Customer Reviews

Knife in the Head [VHS]

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
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1 star:		(0)

 

 

Powerful and complex film that pulls you deeper into mystery even as it offers seeming clues to the story and the characters involved. Delivers psychological suspense as I've never seen in any other film. Fearless and bold direction and acting with a mindbending climax. Truly a great film.

A profound film about consciousness and reality. Bruno Ganz is at his best delivering a subtle and complex performance. One of the best examples of modern German cinema I know, yet hardly anyone has seen or heard of it!

A man is wounded in his head. His memory remains in zero atmosphere and the disyunctive is overclear: the challenge waits no more; the police has to resolve the case but needs too much information that only can be given if he recovers from this brutal attack.

Reinhard Hauff is a real master film maker. Every one of his films are loaded with that existential anguish, so difficult to understand just today sixteen years after the Fall of the Wall. But in those desperate years in the middle of the terrible presence of the Baader Meinkopf,1 the terrorism in Germany was extremely hot. Just remember the painful memories of 1972 Munich, and the frenzy around the whole German population in that decade. Somehow the seventies meant as any other decade previous or later the real awakening and true explosion of controled demmons in search for an answer. If not, go for the titles of Wenders, Fassbinder,Margaret von Trotta, Alexander Kluge and Wolker Schondlorff to realize how the depressed spirit and hopeless soul of the german people was.

If you get a decisive film of Hauff of 1975 Franz Blum, try to get it because to my mind this is his true masterpiece. And since Hauff is a master, his minor artworks are above the average by far. Now it is time to revisit and explore the great and still unknown German filmography of those ages.

As he is trying to pick up his wife at a political rally, the scientist Dr. Berthold Hoffmann is severely wounded when shot in the head by the police. He must learn to do everything all over again, and the police are intent on keeping his innocence a secret by labeling him a terrorist. Great story from the era of the Baader-Meinhof group...when Germany's politics walked the line of conviction and paralysis. A left-wing activist named Volker, who is in love with Hoffmann's wife, becomes fiercely intent on exposing the scientist's innocence, and the police's guilt.