Film Community Calendar

In our Monthly Film Series, we will show a variety of GERMAN or GERMAN language films from Germany, Austria and Switzerland. On the 2nd Wednesday of each month, audiences will now have a chance to see these films on a regular basis at the CLINTON STREET THEATER. (Children movies will be playing on Sunday afternoons – please check our website.) All films are with English subtitles.

WED. May 10, 2017 – 7:00 PM

Directed by: Ernst Marischka,  Cast: Romy Schneider, Karl Heinz Bohm, Magda Schenider,

Perhaps the quintessential Heimatfilm, Sissi resembles a kind of mass, popular dream: a Bavarian princess meets, falls in love with, and eventually marries the Austrian emperor Franz Josef. It was the sort of perfect idyll that allowed audiences to forget the strains they faced in reconstructing a country destroyed in World War II. The landscape of the Alps, where the couple meets, is indispensable to the romantic aspects of the story; the sets and costumes at the Vienna court are extravagant; and the marriage scene—the film’s high point—gives way to a marvelous operetta. A large part of the film’s success was due to the luminous beauty of then seventeen-year-old Schneider. Sissi and its two sequels made Schneider the darling of the film-going public.

The Austrian-born actress Romy Schneider (1938–1982) began her career as the teen-aged star of a series of popular films about the young Austro-Hungarian Empress Elisabeth (“Sissi”). But the “German Shirley Temple” soon transformed herself into a sensual, intelligent young actress who garnered international attention when Italian director Luchino Visconti featured her in his segment of the 1962 omnibus film Boccaccio ’70. She rose to further prominence through a wide range of often challenging collaborations with some of the world’s most renowned film directors, including work with Orson Welles in The Trial, Otto Preminger in The Cardinal, Claude Sautet in Les Choses de la vie, Joseph Losey in The Assassination of Trotsky, and Bertrand Tavernier in Death Watch. Twenty years after her tragic and untimely passing, these films serve as a testament not only to her stunning screen presence but her great versatility as an actress.