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HIGHLIGHTS OF THE GERMAN CINEMA covers three decades of German film to inaugurate the Goethe Institute’s new 35mm screening facility, Kinowelt Hall. The series begins by honouring the 250th anniversary of Johann Sebastian Bach’s death, with Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s The Chronicle Of Anna Magdalena Bach, an austere fictional look at the last 27 years of Bach’s life, accompanied by a score that was recorded live on the set. The Straub/Huillet team tend to combine rigour and tedium in equal measure, but this is one of their best and most accessible films. The series, running every Thursday, numbers many rarely seen classics of the German New Wave, including R.W. Fassbinder’s lesbian soap opera The Bitter Tears Of Petra Von Kant (October 12) and Helke Sander’s prescient feminist film The All-Round Reduced Personality (November 2). It finishes up with blockbusters: the once-banned-in-Ontario The Tin Drum (November 9), Wim Wenders’ Wings Of Desire (November 30) and Ulrike Ottinger’s legendary Joan Of Arc Of Mongolia (December 7). (Kinowelt Hall, 163 King West, 7:30 pm)
