Teensy Kino scene

>> Short films are on tap at the Goethe-Institut

by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

So the Goethe-Institut is hosting a festival of German shorts. No, not lederhosen. Short films, some by students and some by more established talents. The "Short and Sweet" series is collected into four showcases, and the first (tonight, Thursday, March 22) is called "Tricky Germany," a play on the word Trickfilm--animation.

This collection of cartoons from the last five years employs a wide range of animation styles. Baerbel Neubauer's Roots recalls Canadian Norman McLaren's raw efforts, painted directly on the film stock. Olaf Boehme's Base of Reality uses simple, contour-line cel animation to show a geometric impasse. Pencil on paper is put to good effect for Thomas Meyer-Hermann's The Creation, which shows us the Biblical myth as it might have been were God a disgruntled Disney employee. Stop-motion also gets its due--Heinrich Sabl's Pere Ubu adapts Alfred Jarry's absurdist play in a weathered, washed-out puppetoon style.

Some animation also pops up in the "Politics? Politics!" showcase (Thursday, March 29), as For Training Purposes Only and the red-baitin' Hammer & Sickle squeeze in between documentaries and short subjects exploring war in central Europe, Berlin's millennial facelift and, of course, those pesky Nazis. The "Irony of Fate" showcase (Friday, March 23) leans toward the current German comedy trend and that old standby of the student filmmaker, the ironic shaggy-dog yarn. Mind you, this is German comedy, so expect Shadenfreude (discreet pleasure in the suffering of others) by the bucketload.

The big guns come out for "Love and Other Cruelties" (Friday, March 30). A couple of these (Donald Kraemer's Woman or the accomplished but obvious 8cht) might have fit as easily among the "Irony" shorts, but others reach farther. Stefan Schneider's The Navigator is in the same key as Terry Gilliam's Brazil, minus the ludicrous mechanics. Epilogue, meanwhile, is an intense little exercise from Tom Tykwer, who would go on to make Run, Lola, Run.

Most of the films are subtitled or even dubbed, while the animated shorts are largely dialogue-free. Two interesting exceptions: Heike Wasem's The Wheel, a steampunk nightmare set in Lancashire, 1912, is in English, while the touching Tell Me About Love sees a Russian and a Greek bypassing their linguistic block in a Berlin café. Subtitles would be completely contrary to the film's effective point, wouldn't they?

See repertory listings for showtimes