Phoenix

Locations
Call Number: DVD FLC-GER Phoenix
On Shelf At: Downtown Library

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown 1st Floor 1-week checkout	DVD FLC-GER Phoenix	1-week checkout	On Shelf
Downtown 1st Floor 1-week checkout	DVD FLC-GER Phoenix	1-week checkout	On Shelf
Downtown 1st Floor 1-week checkout	DVD FLC-GER Phoenix	1-week checkout	On Shelf

Originally produced as a motion picture in 2014.
Special features: new conversation between director Christian Petzold and actor Nina Hoss; new interview with cinematographer, Hans Fromm; The making of "Phonenix" a 2014 documentary featuring interviews with Petzold, Hoss, actors Nina Kunzendorf and Ronald Zehrfield and production designer K.D. Gruber; trailer; essay by critic Michael Koresky.
Nina Hoss, Ronald Zehrfeld, Nina Kunzendorf.
Set in a rubble-strewn Berlin in 1945, is like no other film about post-World War II Jewish identity. After surviving Auschwitz, a former cabaret perfromer, her face disfigured and reconstructed, returns to her war-ravaged hometown to seek out the gentile husband who may or may not have betrayed her to the Nazis. Without recognizing her, he enlists her to play his wife in a bizarre hall-of-shattered-mirrors story that's as richly metaphorical as it is preposterously engrossing.
DVD.

REVIEWS & SUMMARIES

Library Journal Review

COMMUNITY REVIEWS

really terrible, awful movie, nothing the hell ever happens, had to skip many scenes submitted by Tassos on April 24, 2022, 2:36pm and the dark images are NOT artsy, I call BS on the effort to get away with portraying the bombed-out Berlin of 1945 on the cheap using these vwery dark images.

overall, WORTHLESS.

Facing the past submitted by tarascon on June 29, 2023, 12:16pm Petzold is one of the finest German directors since the 1960’s and 70’s (Fassbinder et al). This beautifully shot film merits watching for two reasons. The first is its narrative concerning the traumas of loss and reintegration, betrayal and manipulation, silence and the structures of denial.

The other reason is historical: a movie about the small victories of daily existence in a postwar Germany rarely shown in cinema (the immediate correlate would be “The Third Man”) may not make for action packed adventures but that’s not the same as saying the struggle is unheroic.

Speaking of bravery, only two people in my family ever spoke openly about the war and postwar era and neither were Party members; one was a Socialist who’d survived being shot by the S.S. (in 1946 no less!) and the other was my mother who was twelve in 1945. Given that nowadays the murderous legacy of National Socialism’s crimes seem alternately forgotten by most or embraced by some, any effort to educate people about this particular past and its lingering damage is a good thing.
And that’s hardly worthless.