The Fullness Of Time Won’t Leave A Trace: Searching for 1980s singer Jeanette Dwyer

Benedikt Eiden 15. June 2025

I was alone in the road of dreams enough as it is / And then you came along and then you came into my street. These were the opening lines of the song “Leo” and also one of the first lines I heard from Jeanette Dwyer. And something, along with its lush, wistful synth line, immediately pulled me down into the song, without being able to say exactly what it was. There was a power, an idiosyncratic beauty. As if something seductively unique, something still unknown to me, pushed out of the arty yet unadorned language, the soaring up-tempo rhythms,

»ein ddr-bürger, der einen westberliner spielt, der einen ddr-bürger spielt«: Ideologie und Albernheit im Werk Ronald M. Schernikaus

Leon Maack 14. June 2025

Am Abend des 9. Novembers 1989 versammeln sich Zehntausende an der innerdeutschen Grenze, um die DDR Richtung Bundesrepublik zu verlassen. Sie verlangen Durchlass, der ihnen kurz zuvor auf einer Pressekonferenz irrtümlich versprochen wurde. Nach anfänglichem Zögern geben die verunsicherten Grenzsoldaten dem Druck nach. Als die Abgeordneten im Bonner Bundestag von der Grenzöffnung erfahren, stimmen sie spontan die westdeutsche Nationalhymne an. Hüben wie drüben, so scheint es, sind alle bester Laune. Elf Monate später ist der ostdeutsche Sozialismus passé. Der Schriftsteller Ronald M. Schernikau kann dem allgemeinen Freudentaumel nichts abgewinnen. Den Fall der Berliner Mauer, die er einmal als das »schönste

Avalanches Of The Soul: On Guy Maddin’s Twisted Heimatfilm Careful

Marion Schiwietz 7. July 2023

R eleased on screens in 1992, this film by Canadian director Guy Maddin opens up a fairy tale book for adults. Set against the idyllic backdrop of a snowy mountain village populated by a cast of peculiar inhabitants, it takes us down a rabbit hole of human abysses. Being both a homage and a parody of the kitschy genre of the Heimatfilm, Careful (Lawinen über Tolzbad) thus accommodates both the wondrous and the strangely familiar. As a result, it brought me to reminisce about my childhood days around the spa town of Bad Tölz in Upper Bavaria, whose surrounding mountains

De la cohorte mystique: Vox Populi!

Benedikt Eiden 29. November 2021

Inmitten dieser Sommer waren wir Schatten,die aus Schatten traten, Schritte setzend,die aus Schritten folgten,Schritte, die zu Schritten wurden,und zu Schritten wurden,und zu Schritten, Schritten…– Wolfgang Hilbig   I’m only satisfied with my music when it can bring me to an inner space whichis rich and mostly egoless,recalling […] feelings of childhood.This is definitely what I can call home for me. – Axel Kyrou, Vox Populi! I t seems to me the older you get, the more you perceive casual music listening as acoustic irradiation. Not that music necessarily has to be always something personal, cerebral or meaningful (on the contrary)

Terror And Transgression In No Man’s Land: The Films Of Takahisa Zeze

Christian Lenz 22. October 2021

T akahisa Zeze is one of the most distinguished and prolific Japanese filmmakers of the present day. Since the late 1980s, the director has realized more than sixty films including blockbusters such as the two-part mystery thriller Roku yon (64, 2016) or the slick romantic drama 8-nengoshi no Hanayome: Kiseki no Jitsuwa (The 8-Year Engagement, 2017). But Zeze’s oeuvre also includes subversive erotic film miniatures and other projects that transgress popular cinema conventions in particular ways – for example the meandering Documentary Zunō keisatsu (2009), a five-hour film about the reunion efforts of the titular proto-punk band, which can look

Die einzig wahre Volksmusik: On Christel Schönheit and Knusperkeks

Benedikt Eiden 22. July 2020

I n 1983, the well-known underground label ZickZack, which had previously played a vital role in shaping the so-called ‘Neue Deutsche Welle’, but was almost history again by the time, released a little 12’’ EP that is now long forgotten, yet on a closer look turns out as a strangely fascinating side-note in the German music culture of the early 1980s. On the front of its cover, in rich-black Antiqua, ‘Knusperkeks’ is emblazoned over a blurry sepia photo of the Belvedere on Klausberg, part of a large palace complex near Potsdam, designed by Friedrich Wilhelm IV but never virtually completed. On the back, besides some acknowledgements for borrowed equipment

Transdiegesis And The Other: Sound in the Films of David Lynch

Tim Nagel 9. April 2020

Diegesis:  1. A narrative world. 2. (film theory) The spatio-temporal world depicted in the film.  Anything within that world (such as dialogue or a shot of a roadsign used to establish a location)  is termed diegetic whereas anything outside it (such as a voiceover or a superimposed caption) is extradiegetic.  This distinction is especially associated with diegetic sound: for example, when a record-  player is shown to be the source of onscreen music. A diegetic audience is an audience within the depicted world. [Sounds in David Lynch’s movies can not] be reduced to some primary function. They are life itself,

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