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Saturday, Jun 20, 2015
7:00 PM
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Pacific Film Archive Theater
The Steel Beast
Imported Print!
One of the first programmers to rediscover films made under the Third Reich, Langlois helped bring to light this 1935 German Surrealist-inspired work, “perhaps the most singular film made under the Third Reich” (La Cinémathèque française). “Commissioned to celebrate the centennial of the Nuremberg-Fürth line, this film by a great German photographer from the twenties, Willy Otto Zielke, was a work of the avant-garde that was banned by the Third Reich for its decadent aesthetics. Zielke was influenced by Surrealism, and the film's originality is to be found in its unusual narrative organization, a daring collage of abstractions, rhythms, and historical commentary, all supported by the music of Peter Kreuder. With accentuated angles, a rotating camera, superimpositions, eroticized details of machines, and a prologue edited and framed so as to place the railways in perspective with the industrial world, this is a film with echoes of Dziga Vertov—the commissioned propaganda film that becomes an aesthetic experience” (Dominique Païni, La Cinémathèque française)
Directed by Willi Ziehlke. With Ariberg Mog. (1936/37, 70 mins, In German, Print from W.K.E.)