Heiner Müller

Happy Lamento (2018)

On the one hand, the beyond-Tropicália surreal, wild, ecstatic universe of Khavn de la Cruz, the Philippines' internationally most venerated underground filmmaker. On the other, the Frankfurt School dialectics of Alexander Kluge, self-proclaimed arrière- ...

Rigor Was His Mark of Quality (2012)

Heiner Müller defines Stoicism as an attempt to deal with anarchy. For him, Erich Honecker is an example for "forced stoicism". Müller agrees with the following quote by Goethe: May God save me from self-awareness! For Müller, it represents a stoic atti ...

Ich will nicht wissen, wer ich bin - Heiner Müller (2009)

This film not only illuminates Heiner Müller's life and works, it is more about questioning the "Sphinx" of the East and its saying about the loss of utopias and examining whether Heiner Müller's texts, as he himself said, were messages in a bottle for t ...

Der Ausländer (2004)

Documentary by Thomas Heise filmed in East Berlin in 1987/88. ...

The Poet as Metaphor Slingshot (1997)

The point of departure for this discussion is the question of whether the collapse of the Soviet Union is dramatic material. Müller answers with this Brechtian sentence: "Oil resists the five acts." He describes how difficult it is to make a dramatic adap ...

Epic Theater & Post-heroic Management (1996)

The discussion begins with the parable of a frog in boiling water. It comes from the book "Post-heroic Management: A Manual" by Dirk Baecker, which is what Heiner Müller is currently reading at the time of the discussion. ...

Heiner Müller in Time Flight (1996)

Müller describes Ovid's Metamorphoses, Golding's translation of which (1603) was one of Shakespeare's sources, as an encyclopedia of the Greek myths, its dramatic central theme being the transformation of human beings into animals, plants, stones---either ...

He Who Smokes Looks Cold-Blooded (1996)

A few months before his death, Müller responded to the keywords "breathing" and "smoking" with an anecdote that interprets breathing as an indiscretion towards the dead. In his view, smoking is a means of practicing stoicism: "Whoever smokes looks cold-bl ...

Queen of Hearts on Judgment Day (1995)

The horizon of this conversation is marked by Müller's personal memories, reflections about ongoing themes in his work, thoughts about his current production and the nearness to death that has been brought by his illness. ...

On the Way to a Theater of Darknesses (1995)

The conversation begins on the topic of Müller's plans for new plays. Müller tells us that he has promised to write a libretto for Boulez, and that he wishes to use the myth of Heracles as material for a stage play. ...

Unter Deutschen (1995)

Documentary filmmaker Troller criss-crosses post-reunified "Transgermania" for a year, probing German identity through festivals (Carnival, Oktoberfest), films, small towns and big cities. He attends a Black–Bavarian wedding at an "animal fair," chats wi ...

The Voice of the Playwright (1995)

One of Müllers's vocal cords was paralyzed as a result of a life-saving radical operation (1995). At the beginning of the discussion Müller observes that figures from Greek mythology live on today as trademarks for products (Ajax as a cleaning agent, Pol ...

Omnivore Democracy (1995)

In this journal, Alexander Kluge and Heiner Müller talk about the dark side and the inevitability of democracy. Heiner Müller believes that democracy has its roots in the tragedy of the Atreidae. ...

My Rendezvous with Death (1995)

The title of the interview is from a line in a poem written by an American about the battle of Ypern in World War I: "My rendezvous with Death took place in a trench." Müller begins the interview by narrating how he prepared himself, both mentally and phy ...

The World is Not Bad, but Full (1994)

The central topic of the interview is the ancient concept of a necessary balance between the dead and the living, which also assumes the notion of a constant potential for force in the world. Müller and Kluge examine this mythical conception of life with ...

I Owe the World a Dead Person (1994)

In order to justify interpreting the Oresteia as a representation of the "birth of democracy" (P. Stein), one has to repress a lot, for example the sacrifice of Iphigenia or Elektra's feminist rebellion. The Oresteia represents an "Egyptian" material, situ ...

Under the Sign of Mars (1994)

This "music magazine" is a montage of visually alienated historical film clips of tanks and soldiers (First and Second World War), pictorial reminiscences of Russian avant-garde art, and excerpts of interviews with Heiner Müller accompanied by heavy metal ...

Anti-Opera (1993)

Heiner Müller was invited to a conference in Japan on the fate of opera in the 20th and 21st century. He talks about his flight over Siberia and his fascination with this "giant ridge" that he characterizes as the "Asian time preserve of Russia." This is ...

The Death of Seneca (1993)

Citing Nietzsche, Müller describes the motive of the philologist as "greed," "simply wanting to have everything, grasp everything, know everything." This "hunger" distinguishes the artist, but has become lost in modern art, which is so boring now because ...

The Last of the Mohicans (1993)

A news magazine program on important aspects of the history of postrevolutionary Cuba, consisting of two documentary film sequences about Castro and two interview sequences with Heiner Müller. Castro speaks about his experiences in the revolution and abou ...

Mind, Power, Castration (1993)

Here Müller and Kluge explicitly address a theme that is latently present in many of their conversations: the relation of intellectuals to reigning political power. Given his many writings on Frederick the Great, it is not surprising that Müller begins t ...

Frederick of Prussia (1992)

Kluge here presents a portrait of Friedrich the Great by means of quotations, film clips, historical images, and film documents. The program is a contribution to a public discussion about the role of the Prussian king in German and European history that un ...

“Wastage” of humans / Comrade Mauser / “Victim of History” (1991)

In this conversation, taking place shortly after the German reunification, Alexander Kluge and Heiner Müller discuss historical developments from the perspective of playwright Heiner Müller's view on subjectivity. Among other things, they talk about the ...

Every Frozen Structure has its Academy (1991)

At the time of the conversation Heiner Müller was the president of the Academy of Arts - East. At the beginning he describes his daily routine to Kluge. He is an unwilling president who has to lead an academy - which will soon be absorbed into a "European ...

Rome, as Far Away as the Moon (1991)

Movie scenes, montages of images and text, as well as conversations between Alexander Kluge, playwright Heiner Müller and classicist Wilfried Stroh provide a multifaceted insight in the far-away world of Ancient Rome. The conversation with Müller revolv ...

Heiner Müller on Legal Questions (1990)

"The metaphor is cleverer than the author" (Lichtenberg), a "screen," an "instrument for bundling" (Müller), because "everything changes so much" (Gertrude Stein) - Müller explicates these functions of figurative language with reference to the use of met ...

Some Kind of Shadow Machines Were Passing by (1990)

In this interview Müller and Kluge explore the East German's memories of the final days of the war. The session is introduced by a clip from the Russian film maker Sergei Parajanov's 1961 film entitled The Ukranian Rhapsody. Here a soldier of the Red Army ...

Die Zeit ist aus den Fugen (1990)

From August 1989 to March 1990, Heiner Müller and the Deutsches Theater ensemble develop "Hamlet/Maschine" amid East Germany's peaceful uprising. Actors help organize the November 4, 1989 Alexanderplatz demonstration. After the wall falls, artists split b ...

Conversation with Heiner Müller in Garath (1989)

In 1989, Heiner Müller staged an unabridged seven-and-a-half hour Hamlet, because in the process of German reunification "a leave-taking from the Hamlet principle in favor of the market economy" was taking place. In this interview, he elaborates on the pa ...

Portrait of Heiner Müller for his 60th Birthday (1989)

This portrait of Heiner Müller on the occasion of his 60th birthday is devoted for the most part to having Müller recount events and memories from the first quarter of his life, starting with his birth on January 9, 1929 and closing with his immediate po ...

Keine Hand wäscht die Andere (1988)

On the run from her criminal Italian husband, a young French woman meets a German lover in West Berlin who offers her shelter but who also gets entangled in her threatened life ever deeper. ...

Robert Wilson and the Civil Wars (1987)

Robert Wilson and the Civil Wars is an in-depth documentation of Robert Wilson's ambitious attempt to stage an epic, twelve-hour, multinational opera for the 1984 Summer Olympics. Filmmaker Howard Brookner follows the avant-garde theatre director as he con ...

"Kino 81" - Stillness, a film magazine by film critics (1981)

An issue of the magazine Kino 81, designed for the film department of WDR by staff of FILMKRITIK ...

Hamlet (2020)

Poem: I Set My Foot Upon the Air and It Carried Me (2003)

A series of poems. ...