Beatrice Manowski Movies

Social constraints on East Germans were so strong that, right up until the reunification, they tended to result in a certain naivete in those who grew accustomed to them. In this story, a fifteen-year-old former East German lass living in West Germany is trying to survive without much help. She falls in with a petty criminal named Darius, who comes from an Eastern European country. He is harsh with her and wants her help to pull off one of his illegal games. She puts up with him for a while and helps him with the one scheme, but eventually she wises up and has the police haul him off to jail. The film ends by showing Elfie taking another street-kid under her wing. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide

With Nekromantik, first-time feature director Jorg Buttgereit mixes cheap gore, transgressive imagery, and cosmic dread into a cult-classic examination of sex, death, and boredom among the youth of pre-reunification Germany. Passive, blank-faced Rob (Daktari Lorenz) spends his days collecting human roadkill from the side of the Autobahn and his nights enacting a quietly macabre domesticity with girlfriend Betty (Beatrice Manowski, credited here as Beatrice M.) in their autopsy/industrial/Nazi-themed apartment. One day Rob delights Betty by bringing home a decomposed corpse dredged from a swampy roadside lagoon; with a sawed-off bedpost in place of its rotted genitalia, the body serves alternately as a vile wall decoration and the third member of a grotesque and quite graphic ménage à trois. When Rob loses his job, material girl Betty hoofs it, and her divorce settlement includes the couple's favorite sex aid. An alienated Rob soon turns to horror movies, animal torture, prostitutes, and graveyard sex in his quest to find the unique combination of utter degradation and total acceptance he shared with his one true necrophile love. Meanwhile, the haunting image of a rabbit being skinned plays like a cartoon in the young man's imagination, perhaps a childhood memory, perhaps an existential dream. Ultimately, this slaughterhouse motif leads Rob to enact a painfully final solution to his deadly eroticism; his journey would nevertheless continue in Buttgereit's Nekromantik 2 a few years later. Although it received its German premiere in 1988, work on Nekromantik started in late 1986, when Buttgereit, the veteran of several shorts, began fashioning the corpse that would figure so heavily in the story; the director knew that without a realistic-looking prop, the project wouldn't be worth filming in the first place. As Nekromantik's cult following grew slowly in Germany, then abroad, rumors abounded that the filmmakers had used actual dead bodies during the shoot. In fact, the film's main corpse was largely synthetic, although real pig eyes from a slaughterhouse filled its sockets -- and, in some scenes, the characters' mouths. Manowski would go on to appear in Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire, while composer/co-star Lorenz would largely give up acting in favor of his musical activities, which included several more collaborations with Buttgereit. ~ Brian J. Dillard, All Movie Guide

Damiel (Bruno Ganz) and Cassiel (Otto Sander) are angels who watch over the city of Berlin. They don't have harps or wings (well, they usually don't have wings) and they prefer overcoats to gossamer gowns. But they can travel unseen through the city, listening to people's thoughts, watching their actions and studying their lives. While they can make their presence felt in small ways, only children and other angels can see them. They spend their days serenely observing, unable to interact with people, and they feel neither pain nor joy. One day, Damiel finds his way into a circus and sees Marion (Solveig Dommartin), a high-wire artist, practicing her act; he is immediately smitten. After the owners of the circus tell the company that the show is out of money and must disband, Marion sinks into a funk, shuffling back to her trailer to ponder what to do next. As he watches her, Damiel makes a decision: he wants to be human, and he wants to be with Marion, to lift her spirits and, if need be, to share her pain. Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire is a remarkable modern fairy tale about the nature of being alive. The angels witness the gamut of human emotions, and they experience the luxury of simple pleasures (even a cup of coffee and a cigarette) as ones who've never known them. From the angels' viewpoint, Berlin is seen in gorgeous black-and-white -- strikingly beautiful but unreal; when they join the humans, the image shifts to rough but natural-looking color, and the waltz-like grace of the angels' drift through the city changes to a harsher rhythm. Peter Falk appears as himself, revealing a secret that we may not have known about the man who played Columbo, and there's also a brief but powerful appearance by Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds. Wings of Desire hinges on the intangible and elusive, and it builds something beautiful from those qualities. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide