Door #3

What do I have lying around for door number three?  Oh look, a German pilsner.  It's not one of those export pilsners in a half-liter can, so maybe we can be optimistic.  I mean, Weihenstephaner, oldest brewery in the world.  They must be doing something right?  I'm feeling a little skeptical about traditional things right now, though.

Very light in color, straw yellow, bright white head, although not very long lasting.  It has that German beer smell, a good whiff of grain and grass, although it is a little lighter than a lot of lagers and other helleses.  It's pretty thin in the mouth, but with a good flavor.  Slightly sweet, not grassy in taste.  Not very much bitter for a pilsner.  It feels a lot more like a summer beer than an Advent one, with just enough flavor to be good on its own, especially in company, but would so not lose anything with a nice salty snack.

I would have thought that I would have picked Wiehenstephaner pils at some point in the past; I have had several other of the beers.  Somehow the pilsner has never made it to my glass.  That's probably a mark of my disinterest in the "typical" than a true lack of opportunity.  The beer stores are pretty well supplied with German beers of this type, even now.  And the influence of German beers has been felt for more than a century in Spain and its drinking habits, at least in the products.  More on that later...

Heimkino zehn

It's coming time to finish the German Film Festival for this year, and there's one more documentary to go.  I'm kind of digging the documentaries that I've been able to see this year, but to be honest, I probably wouldn't seek out the docs next year if I had to choose.  I'm just too invested in my fictional or "based on actual events" movies.  This documentary goes by the name Lost in Face.  It's a series of interviews with a woman who has suffered prosopagnosia or face blindness her whole life.  She explains that she has never been able to recognize her face in the mirror, but she knows her clothes and her house, so the person in the mirror must be her.  She can't recognize anybody she's ever known by their face, instead she can identify their gait, posture, or general attitude, and identifies people in family photographs by how they face the camera.  She is something of an artist now, creating semi-cubist works because of her inability to retain details of faces.  They come out with several eyes or no really identifiable eye, lines that could be a mouth or not, and yet the hairstyles are often quite exact.  "Charlotte" did not give her real name at first, being suspicious of how the interviews could develop, but later developed something of a rapport with the interviewer.  He takes her to a hospital for a brain scan, to see if there's a physical problem that can explain her condition, but in the scans the part of her brain that is supposed to process faces appears to be perfectly normal.  The malfunction is at a smaller level of detail than the machine can detect.  The interviews are interspersed with animations of her brainspace, with her "self" cutting the strings of other faces and people and letting them fall into the abyss of nothingness.  She talks about finding friends through her horses, which are kept at a fairly snooty stable, although she doesn't pay any attention to the other people who board there.  A young girl showed up one day with no horse to ride and was just watching the others, so Charlotte, riding without tack or "proper" riding habit, asked her if she wanted to ride Charlotte's horse. They became close friends, and Charlotte was worried about how to handle a long distance friendship when the girl eventually moved to Australia.  Charlotte also talks about her birth mother, who had been very young, perhaps a teenager, when she was born, and had given her up for adoption.  Charlotte's adoptive parents allowed her birth mother to come around as an "aunt", although eventually she managed to get ahold of her birth certificate and see who her birth mother was.  I think no father was actually listed on the certificate.  They continued their friendship until her birth mother's death.  The interviewer spends some time in the beginning encouraging Charlotte to try new ways of knowing the forms of faces but at first she rebuffs him.  At the end, though, she tries to use touch to "see" the features of a face to draw it.  She makes a portrait of him and gives it to him as a present.

Weihenstephaner, is that what I'm left with?  Don't get me wrong, it's a good beer, but it's so normal for something to go with such a surreal kind of story.  It's Vitus, the weizenbock, so at least there's a certain weight to it to help you digest the strangeness of the film.  It's a pretty typical German beer, with the touches of grain in the aroma and flavor, but also some good shades of fruit coming in.  Nothing too exotic, apple and banana for the most part, but it's a playful sort of beer, perky and bright after a story showing somebody living a life that we can only comprehend in the most basic way, understanding her words but not her reality.

Heimkino vier

I don't generally choose to go to the documentaries, and there aren't that many that come to the German Film Festival.  Sometimes they aren't documentaries as much as a personal report and musing, like that one on slower living a few years ago.  This year there are several documentaries offered, mostly arty stuff.  One is a biography of German artist Christoph Schlingensief, a man who always wanted to make movies, and managed to do it, although they were certainly not "popular".  Upon viewing one of his films as part of his application to film school, a professor told him that the film made it clear he would never love anybody.  Schlingesief took this as a challenge to prove that he could, in fact, love other people, even though he had to apply to film school several times, and was only accepted with some very influential recommendations from established directors.  His vision was to share provocation and make people reconsider their view of the world, not too uncommon among artists, really.  Schlingensief had the same idea about violence on film as Tarantino, apparently, in that it isn't something to be careful of, but to exaggerate and exploit.  Schlingensief was trying to remove the power of taboo by forcing it people's faces, making uncomfortable and ugly things mundane.  He was hired to direct plays, which he found an interesting challenge and was not immediately successful at.  He created installations in public spaces where people would be faced with the realities of xenophobia or racism, or be encouraged to face their socio-political worries in the Church of Fear.  His parents appear in his early homemade movies, not terribly excited about it.  He made television appearances to defend disgusting or upsetting art, bringing arguments of freedom of expression and honesty with oneself.  Sadly, he was diagnosed with cancer in 2008 and died only about a year and a half later.  He isn't very well-known outside of Germany, but seems to be something of a figure in the German art and cinema world.  Certainly, his films, which look like grosser versions of Ed Wood or other B horror movie makers, could be enjoyed even if just as junk entertainment.  I'm sure Schlingensief would want us to read between the lines, though.

A doppelbock does seem to go with this style of art somehow.  And Korbinian is a formidable kind of doppelbock, with a royal reddish color and a dessert-laden taste.  I've met Korbinian before, but this one came in a selection box, and it never hurts to try things again.  While fruity, there's also a definite chocolate flavor hiding in there, giving the beer a richness and smoothness that surpasses a lot of the style.  And bocks are a nice group, so that's saying something on my part.

movie three

 Somehow a German wheat beer feels appropriate for a classic German movie.  You find Weihenstephaner around, in bars and stores, but it's not one I pick up habitually.  Now that it's all summery and gross at night, it's a good time for a tangy wheat.  Vitus is glowy yellow-gold, cloudy like wheat beers tend to be.  It's a bit sour in smell, but with a little sweet hiding under it.  The taste is classic wheat beer, sweet at first and developing a little tang as the swallow happens.

Supplier: Cervecissimus
Price: €2.80

spoilers ahead!

I don't know if it matters to warm people about spoilers for a movie that's over 90 years old.  Varieté from 1925 is one of those show people movies that seem to have been pretty popular in the early 20th century.  Maybe because live spectacle was so much more important for entertainment then.  It starts in a prison with the warden calling up a prisoner and guilting him into discussing his crime with a letter from his wife.  It seems he was a carnival worker with a piano playing wife and a young baby he adores, but one night a friend of his brings a young woman to him to dance in the carnival.  She and her mother were picked up in an unnamed country and the mother died off of South Africa, so the young woman has nobody and nothing.  The wife doesn't want to hire her but the carnival man says she stays.  She dances for the audience and an attraction develops between her and the man, and he starts to feel like he should return to performing himself.  He had been a trapeze artist until he broke his leg, and when he mentions this to his wife she says if he goes back into performing it will be without her.  He takes her at her word, apparently, because soon he decides to run away with the dancer and start a new trapeze act.  Later, in Berlin, they are seen in a carnival by the agent of the Wintergarten, who has just lost his trapeze artists because one was injured in their last performance.  He convinces the remaining Artinelli to hire the pair for a new act and they begin a successful career with him at the Wintergarten.  Artinelli is interested in the woman, the man's "wife", from the start, but she shows no interest in him until he corners her in his room and probably rapes her.  Bizarrely, but a trope for old movies and stories, she falls in love with him after that episode, but doesn't want to leave her "husband", so as not to break up the act, possibly.  Eventually, the man finds out and lays a trap for the lovers.  He tells Artinelli that he'll be out late and then he waits in Artinelli's room for him to come back from his date with the woman.  He confronts Artinelli, pulls out two knives and demands he defend himself, and finally stabs him.  It was a foregone conclusion, since Artinelli was practically falling down drunk.  The man goes to his room, where his "wife" is pretending to sleep and she greets him happily when he comes in.  He looks at her strangely and she gets nervous, then when he goes to wash his hands, blood flows into the water and she screams.  He leaves the room and she follows him, begging him to stay and possibly explain what happened, but then they pass Artinelli's room and she sees the body.  She runs after her "husband" shouting for help, but then she falls down the stairs and breaks her neck or something.  At the end she's lying immobile on the stairs anyway.  The man turns himself in to the police, and we return to the beginning, to the scene with the warden.  The prisoner feels that God is punishing him for his bad decisions, but the warden assures him that God's mercy is greater than his justice, and the last scene is the prison gates opening.

The carnival man is Emil Jannings, a staple of these old German films.  When he goes in for the kill, he looks like an incredibly dangerous man.  His eyes seem to glow with the fires of Mephistopheles.  He's a jerk for abandoning his wife and the baby he seems to love dearly, but he's also a good partner to the young woman while they're together.  She seems to be following the policy of ingratiating herself to the most important man around.  Probably, this is just a survival strategy learned in a life of hardship.  Still, she doesn't seem to be disgusted by either of the men we see her with in the film.  Artinelli is the villain for sure, deliberately trying to destroy a relationship for his personal enjoyment, even if it might hurt him professionally.  In the end, of course, it hurts him both professionally and personally, since he's dead.  There are a couple of scenes where signs are in English, a reminder that the images for this restored version were taken from a copy in Library of Congress.  Like most 1920s films that are still available, the cinematography is excellent and the framing of the scenes is fantastic.  The story barely needs the intertitles, since the images practically speak for themselves.  The people next to me even commented that it was truly impressive how well they filmed different angles and movement with the technology of the time.  I'm only minorly irritated by the piousness at the end, but again, it's a common theme in those early films.

I think Stephan looks a little disapproving...

on the dark side

I'm continuing my German week with a good dark beer from Weihenstephaner, Korbinian.  I always favored the dark beers in Germany and Austria, and the taste is still with me after all this time.

Wait, did St. Stephan have a pack bear?!

 The smell is definitely alcoholic, not with the whiffs of plant matter noticeable in other beers.  It's a doppelbock, so definitely dark, but not black.  The beer in the glass has red-brown highlights, almost rubyish.  The taste is sweeter than I expected, but thinking back to previous bocks, it's just what it should be.  There's a little bit of chocolate at first, but it quickly disappears, replaced in the aftertaste with a grassier flavor.  There's that plant material.  It's a strong beer, at 7.4%, but the taste is deceptively smooth.  It's a good beer to go with my next German film...

Here's to horror!

Supplier: La Tienda de la Cerveza
Price: €2.95

I didn't see anything at the festival on Friday, so reviews will wait until tomorrow.  My friend the beer-seller has had a haircut, though, if I'm going to give an opinion on something besides beer.  While I like my guys to have some hair up top, some of them plenty hot with a shorter do.