Frankfurter Rundschau, 30.08.2005

Is pop a thing of the past? No! Here's something new, writes Oliver Tepel about "Le Fil", French chanson singer Camille's second album. "Her solo debut didn't make it to the German record stores. So here almost no one has heard how she blended soul with the old chanson style, how she entirely ignored the popular music of the sixties, opting instead to indulge passionately in complex arrangements. Yet those who did get wind of her took note: here is something exceptional. Classic pop experiments in the idiom of a young woman whose studies of life testify to a great involvement and a keen sense of observation. Those who prefer Benjamin Biolay's version of the nouvelle chanson may find Camille 'too intense, too strange', but then she'd probably like that."


Der Tagesspiegel, 30.08.2005

"The Hartz IV reforms to unemployment and social security benefits could be the transition to 'Bürgergeld' ('civic money', a more friendly-sounding German formulation for negative income tax - ed), or to an intensified culture of brutalisation", writes sociologist and publicist Matthias Greffrath. "We now know three categories of 'workers' in Germany: well-paid 'core workers' who are socially insured and have full-time, permanent work; temporary workers, mini-jobbers and part-time workers mostly in the service sector, who make no contribution to the social security system and have no long-term security themselves, often with incomes under the poverty line; and finally the unemployed and those who have been forced by the state into more or less meaningful 'job creation schemes'." For Greffrath there are two paths out of this misery: Either a negative income tax or unconditional basic income for all, or "a reduction of the working week with the aim of achieving full employment. A utopia? VW implemented it more than a decade ago with a working week of 28 hours (with cuts in payment). 'I'm doing fine', said a worker in Wolfsburg at the time, 'I work four days at the plant, I've got more time for my kids and my house, and I work one day for the German Federal Agency for Technical Relief – as an auto mechanic, I mean that's my job after all.' Work for money, work for yourself and work for society – not a free-time society, but a three-time society."


Süddeutsche Zeitung, 30.08.2005

Dawid Danilo Bartelt takes stock of Brazil's first Brazilian left-wing government under president "Lula" da Silva just in case it isn't around for much longer. Plagued by insider fighting and under pressure from all sides Lula's Worker's Party PT has not been able to fulfil its social promises. But it was on the right track with its planned economic reforms, writes Bartlet. "For a society which has never gone through Fordism – in other words widespread integration of the workforce in formal working conditions - in which the distribution of income, life expectancy and daily calorie intake is more obscene than almost any other country in the world, and for a state which is desperately in need of reform and has no control over huge swaths of its territory, a functioning social market economic would be the equivalent of a revolution."


Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 30.08.2005

Christina Thurner looks back at the Berlin dance festival "Tanz im August", which ends today. She was especially taken by the piece "Wir sind alle Marlene Dietrich FOR" (we are all Marlene Dietrich FOR – the latter word evoking "UNPROFOR") by the Iceland Dance Company. "Your ears ring when you leave this haunting, shrill performance about entertainment in the time of war. But you go home all the richer for the powerful images that denounce wartime goings on without trying to instruct. This lends them an enduring yet painful beauty."


Die Tageszeitung, 30.08.2005

Claus Löser gives his seal of approval to the Sarajevo Film Festival, which has just finished. "After eleven years it has established itself as an established meeting point of the film industry with a good international quota. Glamour twinkles between the ruins: luxury limos, red carpet, waiters in livery and white gloves; and almost a hundred sponsors jostling for attention in the chunky catalogue. Alongside Thessaloniki it is the most important platform for the films of South Eastern Europe and offers the region's freshest and most controversial productions. Like the cityscape of the host city, the festival's screens continue their thematic preoccupation with the breakup of Yugoslavia, civil war and reorientation.