#Bales2023FilmChallenge April 6: Someone is rejected on #SorryCharlieDay

A scandal, that's what it was! In the late 1960s, Peter Fleischmann picked the picturesque Catholic village of #Landshut as the backdrop for Jagdszenen aus #Niederbayern, the #film adaptation of Martin Sperr's #TheatrePlay with the same name.

A young man named Abram – played by Sperr – returns to his family village. Soon the townspeople's thorns move from the in their eyes other disgraceful villagers to the much-needed mechanic.

Where did he return from? He was in prison. What for? For being a homosexual. He's a #Drecksau (a dirty pig), his mother says. The village whore can't turn him around. A sow is slaughtered in real time in celebration of a successful #harvest and plans for the town's future are forged.

While created when West Germany's #Paragrafen175 was in place [1872–1994], illegality of same-sex relations], the homosexual aspect wasn't the main cause of the outrage. Some of the Landshutter villagers who played alongside the professional actors felt they were depicted as being backwards. This isn't a movie about hunting, sigted some. Lifting the veil of the prevalence of, a #Fernweh in a sense, *that* Germany (hush) was another.

Catholic Mass is a theatrical re-enactment of the life and suffering of the son of God. When rites outstay their meaning, when invocations turn routine, the worshippers lose sight.

#film #cinema #WestGermany #PeterFleischmann #MartinSperr #AngelaWinkler #HannaSchygulla #LGBT #Bayern #Bavaria #FilMastodon #CineMastodon @film https://letterboxd.com/12pt9/list/bales2023filmchallenge/

#Bales2023FilmChallenge March 7: a town meeting for #NationalTownMeetingDay

Raymond Rouleau's Les sorcières de #Salem (FR/GDR, 1957) – , with a screenplay by Marxist philosopher Jean-Paul #Sartre – is a very early #film adaptation of Arthur Miller's 1953 #TheatrePlay The Crucible. An allegory of #McCarthyism, the play is a (partially dramatised) retelling of the #SalemWitchTrials, a dramatic episode in early US-American history. During several court and town meetings, 200 people were falsely accused of meddling with the Devil; 19 of them were eventually executed.

Miller himself was accused of un-American activities in 1956 and convicted of contempt of Congress for refusing to identify others present at meetings he had attended. Which doesn't mean that #WitchTrials are a thing of the past. As easily one can transplant Puritan religious mass hysteria to 1950s McCarthy anti-socialism, as easy is it applicable to the state of the world today.

#ArthurMiller #JeanPaulSartre #TheCrucible #DDR #SimoneSignoret #YvesMontand @film