Word: german
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...mesmerize. Yet “The Rake’s Progress,” a modern opera first performed in Venice in 1951, is seldom included in the repertoire of major companies due to the common but misguided perception that English opera is inferior to its Italian or German counterpart. Over the past two weekends, the Dunster House Opera sought to correct this under-appreciation of Stravinksy’s work. Though the undertaking was an ambitious choice—the unorthodox rhythmic and harmonic elements of the music are particularly difficult—the company achieved a level...
...Told in a staccato beat of bombings, shootings and car chases, it's the story of a time when the young West German democracy, some 30 years after the death of Hitler, was shaken to its core. It was a high drama game of cat and mouse: The terrorists would act and the state would react with laws that many Germans felt curbed civil liberties, helping lift the Baader-Meinhof members to mythical status. It's a uniquely German story, but in the age of Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, many of the themes also resonate with American audiences...
...This obsessive research is all part of Eichinger's technique: to fill in the blanks of events that have entered Germany's collective consciousness, but that few people have witnessed up close. Baader Meinhof is laced with exact replicas of iconic photographs that appeared in German newspapers at the time. But these are the after-the-fact images of dead bodies and devastated buildings. Eichinger provides the missing frames, reconstructing the violence leading up to those images to expose its brutality...
...criticism of other German filmmakers who've tackled the same subject - such as Volker Schlöndorff in his 2000 film The Legend of Rita - is that they focus too much on trying to understand the terrorists and not enough on comprehending the destruction they caused. Besides, destruction makes for more exciting viewing. Throughout his career, Eichinger has emulated filmmakers who know how to entertain, which serves him well at the box office, but puts him at odds with the arthouse crowd, who accuse him of pandering. Never one to stand down from a fight, Eichinger bats the criticism back...
...surprise that the row revolves around cars, an industry badly hit by the downturn. Sarkozy's loan package was announced the day Peugeot Citroen revealed 11,000 job cuts worldwide. Sales at German firms such as VW, Europe's biggest carmaker, dropped 16% in January, BMW, the world leader in luxury autos, was down 22% and Daimler AG's Mercedes unit fell 35%. No surprise that European carmakers are pleading for an immediate $19 billion cash injection from...