Max Ernst: My Vagabonds - My Restlessness

After ten years, Hella Mayer and her boyhood friend Andreas meet again in Berlin on the street. Both know each other from common dance lessons times.

Interview film with the protagonists of the New German Cinema in 1966.

Customs officers Katti and Wolfgang are so deeply in love with each other that they are barely aware of their surroundings. But after the wedding reception, there's nothing but trouble.

Martin is 25 years old and very reserved about work. Together with his buddy Henry, he lives in their Schwabing apartment in the day. But everything changes when he falls in love with the attractive Barbara and observed a slump: For when he gives up the police report, the officials themselves suspect him of the crime. In addition, he still owes a text to the hit producer Viktor Block. Suddenly Martin is up to his ears in chaos.

A study of German 19th Century Romantic art through the writings and paintings of Carl David Friedrich and his fellow artist, Carl Gustav Carus.

In his experimental short film "Brutalität in Stein" (Brutality in Stone), Alexander Kluge demonstrates how Nazi architecture used dimensions of inhuman and super-human scale to bolster the regime's politics of the same kind. Shots of huge neo-classical architectural structures from the Nazi period are confronted with equally anti-human national-socialist language as a voice-over.

Max Ernst on amateur astronomer Ernst Wilhelm Leberecht Tempel.

"Spring Symphony" is the story of Robert Schumann and Clara Wieck. Both were music entities. Robert Schumann turns out to have been a second tier composer, if that, never rising to the heights of a Beethoven or Mozart. In contrast, Clara Wieck was a master technician in the playing of the piano, a composer (probably not at Schumann's level), and was a child prodigy.

In the sixties the painter and sculptor Niki de Saint Phalle started her career with shooting paintings, reliefs that were fired at with paint bags. She became famous and popular for her Nanas, colorful sculptures of big and cheerful women, and for the cooperation with Jean Tinguely. The frame of this film is a tour through her tarot garden in Tuscany.

Two old school friends, both in their late twenties. One lives on his parent’s rural estate and does nothing; the other half-heartedly pursues work as a journalist in Düsseldorf.

Potato Fritz and his friends have moved from Germany to the American Wild West, settling eventually in the Rockies. They are besieged by what appear to them to be hostile Native Americans. Before too long, it becomes clear that the hostiles are in fact a gang of gold thieves. This movie is notable among German-made Westerns for its use of authentic period costumes and firearms.

The inner world of the great painter Max Ernst is the subject of this film. One of the principal founders of Surrealism, Max Ernst explores the nature of materials and the emotional significance of shapes to combine with his collages and netherworld canvases. The director and Ernst together use the film creatively as a medium to explain the artist's own development.

The film features several horse trainers and other track workers talking about their roles at the track, always eventually interrupted by an older man who claims to be the true authority, and demands that they be thrown out. One recurring young man, the first to appear, claims that he protects the horses from enthusiastic racing fans. He does not appear to be employed by the track, but seems to provide his services voluntarily. His protection from "fanatics" gives the film its title. The film is shot in a documentary style, but the sheer implausibility of the dialogue leaves the exact nature of the film ambiguous.

During the Prohibition the US government has been just as successful at stopping drinking as they have been in the War on Drugs. Customs Officer Arne Kolk is determined to stop the alcohol smugglers at any price.

Daddy, filmed in cooperation with movie director Peter Whitehead, discovers the connection between a father and little girl. Like the majority of Niki De Saint Phalle’s films, the flick combines autobiography with imagination, mixing erotic scenes of incest with a reverse of energy as the female character humors the daddy figure. Saint Phalle narrates the film, offering an almost psycho-analytical explanation of its content and explains the different inexplicable.