Markus Stockhausen Movies
- 1999
Noted Israeli filmmaker Amos Gitai directs this documentary about the history of Zionism, focusing particularly on the life and work of Theodor Herzl, who founded the movement in 1897. Gitai features not only standard interviews with a number of historians and journalists, but also more lyrical imagery such as a woman reading the Old Testament over family photographs. ~ Jonathan Crow, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Efratia Gitai
- 1996
Haunting and deeply personal, this stylized film reflects director Amos Gitai's feelings and response to the 1995 assassination of Israeli leader Yitzhak Rabin. Essentially a series of images shot from a moving vehicle in key Israeli and Polish cities, with a focus on the death place of Prime Minister Rabin, the film is narrated by several notable personalities reading passages from the writings of Josephus Flavius, a Jewish commander who lead the Israeli Jews in a desperate bid to keep the Romans out of their holy land in 73 A.D. The Hebrews lost and Josephus was allowed to live, provided he write a history of the devastating battle from the Roman viewpoint. Interspersed amongst the readings and the moving scenes are a few exquisitely sad songs. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide
Instead of simply traveling to eastern Siberia to collect a modern art collection willed to him by a forgotten uncle, Daniel (Jerome Koenig), who runs an art gallery in Paris, decides (for reasons which are never explained) to bring a ten-foot long hand along with him. It is perhaps a portion of a huge sculpture of a golem (an artifical being dicussed in Jewish legends). Thus, instead of flying to Vladivostok, he rents a truck in St. Petersburg and drives across Russia. Along the way, he drops hints about a short-lived experiment in social engineering: Birobidjian, an autonomous region created in Siberia in 1928 especially for Jews. Hanna Schygulla, who starred in the first film of this trilogy, also makes a brief appearance in this, the second. Sam Fuller, a pet of the European filmmaking community, also makes a brief appearance. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Jerome Koening, Hanna Schygulla, (more)
This difficult-to-follow arthouse film explores the parallel stories of two very idealistic Zionist women who never met in real life. The story concerns the German poet Elsa Lasker-Schuller and the Russian Mania Schochat. Elsa (Lisa Krezer) lives in 1920's Berlin as Germany is degenerating into the chaos from which Hitler will emerge. Mania (Rivka Neumann) is living in Palestine, amid some of the first and most rigorous experiments in genuinely Marxist living, at a radical kibbutz. Each survives to be present at the beginning of the Jewish state, and each is sorely disillusioned. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Lisa Kreuzer, Markus Stockhausen, (more)
