Solo Sunny review – a rueful East German gem of ambition, loneliness and faded dreams

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Konrad Wolf’s 1980 drama follows a singer trying to escape the drab compromises of GDR life, capturing the melancholy of thwarted ambition with warmth and wit The terrible sadness, tattiness and poisoned idealism of the old GDR is preserved as if in a time capsule in this East German film from 1980; it could be a kind of B-side to Bob Fosse’s Cabaret. The heroine, would-be solo pop singer Sunny, is told by her ungallant MC that she is no Liza Minnelli; Cabaret fans might well incidentally recognise here the brusque German word “bumsen”. Solo Sunny is the work of Konrad “Koni” Wolf, a director with an impressive and strange pedigree: he was a garlanded state-sanctioned artist in East Germany, much admired at the Berlin film festival, whose older brother Markus happened to be one of the highest-ranking officials in the Stasi. It makes Wolf the second most politically compromised German film-maker in history. (The disillusioned communist East German character in Jenny Erpenbeck’s novel Ka...
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Kenneth Anger, underground film-maker and Hollywood Babylon author, dies aged 96

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The pioneering movie-maker had a major influence on queer culture and the 60s counterculture, and is also remembered for authoring the cult film history book

Kenneth Anger, the artist and film-maker whose work offered a distinctively radical mix of paganism and homoeroticism, has died aged 96. Art gallery Sprüth Magers confirmed his death, saying: “Through his kaleidoscopic films, which combine sumptuous visuals, popular music soundtracks, and a focus on queer themes and narratives, Anger laid the groundwork for the avant garde art scenes of the later 20th century, as well as for the visual languages of contemporary queer and youth culture.”

Anger’s films, which included Fireworks (1947), Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954), Scorpio Rising (1963) and Lucifer Rising (1972), made him a key figure in the counterculture over four decades, and later a hero to subsequent generations of film-makers grappling with similar themes. While he never found commercial success through his films, his book Hollywood Babylon – a compendium of often sleazy and largely unverifiable gossip about the film industry – became famous after first being published in 1959; it was followed by a sequel in 1984.

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