as soon as the jury convenes is a Chechen. Every member of the jury represents a different class or section of the population. Next to the aggressive taxi driver sits a big industrialist and the Georgian doctor meets the Jewish academic. What we do not encounter are women, who even Tarkovsky believed were almost incapable of having deeper feelings. The last image shows a bird which has made itself at home in the warm conference room among all the leftover food. Outside in the free world a snow storm is raging and yet the brave little bird flies out into it, as soon as someone opens a window. These are the clearest words on the beleaguered Russian democracy that we will ever be able to hear from Nikita Mikhalkov."

Cristina Nord in the taz was all for Ang Lee winning but her enthusiasm for the festival as a whole was measured. "The competition consisted of 23 films and some promising names. Many of the contributions offered the attractions of well-crafted Hollywood cinema (like Paul Haggis' 'In the Valley of Elah' and Tony Gilroy's 'Michael Clayton') and some came from auteur film makers looking back over a long career, such as Eric Rohmer, Ken Loach and Youssef Chahine. I have nothing against the individual films, but as a whole it was rather lacking in variety."

Michael Althen in the FAZ sees dark clouds ahead for the festival and asks. "Why in Venice when all the arts are united under one roof, does the film festival not make more of the dialogue with the art and architecture biennials that take place at the same time. That would really offer a future for the cinema."


Süddeutsche Zeitung 10.09.2007

For Peter Laudenbach, Dimiter Gotscheff's staging of Heiner Müller's "Hamletmaschine" at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin in which he also played the lead role is a furious exercise in driving out old ghosts. "Curiously, the fact that Gotscheff is not a trained actor, and that he is as far from the art of fine nuance as Hamlet is from Hecuba, doesn't harm this unabashed self-experiment one bit. Nor does Gotscheff's strong Bulgarian accent. A non-actor plays a non-play: a textual scree slope in which Hamlet and Ophelia, Charles Manson, Ulrike Meinhof and Inge Müller - the dramatist's wife who committed suicide - haunt the stage, as does, behind many masks, the author himself."


Berliner Zeitung 10.09.2007

Since the foiling last Tuesday of a terrorist attack on US military installations in Germany in which two of the perpetrators were German converts to Islam, the feuilletons have been probing the mindset of the Islamic convert. Today Christian H. Hoffmann explains in an interview the reasons for his conversion. "I had real problems with one aspect of the Protestantism so deeply rooted in my family. The idea of original sin, that God's son is already sinful when he comes into the world, that was really hard for me to accept.... Islam has no concept of original sin, and at one point I realised that this religion suits me perfectly." Society had a different view of his conversion, however. "Your entire life you believe you live in a society of human rights, free speech and tolerance. Then all of a sudden you're on the side of the minority and you have to learn that society does not treat its minorities as it claims to do - and as you yourself thought it did. You're literally catapulted out of society. That was certainly an interesting discovery."


Saturday 8 September, 2007


Süddeutsche Zeitung 08.09.2007

Writer and Islamic scholar Stefan Weidner sees nothing mysterious about the seductive power of Islam: "People who read the Koran often feel like they're being addressed personally, as if they too were prophets. That's both beguiling and eerie. And the appeal is correspondingly greater - like the promise of security - when you relent and profess the faith. You could compare Islam with the marriage proposal of an exceptionally promising, extremely authoritarian man. Of course the temptation to say yes to such proposals is great, even when your rational mind makes a few shy objections. This is basic to every personally motivated conversion. Religious studies and sociology don't have much to say in the matter, to say nothing of protecting the constitution."


Neue Zürcher Zeitung 08.09.2007

The day before writers gathered around the world to give readings in a literary protest against Robert Mugabe on Sunday, Zimbabwean poet and writer Chenjerai Hove writes a swan song to his country which once was once a beacon of hope for the entire continent. "President Mugabe has been in power since 1980, and soon afterwards he declared his commitment to 'controlled democracy'. His vice president at that time, the now deceased Simon Muzenda had the decency to explain this concept more precisely. 'If we tell you to vote for a baboon, you vote for a baboon,' he told listeners at a public event. The principle of 'controlled democracy' obviously involves declaring that the people are idiots incapable of defining their own wishes and aspirations."


Der Tagesspiegel 08.09.2007

Hans Werner Henze's new opera "Phaedra" may not be revolutionary, but the world premiere at Berlin's Staatsoper last Thursday was wonderfully lucid, writes Christine Lemke-Matwey. "The orchestration sparkles wondrously, almost weightlessly, and the cast speaks volumes. The instruments adhere to the diverse constellations of singers like sylphs, ever ready to fan Phaedra's lust, Theseus' hysterical horror or Hyppolyte's lamentation. Tubular bells signal his death in a droning knell. And it's not only at moments of such classical, apocalyptic tumult that Henze, the genuine musical dramatist, remains true to both himself and a gentle twelve-tone melodiousness. Beautifully shrill, by contrast, is Phaedra's malice at Hippolyte's salvation, while the final dancing apotheosis ('Wir dringen zur Sterblichkeit vor' - 'We're all advancing toward mortality') is filled with magical, silvery blackness."