Ulrich Köhler
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NYFF 2025: Duse, Gavagai
When I caught up with Martin Eden during the pandemic, I liked it pretty well but didn’t understand “what, exactly, is the value of […] a eulogy for the Western European project’s dissolution at this late date.” Whoops! I don’t know why I couldn’t grasp why Pietro Marcello wanted to delve into fascism’s allure for charismatic upstarts in 2019; I certainly get it now, so perhaps my positive response to his tepidly-received Duse is, in part, a delayed apology for spacing the first time round. This film’s project is, pretty precisely, gender-flipped Martin Eden (more succinctly, per my colleague Mark […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 15, 2025 -
Made For These Times: Ulrich Köhler on In My Room
Ulrich Köhler’s In My Room begins with what looks like a DCP glitch. The view is from a handheld news camera entering a press conference scrum, its operator confirming in voiceover that he’s rolling while roaming from lectern to lectern. Each time an official statement is delivered, the image cuts to the aftermath—the as-yet-unseen cameraman, Armin (Hans Löw), has confused the “off” and “on” switch, and the inadvertent B-roll he shot is unusable. All of Armin’s life is similarly shabbily disarrayed: At a club, he picks up a young lady and brings her home, but an ill-phrased refusal to let […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 4, 2019 -
TIFF 2018 Critic’s Notebook 8: In My Room, Wavelengths
Here’s what I did not expect to see last Monday: Béla Tarr, hunched by a door before the fourth and final screening of the experimental Wavelengths shorts programs so crucial to my annual TIFF experience. I’d missed a trick–news that he’d be with us had been tweeted out that morning, but I’m glad I didn’t know. Dropping in one of the crucial film figures of the last 30 years was a shock to the system; the red-carpet clutter unavoidably inseparable from nearly any festival faded away, and for a few minutes there was just Tarr, as stringent as expected, talking about the young […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 19, 2018
