Erwin Kneihsl

Reel 9 of Gérard Courant's on-going Cinematon series.

An unsuccessful artistic director tries to raise money for a new opera house at a gala with celebrities from the worlds of culture and finance (and thus secure his own career) - an attempt that fails miserably.

"Deutschland privat" is a special project by Robert van Ackeren, who in 1979 asked people to send him their 8mm home movies by placing ads in several magazines in Berlin, Germany. In the ads he announced that he was planning to blow up and mount the best of those movies into a feature documentary to be released in German cinemas. He was surprised how many home movies he received and how generously people allowed him to use them for his feature. Part 1 of "Deutschland privat" gives us typical German home movies of the 1970s, i.e. private holidays, family parties, etc. Part 2 consists of what is now called "amateur porn"; home made 8mm movies featuring real porn action.

The film presents dazzling, creative, and surprisingly diverse "home theater" from five decades. And especially on the basis of the sometimes explicit sexual scenes, van Ackeren draws a very specifically German picture. This includes twenty-five Super 8 films with such beautiful titles as "Lady Di's Hat" (The VIP Movie), "Skin the Cock" (The Leisure Movie) or "Model Experiment" (Sex Film Without A Highpoint).