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Hermann Vaske on Isabella Rossellini in Can Creativity Save the World?: “That was a set-up interview when she presented Casablanca at MoMA. It had to do with an Ingrid Bergman anniversary …” and Isabella at La Grenouille for David O. Russell’s Joy luncheon in the same Dries Van Noten outfit Photo: courtesy of Hermann Vaske and Anne-Katrin Titze

In the first instalment with Can Creativity Save The World? director Hermann Vaske, we were joined by music producer and 99 Records founder Ed Bahlman. In the second instalment we touched upon Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker with a new crop of climate activists, including Luisa Neubauer and Lakshmi Thevasagayam, the power of hope, a couple of Albert Einstein quotes, Garry Kasparov, AI challenges, interesting doublings with Günter Grass and Salman Rushdie, John Cleese, Nick Cave, Slavoj Žižek, Quentin Tarantino, Hans Zimmer, meeting the great Oscar Niemeyer at the Copacabana, Le Corbusier,...

South Korean writer Han Kang, whose international breakthrough novel The Vegetarian was made into a film, has won the Nobel Prize in Literature 2024.

The Swedish Academy unveiled the honoree Thursday, lauding “her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.”

Han’s 2007 novel The Vegetarian, her first novel to be translated into English, won the International Booker Prize in 2015. The story of Yeong-hye, a part-time graphic artist and homemaker, whose decision to stop eating meat leads to mental health struggles and problems in her familial life, was adapted as a feature film by Woo-Seong Lim and screened at Sundance in 2010.

The honor is one of the five Nobel Prizes established by the will of Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, in 1895. The others are prizes in chemistry, physics and medicine, as well as the Nobel Peace Prize.

Han Kang is the first South Korean to win the literature Nobel.

Wajda takes three young entrepreneurs and follows their greed and ambition to toxic capitalism’s logical conclusion in this queasily disturbing satire

Andrzej Wajda’s queasily compelling film from 1975, adapted by him from a novel by Wladysław Reymont, is an expressionist comic opera of toxic capitalism and bad faith, carried out by jittery entrepreneurs whose skills include insider trading, worker-exploitation and burning down failing businesses for the insurance. It is set in late 19th-century Łódź, a supposed promised land of free enterprise, whose night skies are shown by Wajda as more or less permanently red with factories set ablaze.

Our three gruesome heroes are Karol (Daniel Olbrychski) who is a Pole, Maks (Andrzej Seweryn) who is German, and Moryc (Wojciech Pszoniak) who is Jewish; this last being considered in these times effectively a separate nationality, and in fact the uneasy suspicion between these identities creates something a little like the mood in Danzig,...

Volker Schlöndorff, director of the Oscar and Palme d’Or winning The Tin Drum (adapted from Günter Grass’s novel Die Blechtrommel) with Anne-Katrin Titze on Jonathan Coe’s research on a Billy Wilder film for Mr. Wilder And Me: “I told him everything I knew about Fedora and the shooting of Fedora in Munich.” Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

Jonathan Coe’s imaginative and savvy novel, Mr. Wilder & Me, which centres on the making of Billy Wilder’s penultimate movie, Fedora, seen through the lens of a fictional Greek composer named Calista, credits Volker Schlöndorff as an important source.

Jonathan Coe’s Mr. Wilder And Me (Europa Editions), collection Anne-Katrin Titze Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

I met Volker at the Austrian Cultural Forum’s Hedy Lamarr: Actress. Inventor. Viennese exhibition to discuss his role in the research for the novel, which led us into a wide-ranging conversation that included his documentary series Billy,...

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French author Annie Ernaux, whose autobiography Happening was adapted for the screen by director Audrey Diwan as the abortion drama under the same name that earned the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival 2021, has won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

The Swedish Academy unveiled the honoree Thursday, lauding her for “the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots and collective restraints of personal memory.” Her other books include The Years and Getting Lost.

Ernaux “was born in 1940 and grew up in the small town of Yvetot in Normandy, where her parents had a combined grocery store and café,” the Swedish Academy noted. “Her path to authorship was long and arduous.”

The honor is one of the five Nobel Prizes established by the will of Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, in 1895. The others are prizes in chemistry, physics and medicine,...

The Forest Maker (Der Waldmacher) director Volker Schlöndorff on meeting Alternative Nobel Prize winner Tony Rinaudo in Berlin, 2018: “Six weeks later I was already meeting him again in Bamako, Mali …”

The Forest Maker (Der Waldmacher) from director Volker Schlöndorff is an evermore important film essay on the decades-long work of Australian agronomist Tony Rinaudo with African farmers and the community at-large. Idriss Diabaté from Ivory Coast, Senegal’s Alassane Diago, and Laurene Manaa Abdallah from Ghana are credited as co-directors and provide us with vital insights in their own individual sections.

“Nothing is lost” Rinaudo says and everything can be regrown again. Angela Winkler, star of Volker’s Oscar-winning adaptation of Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum, lends her enchanting voice to the prologue, which recounts an old African legend about the cradle of mankind, as collected by Carl Einstein.

Volker Schlöndorff with Anne-Katrin Titze on Sebastião Salgado:...

Corpo Celeste (Heavenly Body), Le Meravigile (The Wonders) and Lazzaro Felice (Happy As Lazzaro) director/screenwriter Alice Rohrwacher with Alba Rohrwacher Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

Cannes Best Screenplay winner Happy As Lazzaro (Lazzaro Felice), shot by Hélène Louvart, executive produced by Martin Scorsese, and starring Adriano Tardiolo with Alba Rohrwacher, Luca Chikovani, Agnese Graziani, David Bennent, Nicoletta Braschi, Sergi López, and Tommaso Ragno, was the opening night film in The Wonders: Alice and Alba Rohrwacher, organised by Museum of Modern Art Department of Film Curator Josh Siegel with Camilla Cormanni and Paola Ruggiero of Luce Cinecittà.

Alice Rohrwacher with Alba Rohrwacher: “I think fairy tales were very important for us. Especially the collection of Italian folktales done by Italo Calvino.” Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

The casting of David Bennent (Volker Schlöndorff’s adaptation of Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum), the magic of Italo Calvino (Italian Folktales), Astrid Lindgren, Angela Carter (The...

Pamela Katz, Carrie Welch with Margarethe von Trotta on the Return To Montauk set Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

Volker Schlöndorff, Oscar-winning director for The Tin Drum, based on Günter Grass's novel Die Blechtrommel, invited me to join him on the set for his latest film, Return To Montauk (Rückkehr Nach Montauk), while he was shooting scenes with Stellan Skarsgård and Susanne Wolff at the New York Public Library. The film also stars Nina Hoss and Niels Arestrup (brilliant in Diplomacy with André Dussollier). Screenwriter Colm Tóibín, along with Margarethe von Trotta and her co-writer Pam Katz (The Other Woman (Die Andere Frau), Rosenstrasse and Hannah Arendt) were up on the steps.

Margarethe von Trotta with Volker Schlöndorff Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

Von Trotta co-wrote and co-directed The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum with Volker, based on Heinrich Böll's novel and he directed her in their script for Coup de Grâce.

Günter Grass with David Bennent and Volker Schlöndorff on the set of The Tin Drum

Günter Grass, honored in 1999 with the Nobel Prize for Literature, died at the age of 87 today, April 13. Volker Schlöndorff directed The Tin Drum (Die Blechtrommel), based on Grass’s first novel and worked on the screenplay with Jean-Claude Carrière and Franz Seitz. Grass contributed additional dialogue. The film premiered at Cannes in 1979, winning the Palme d'Or in a tie with Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1980. Last year in New York at Lincoln Center, Volker and I discussed his adaptations, from The Tin Drum to Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman and Cyril Gély's play Diplomatie (Diplomacy).

Peeling the onion signed by Günter Grass - June 2007 Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

When Günter Grass came to New York in June 2007, I had the chance to discuss...

German novelist and Nobel Prize–winning author Günter Grass has died, reports the New York Times. Grass, best known for his Danzig Trilogy, died on Monday in a clinic in Lübeck, a city in northern Germany where he'd lived for decades. His first novel, The Tin Drum, was adapted into a film that won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film in 1980. In 1999, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He most recently published a controversial poem in 2012 criticizing Israel for its rhetoric on Iran's nuclear program, and in 2006, came under fire after revealing he'd been a Nazi during World War II. He was 87.

German news agencies are reporting that Günter Grass, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1999, has died at the age of 87. Cinephiles will know him primarily as the author of The Tin Drum (1959)—Volker Schlöndorff's 1979 adaptation won the Palme d'Or in Cannes and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. "First published in 1959, the book, about a little boy, Oskar, who refuses to grow, caused a huge controversy in Germany, both because of its bawdiness and because it dealt in such an ironic and mocking fashion with the Nazi era," wrote Geoffrey Macnab for Criterion in 2013. » - David Hudson...

German news agencies are reporting that Günter Grass, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1999, has died at the age of 87. Cinephiles will know him primarily as the author of The Tin Drum (1959)—Volker Schlöndorff's 1979 adaptation won the Palme d'Or in Cannes and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. "First published in 1959, the book, about a little boy, Oskar, who refuses to grow, caused a huge controversy in Germany, both because of its bawdiness and because it dealt in such an ironic and mocking fashion with the Nazi era," wrote Geoffrey Macnab for Criterion in 2013. » - David Hudson...

Iceland’s Oscar submission takes top prize in Lübeck; Edward Snowden gives video introduction to Citizenfour at Dok Leipzig; arson attack hits Lgbt screening in Kyiv.

Baldvin Baldvin Zophoníasson’s Life In A Fishbowl was the big winner at this year’s Nordic Film Days in Lübeck, taking home the Ndr Film Prize, worth $15,655 (€12,500)

Lead actor Thorsteinn Bachmann accepted the award in person from the five-person jury, which said it was “a touching and hopeful film about seemingly hopeless situations”.

The co-production between Iceland, Finland, Sweden and the Czech Republic is Iceland’s submission for the Best Foreign-Language Film Oscar and is being handled internationally by Films Boutique.

Special mentions were also given to Hisham Zaman’s Letter To The King (Norway) and J-p Valkeapää’s They Have Escaped (Finland) by the jury comprising actors Victoria Trauttmansdorff and Niklas Osterloh, producer Christoph Thoke, Ndr commissioning editor Diana Schulte-Kellinghaus and Finnish film-maker Kirsi Marie Liimatainen.

Festival-goers voted for...

Diplomacy director Volker Schlöndorff with Anne-Katrin Titze at Lincoln Center on Anton Corbijn's A Most Wanted Man: "Actually, I always compared Niels Arestrup to Philip Seymour Hoffman." Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

At the 2014 Telluride Film Festival, Volker Schlöndorff was awarded the Silver Medallion and Diplomacy (Diplomatie), starring Niels Arestrup and André Dussollier was screened, as well as Billy, How Did You Do It? (Billy Wilder, Wie Haben Sie's Gemacht?) and Baal starring Rainer Werner Fassbinder. In New York, we discussed his adaptations from The Tin Drum by Günter Grass to Cyril Gely's play Diplomatie and dubbing Dustin Hoffman in German with Otto Sander in Arthur Miller's Death Of A Salesman. Working with Sam Shepard on Voyager, Arestrup's correspondence with Philip Seymour Hoffman in Anton Corbijn's A Most Wanted Man, Bertrand Tavernier's The French Minister and Ralph Fiennes' Max Frisch desires are explored.

Anne-Katrin Titze: As far as adaptations are concerned,...

Mood Indigo's Audrey Tautou with Michel Gondry at the Tribeca Grand Hotel premiere: "I like the bell. The doorbell that is like an insect." Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

Michel Gondry had a Tin Drum moment on the red carpet for his Mood Indigo*, starring Audrey Tautou and Romain Duris with Gad Elmaleh, Omar Sy, Aïssa Maïga and Charlotte Le Bon. Boris Vian transformed into Günter Grass with a Volker Schlöndorff image stuck in and out of Gondry's head ending up in Is The Man Who Is Tall Happy? An Animated Conversation With Noam Chomsky and out of a faucet in Mood Indigo. Tautou and Duris walked the red carpet in 2013 at The Paris Theatre - she for Claude Miller's Thérèse Desqueyroux and he for Régis Roinsard's Populaire.

Audrey Tautou at Mood Indigo New York premiere: "I was really intrigued by the imagination and phantasy of this universe." Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

David Byrne,...

Versatile actor at Berlin's Schaubühne theatre who made films with Wim Wenders and Eric Rohmer

The German actor Otto Sander, who has died aged 72 after suffering from cancer, made his name as one of the members of Peter Stein's Schaubühne theatre in Berlin, where he developed a versatile but precise stage presence that he brought to all kinds of roles. Sander also had more than 100 credits in film and TV productions, most notably Wolfgang Petersen's Das Boot (The Boat, 1981), as a drunk and disillusioned U-boat captain, and Der Himmel über Berlin (Wings of Desire, 1987), as one of the two angels in Wim Wenders's magical survey of the divided city.

Born in Hanover, Sander grew up in Kassel, where he graduated from the Friederichsgymnasium in 1961. He did his military service as a naval reserve officer. In 1965, in his first engagement at the Düsseldorf Kammerspiele, he showed a natural...

Aida Folch and Jean Rochefort in The Artist And The Model In my conversation with Academy Award winning director Fernando Trueba on his latest film The Artist And The Model (El Artista Y La Modelo), we spoke about the influence of a famous father and son, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Jean Renoir. Grace Kelly, Hedy Lamarr, a François Truffaut Wild Child and Robert Bresson's Au Hasard Balthazar led to the nature of women in Michelangelo Antonioni's Identification Of A Woman.

Alongside Trueba was actress Aida Folch whose character Mercè is recruited by Claudia Cardinale's Léa Cros to become a muse for her husband, the artist Marc Cros, played by Jean Rochefort.

The film set in 1943 was co-written by long-time Buñuel collaborator Jean-Claude Carrière, who together with Günter Grass adapted his novel The Tin Drum for Volker Schlöndorff's Academy Award winning film of the same name. He is...

Presenting his new film “Calm at Sea” (reviewed here) in the Bio Roy Theater during the Göteborg International Film Festival last week, director Volker Schlöndorff said, in mock-pique, “It’s so great to be in this wonderful theatre, named after Sweden’s great filmmaker Roy Andersson. I‘m still waiting for my hometown to put up a theater in my name.” And perhaps given the level of esteem in which he is held, especially in his home country, the idea of one day catching a 2.30 showing at The Volker is not so farfetched. But of course Schlöndorff’s career has hardly been plain sailing, with his towering achievement, the oddly compelling, uncanny adaptation of Günter Grass' “The Tin Drum” rather overshadowing the films that came before and after, especially having been crowned with an Oscar and the Palme d’Or. Nonetheless the director has continued to work in various genres and media,...

The Tin Drum is a story of Europe’s nasty history in the first half of the 20th Century and, like that tortured history, the film features an intoxicating mixture of the profound and the profane. Rewarded in 1979 with an Oscar and the Palme d’Or, Volker Schlöndorff’s satiric epic manages to reduce WWII’s enormous struggles to simple, precisely stated metaphors that entrance, shock and mystify. Schlöndorff’s intent is not to increase viewers’ historical understanding of that dark period, but to serve up its murky vicissitudes with a freakish lingua franca that simultaneously amuses and repulses; that seduces while it brutalizes.

Based on a sprawling 1959 novel by Günter Grass, The Tin Drum is set in Danzig, a nominally autonomous region on the Baltic coast established in 1920 by the Treaty of Versailles. The story’s chief concern is the life and times of Oskar Matzerath (David Bennent), born...

Blu-ray & DVD Release Date: Jan. 13, 2013

Price: DVD $29.95, Blu-ray $39.95

Studio: Criterion

Volker Schlöndorff’s (The Handmaid’s Tale) 1979 war drama The Tin Drum, which earned the Palme d’Or at Cannes and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, is based on Nobel laureate Günter Grass’s acclaimed 1959 novel.

David Bennent pounds away at The Tin Drum.

Oskar (David Bennent) is born in Germany in 1924 with an advanced intellect. Repulsed by the hypocrisy of adults and the irresponsibility of society, he refuses to grow older after his third birthday. While the chaotic world around him careers toward the madness and folly of World War II, Oskar pounds incessantly on his beloved tin drum and perfects his uncannily piercing shrieks to bizarre, dangerous and memorable effect.

Characterized by its surreal imagery, arresting eroticism, and strong, satirical tone, The Tin Drum is presented in German with English subtitles.

Available for a time...

Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir (2008) is an animated Israeli film which is nearly four years old but, to my mind, it has become relevant in an unforeseen way with the recent controversy over Günter Grass’ poem about Israel. Grass is a celebrated Nobel Prize winning novelist and his recent poem ‘What Must be Said’ apparently questions Israel’s innocence in the nuclear conflagration developing in the Middle-East, treating both Israel and Iran as equally dangerous. This has led to huge criticism of Grass across the liberal West. For instance, a French ‘philosopher’ Bernard Henri Levy, writing in The Huffington Post, wonders if Grass has nothing better to do than to publish a poem in which he asserts that a serious threat hanging over our heads comes from a ‘tiny country, one of the smallest in the world, one of the most vulnerable as well and, by the by, a...

Getty German writer and Nobel laureate Gunter Grass reads an excerpt of his novel “The Tin Drum” at the 61st Frankfurt Book Fair in Frankfurt October 16, 2009.

In his 1939 elegy for W. B. Yeats, trying tacitly to pardon the Irish Nobel Laureate’s flirtations with Fascism at the end of his life, W. H. Auden coined a commonplace: “poetry makes nothing happen.” In the past twenty-four hours, however, Günter Grass has demonstrated that a German Nobel Laureate can cause quite a...

The adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer's 9/11 novel begins promisingly, but soon drowns in treacly sentimentality

In 2001, the twin towers of the World Trade Centre were an unloved New York landmark that became overnight a palpable absence on the skyline and a complex emblem for our tormented times. In his distinguished book Celluloid Skyline: New York and the Movies, published in December of that year, architect and film-maker James Sanders called them "that most overbearing symbol of the new city": he was discussing their unlovely role in Three Days of the Condor (the film's villain, the CIA, had its headquarters there), and in the 1976 version of King Kong.

The book was in proof the week of 9/11 and Sanders considered removing these opprobrious references, but wisely decided this would distort the way Manhattan was perceived by both himself and his readers. Others reacted more precipitately, and film-makers cut shots of...

This week: the story of a Frenchman's epic journey from Paris to Pakistan by car, the latest from novelist Paul Auster about a neighborhood in Brooklyn, and Gunter Grass' unusual new memoir/novel.

The Way of the WorldBy Nicolas Bouvier

Related story on The Daily Beast: This Week's Hot Reads

It was a Parisian Indiana Jones, eccentrically dressed in a khaki combat jacket and French beret, who first told me about The Way of the World. We were in Northeast Afghanistan, camping on top of a hill overlooking a large archaeological site that may or may not have been the city where Alexander the Great met his bride Roxane. I was just out of college and had, at that moment, decided to become an archaeologist. I was in such awe of the man that he could have told me to read the phonebook and I would have. It was a fortunate thing he didn't,...

By Michelle Orange

Samuel Johnson said it was the last refuge of scoundrels, and if that's true, then I predict a nation-wide crime wave and a week-long run on golden toothpicks and hairless cats, because at this time of year patriotism will not be denied. Refuse to partake of -- or at least acknowledge -- it at your political and gustatory peril. With that in mind, we offer a list of films that might satisfy those on the patriotic fence, those who prefer their patriotism (and their marshmallow salad) a little bittersweet. Like Mr. Johnson, I am not an American, and much of what I know about everything, including American patriotism, I learned at the movies; these films have taught me the most about the boons and the bummers involved in loving this country.

Glory (1989)

Many countries with historically subjugated populations have stories similar to that explored in 1989's "Glory...