Klaus Wildenhahn

Klaus Wildenhahn, a native of Bonn, takes a personal and slightly wistful look behind the scenes of the government's move from Bonn to Berlin and bids farewell to the comparatively modest “federal village.” He is not interested in the political celebrities, who, unlike in the television reports produced at the same time, serve only as background noise, but in the everyday lives of the small employees, parliamentary servants, chauffeurs, and waiters.

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In her former life, Johanna K. worked as a civil engineer – Mr Kamermans – in Holland, building dykes and roads. Then she discovered her love of beautiful clothes and cabaret, and found her calling as a dancer. Pleasantly, calmly, and with admirable thoughtfulness, she recounts various stages of her eventful life between St. Pauli and Ibiza, between her own gender identity and social constraints and expectations.

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A portrait of St. Pauli and its people.

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Klaus Wildenhahn portraits workers and engineers restoring the Dresden Castle in the summer of 1990.

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Short version of Wildenhahn's own 1971 three-part film "Der Hamburger Aufstand Oktober 1923".

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A documentary about the 1892 cholera outbreak in Hamburg.

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Klaus Wildenhahn documents the consequences of the shutdown of the Thyssen smeltery in the city of Oberhausen.

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A portrait of the two documentary filmmakers Jerzy Bossak and Richard Leacock.

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Wuppertal is a drizzly, industrial city on the Rhine and one immediately wonders why Pina Bausch and her avant-garde dance troupe have settled there. A socially engaged documentarian, Wildenhahn is also perplexed by this issue and spends considerable time trying to place Bausch in a context outside of the aesthetic. Still, the dance company's daily life and the excruciating rehearsal and performance schedule is solidly captured. The film begins cleverly: a dance critic offers sagacious comments on ballet dancers finishing their careers at mid-thirty just when, according to Bausch, the "aspects of misery, suffering and fear of death should become an integral part of a dancer's spiritual and psychological make-up." Wildenhahn's camera glides over the dancers' bodies as Bausch leads them through their paces, a consummate teacher. Leaving behind rehearsals of "Bandoneón" and "Walzer," Wildenhahn then ventures out into the streets of Wuppertal searching for the dance of the common people.

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Second bandoneon film by Klaus Wildenhahn.

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A film about the connection of workers and the bandoneon in the Ruhr region.

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A portrait of the writer and former miner Günter Westerhoff

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Documentary about a steelworker strike on New Year's Eve 1978/79.

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This documentary brings together literary quotations, landscape photos, conversations with former farm workers, and memories of the concentration camps in Emsland.

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A four-part documentary about an economical crisis of the car industry in Germany, in the summer of 1975.

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Behind the scenes look at the preparations for the last two editions of Dietmar Schönherr's Talkshow.

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The two-part documentary introduced people in the villages and less populated areas of the Federal Republic. The prevailing structures, worries, hardships and hopes were shown - a portrait of the 1970s.

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A church congregation in Hamburg-Harburg: Klaus Wildenhahn observes the work of a pastor. What is his job? What is expected of him? What does he himself want?

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This award-winning film documents the only uprising of communists ever to occur in Germany. During the post-World War I period, Germany suffered from hyperinflation and the near-starvation of many working people. Working conditions were extremely bad, and there was a very vocal socialist movement. Despite fears that communists of one sort or another might take over the country, there was only one communist-led uprising, in 1923, and it was brutally suppressed. The uprising was a useful stick for governmental forces seeking greater social control, however, and it strengthened the tendency of the already weak Weimar regime to govern by emergency decree. An additional consequence was that the use of private militias was legitimized. These tendencies laid the groundwork for Hitler's takeover of power not too many years later. This documentary uses rare and never-before seen film footage from the strike and from that era.

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Documentary film.

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Documentary about a couple who lives on the fringes of German society.

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HARLEM, USA: in the aftermath of Martin Luther King’s murder, German filmmaker Klaus Wildenhahn turned his 16mm camera on the New Lafayette Theatre as its players rehearsed scenes, ran public workshops and conducted exercises in uptown Manhattan. New Lafayette (or NLT) had been founded by actor-director Robert Macbeth the previous year, with the aim of producing theater for black people, by black people, to reflect the experiences and vernacular of the Harlem community. Within the Black Arts Movement, NLT would become a significant institution: it published the journal Black Theatre, and employed a host of talents – including the Black Panthers’ Minister of Culture, Ed Bullins, and the great pianist Junior Mance, both of whom appear in Wildenhahn’s film as resident collaborators.

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A paean to alcohol as a means of survival to this world, and to the ephemeral communities created by our need not to be alone. On Christmas Eve, between six in the evening and four at night, Klaus Wildenhahn films people who are excluded from this "must be" celebration, and land up in a bar in St. Pauli, Hamburg: truck drivers and prostitutes, regular or casual customers, a coach and an amateur boxer... all desperately in search of happiness, tenderness and sex.

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Observational documentary about the Merce Cunningham Dance Company rehearsing throughout the summer of 1967 in New York.

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Workers in the northern German province build a silo.

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Experimental composer John Cage tours Europe with The Merce Cunningham Dance Company in 1966.

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Jazz and its milieu. Klaus Wildenhahn films the Jimmy Smith Trio in New York. With the addition of a white guitarist, Kenny Burrell, the band is in the studio recording the Rolling Stones current hit “Satisfaction”, as a tribute to the successful British Beat musicians, who were themselves inspired by blues and jazz.

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An account of the first European tour of American jazz organist Jimmy Smith and his trio in 1965, replete with backstage footage and music.

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A 90-year-old Japanese woman runs a small traditional shop in St. Pauli. Her name is Mizuki Wildenhahn, née Inai. In the 1950s, she fell in love in London with the future documentary filmmaker Klaus Wildenhahn. They married and had two children. The relationship broke down in 1968, after ten years, but they always stayed in touch. After the separation, Mrs. Wildenhahn raised Nikolas and Nina on her own and opened the shop Ars Japonica in 1977.

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Klaus Wildenhahn, a native of Bonn, takes a personal and slightly wistful look behind the scenes of the government's move from Bonn to Berlin and bids farewell to the comparatively modest “federal village.” He is not interested in the political celebrities, who, unlike in the television reports produced at the same time, serve only as background noise, but in the everyday lives of the small employees, parliamentary servants, chauffeurs, and waiters.

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Documentary by Jan Sebening and Daniel Sponsel.

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A documentary about the 'critical mass', the Film Coop, a group of young filmmakers in Hamburg during the 1960s - a small group far from the Mainstream or the New German Cinema.

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Interview with Klaus Wildenhahn about his filmmaking practice conducted and directed by Christoph Hübner

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A documentary about the 1892 cholera outbreak in Hamburg.

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Klaus Wildenhahn, a native of Bonn, takes a personal and slightly wistful look behind the scenes of the government's move from Bonn to Berlin and bids farewell to the comparatively modest “federal village.” He is not interested in the political celebrities, who, unlike in the television reports produced at the same time, serve only as background noise, but in the everyday lives of the small employees, parliamentary servants, chauffeurs, and waiters.

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A portrait of St. Pauli and its people.

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Klaus Wildenhahn portraits workers and engineers restoring the Dresden Castle in the summer of 1990.

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Short version of Wildenhahn's own 1971 three-part film "Der Hamburger Aufstand Oktober 1923".

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