The Torn Curtain Film Series @ LACMA

Alexander Kluge on the set of Yesterday Girl (1966)

Yesterday Girl (Abschied von Gestern)
Friday, February 20 | 7:30 pm
Anita G., a penniless young refugee from the East (played by Kluge’s sister), wanders through the alien landscape of the “economic miracle” committing petty crimes. As Anita encounters judges, social workers, and bureaucrats, Kluge makes it clear that she's a product of a history that Germany wants to forget.

The All-Around Reduced Personality (Die allseitig reduzierte Persönlichkeit)
Friday, February 20 | 9:10 pm
Sander’s autobiographical film about three days in the fractured life of a single mother and photojournalist with “her feet on the ground and her head in the clouds” is rich in images of the divided city.

Escape from East Berlin
Saturday, February 21 | 7:30 pm
Directed by Hollywood film noir master Siodmak (The Killers, The Spiral Staircase) who returned to his native Germany in the mid-fifties, Escape was inspired by a true story about twenty-nine East Germans who fled Communist rule by tunneling under the Berlin Wall. With its emphasis on suspense over politics and its topical setting, the film was a success with US audiences.

Funeral in Berlin
Saturday, February 21 | 9:15 pm
In this sequel to The Ipcress File, bespectacled antihero Harry Palmer travels to Berlin to oversee the defection of a Soviet intelligence officer. As the double crosses pile up, Goldfinger director Hamilton keeps Caine hopping through such Berlin landmarks as the Kurfürstendamm, the Europa-Centre, the Tiergarten, Kreuzberg, and Checkpoint Charlie.

Full series and ticket information here.

NOW @ LACMA: The Two Germanys on Film

Michael Caine in Funeral in Berlin (1966)

Katzelmacher
Friday, February 13 | 7:30 pm
In this early film based on his own Brechtian play, a Greek guest worker (Fassbinder) living in a Munich suburb provokes the xenophobia and violence of his brutish neighbors when he begins dating a local girl.

Even Dwarfs Started Small (Auch Zwerge haben klein angefangen)
Friday, February 13 | 9:10 pm
In Herzog’s shocking allegory, cast entirely with dwarves and midgets and shot on the tropical island of Lanzarote, the inmates of a correctional institute revolt. “The anarchist uprising is a beautiful negation of bourgeois values, sometimes savage, but usually compassionate and amusing.”— Time Out.

The Third Generation (Die Dritte Generation)
Saturday, February 14 | 7:30 pm
A group of deluded and manipulated losers hole up in a house to plot the overthrow of the state. “A cruel and sometimes very funny comedy about terrorism… and one of the richest looking and sounding films I’ve ever experienced.”—Vincent Canby, The New York Times.

Not Reconciled (Nicht Versöhnt oder Es hilft nur Gewalt wo Gewalt herrscht)
Saturday, February 14 | 9:30 pm
A former assistant to Bresson, Renoir and Rivette, Straub presents a stark and rigorously compressed adaptation of Heinrich Boll’s Billiards at Half Past Noon. The lives of three generations of the Fähmel family, from the turn of the century through Nazi Germany to the mid-1960s, are intertwined in this influential and austere debut feature.