Dok Night – Vegan Food & Symbiopsychotaxicinema presents IN GEFAHR UND GROßTER NOT BRINGT DER MITTELWEG DEN TOD (1974)

19:00 Vegan Food

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20:30 Symbiopsychotaxicinema

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SYMBIOPSYCHOTAXICINEMA presents

IN GEFAHR UND GROßTER NOT BRINGT

DER MITTELWEG DEN TOD  (1974)

Films for Those Who Care

Presented by Jeffrey Badcock

A series of socially engaged movies, screened once a month on Thursdays. Touching on such hot topics as immigration, homelessness, racism, education, radical gender propositions, the pandemic and gentrification, these films not only explore visionary politics, but are also chosen to stir our imagination and creativity. The essence of cinema is the collective experience, and these screenings are aimed at creating intimate communities again in an increasingly hectic and fragmented world.

IN GEFAHR UND GROßTER NOT BRINGT

DER MITTELWEG DEN TOD  1974

(In Danger and Deep Distress the Middle-way Spells Certain Death)

Directed by Alexander Kluge and Edgar Reitz
86 minutes
In German with English subtitles

These kinds of movies coming from Europe in the 60s and 70s have an openness and fundamental playfulness that can’t be found in cinema today. What happened? At what point did everything become so straight-laced, uptight and unimaginative? The answer is that the cinema changed according to the dictates of society, and after the leftist movements were crushed, the only narrative that existed was right-wing and corporate.

This movie loosely focuses on two women living in West Germany. One woman steals men’s wallets to survive, and the other is a spy for the East German government. But don’t expect a thrilling suspense drama here… instead this is more a movie about the public sphere, about how our society works. We watch our two characters as they try to survive in a male dominated world, and the editing creatively juggles narrative fiction with documentary. For example, mixed in with the narrative we see real-life attacks of the police on students, along with the eviction of an occupied building in Frankfurt am Main. There are potshots taken at stuffiness on both sides of the Berlin wall, for example our East-German spy is reprimanded because her spy reports are more like poetry than dry factual documents. Obviously she has a different idea of truth than the state officials.

It was directed by the leading figure of the New German Cinema Alexander Kluge, but strangely enough it was co-directed with Edgar Reitz, who would later create the famous Heimat series. In the end, it is another wonderful snapshot of a different era, opening up possibilities that we could be embracing today.