The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach *
Jean-Marie Straub/Danièle Huillet, 1968
Germany
@ home on DVD

Would certainly benefit from a theatrical screening. The long, static takes and low resolution of the DVD made for a less than enthralling viewing experience.

The musicmaking and ornamentation both of the churches and the costumes were precisely enthralling, though.

It'd be interesting to see a more contemporary musical biopic done in this fashion.

See also: IMDb

Last Year at Marienbad **
Alain Resnais, 1961
France/Germany
@ SIFF Cinema

This was the first time I've dozed off during a movie in a very long while. I suspect I didn't miss much though. It's all about repeating patterns, the same thing occurring over and over, but hoping eventually for a different outcome. Perhaps like the way in which memories mutate as you recall them over time. Ought to see this again several times.

See also: IMDb | TCMDb

Yella *
Christian Petzold, 2008
Germany
@ The Grand Illusion

It might be interesting to watch again just to check for hints that Yella is actually dreaming/dead/watching alternate versions of her life flash before her eyes. There were certainly some obvious clues but probably more subtle ones as well.

Geography is important in the movie and not made particularly clear for non-German viewers. Yella's journey is essentially from the former East to the former West, from a pretty but still depressed region to a city schooled in capitalist economics, with the River Elbe as a kind of border between the two. Thus, pic is also a portrait of an easterner finding her vocation but losing her soul.

Hadn't caught this bit (mentioned in Variety) very well.

See also: IMDb | Variety review

Loos Ornamental ***
Heinz Emigholz, 2008
Germany
@ Northwest Film Forum

Incredible.

First come a few words in German, and then there are no words at all, only images of Adolf Loos's architecture, arranged in a chronological slide show of long-held video stills inside and outside the buildings, mainly in Vienna. Loos famously eschewed ornament, reducing form to function by exposing beams, stacking grids, and letting materials express their own conditions. This makes for some genteel moments, but there's also the return of the repressed, in perfectly flat and geometric surfaces that nonetheless roar like baroque sculpture because they are made of wildly mottled red or green marble. Drunk on the dream of modernism, you reach the end of the film, where there's only a cube gravestone with the architect's name on it. It's right in the city, and a train passes close behind it.

See also: IMDb | Jen Graves in The Stranger