Jürgen Klauss Movies

Noted French director Claude Chabrol helmed this oddity, a remake of German director Fritz Lang's 1922 classic Dr. Mabuse. The film features an all-star international cast as it tells the futuristic horror story of a bizarre epidemic which has swept West Berlin leaving a grim trail of grisly suicides. Meanwhile, the media broadcasts weird, highly suggestive propaganda. The authorities are appalled by all the bloodshed, but only one lone cop suspects that the "suicides" are really the work of a demented criminal mastermind. The film is also known as Dr. M. ~ Sandra Brennan, Rovi

A West German businessman's extra-marital fling with a part-time hooker from East Germany sets the stage for a dramatic confrontation in this conventional story of life in a politically mixed world. Berthold (Hansjoachim Krietsch) runs a drainpipe business, and twice a year at the East-West Leipzig fair he gets together with the East German Rosi (Heike Schrotter) for fun and games, in-between the business transactions. This time, he and Rosi meet as usual but on the business side, and he suddenly finds himself involved in a lucrative deal that requires some cooperation from his wife's brother. He gets in touch with his wife and continues to make the rounds with his buddies at Leipzig, unaware that his secret encounters with Rosi might soon be much less secret than he would like. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi

Combining a part-documentary, part-fiction approach to the March, 1921 uprising of sailors at the port of Kronstadt (an island port in the Gulf of Finland, near St. Petersburg), director Jurgen Klauss has created an erudite synopsis of the nature of the rebellion. Lenin was faced with a food shortage in the early years of his regime and in an attempt to handle the crisis, forcibly took grain from the peasants and redistributed it to the cities and the military zones in the country. Since the grain was not enough to go around to begin with, this caused shortages everywhere and the peasants revolted in 1918 -- with the sailors at Kronstadt following suit in 1921. This portrayal of the Kronstadt revolt is set in a studio with stage props, and is clearly meant to illustrate the issues and the history at hand. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi

Elizabeth Wilms grabbed her new 16m camera in 1942 and began shooting scenes of everyday life in the Ruhr industrial valley where she lived. Her real profession was that of a baker -- hence the title of this documentary -- but her avocation was certainly film. She kept on shooting -- scenes of carnivals and celebrations, before the war brought bombing and killing to German cities, scenes from Muenster before, during, and after its bombing in World War II, scenes of poverty-plagued Germans living in makeshift shelters once the war had ended, and scenes of reconstruction as the world began to piece itself back together again. Writers and directors Juergen Klauss and Michael Lentz had long interviews with Wilms, and after asking her about the 400,000 meters of film in her storage bin, they then viewed nearly 100 clips from her collection in an effort to judge their quality and content. The next step was to piece them together with Wilms' observations, and this 72-minute documentary is the result. Elizabeth Wilms died in 1981 at the age of 76, a few months before the documentary was released, filming with her camera right up to the end. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi

This incisive film, an example of New German Cinema, is a wry and witty, biting and bitter take on the lives of a group of East German refugees in West Berlin at the end of the 1970's. Both the director Juergen Klauss, and the four principal actors in the film are East Germans who have gone through the same pains of adjustment that are confronted in the film. The story contrasts the experience of its central character, Max Rand (Stefan Staudinger), who arrives on an exit-visa and is really interested in going to the Maldive Islands, with seven roommates who long to go to West Berlin to "get a life." After they arrive, the roommates are supported by welfare and quartered in a condemned building, almost a symbol for their own fate. One roommate wants to enroll in the university to get a good education, only to find there are no openings available. All the compelling life quests, worthy of the time they spent in prison and this exile, crumble in the harsh reality of West Berlin with its different culture and political system. The roommates have to settle for jobs far below anyone's ideal, such as taking care of circus animals or working in a Peep Show, and that indignity exacerbates their loss of identity. As they straddle East and West German systems, trying to cope, some of the roommates just cannot make it. One becomes a terrorist, living constantly with the threat of capture and imprisonment, another commits suicide. In contrast, Max Rand may be politically unconscious - or simply much more aware, or both - but he goes through no soul-searching dilemmas. The ending of his story is quite different than that of the seven others. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi