A Vision of Resistance: Peter Nestler

Pachamama
Admired by the likes of Jean-Marie Straub and Harun Farocki, Peter Nestler was one of the most important filmmakers to emerge from postwar Germany. From his early films about the changing realities of rural and industrial areas in Germany and the UK, to his work for Swedish television, Nestler has remained a precise observer of the poetry and politics of labor, crafting meticulous portraits of industrial processes, working conditions, and workers themselves, as well as the background of struggle and oppression against which the era’s proletariat toiled. A vigorous yet nuanced opponent of fascism, an excavator of lost histories and a masterful formalist whose works are rich with a materiality all their own, Nestler has spent five decades chronicling how things get made, whether in a factory or at the level of ideology. This June, the Film Society is pleased to host Nestler himself for his first major retrospective in years, including a wealth of new digital restorations courtesy of Deutsche Kinemathek.
Presented in partnership with the 2017 Robert Flaherty Film Seminar and with support from MUBI and Goethe-Institut. Organized by Dennis Lim and Dan Sullivan, in collaboration with Ricardo Matos Cabo
Acknowledgments: Deutsche Kinemathek, Courtisane, Christopher Small, Ted Fendt, Barbara Ulrich, Nuno Lisboa, Anita Reher
Peter Nestler Program 1
Peter Nestler Program 2
Q&A with Peter Nestler on 6/24 and Reception
Three films about work, industrialization, and change, set in a Swabian village in the 1960s, a small town in the Ruhr region, and a men's club in Sheffield.Peter Nestler Program 3
Q&A with Peter Nestler on 6/24 and Reception
Nestler’s feature The North Calotte, an extraordinary journey through Northern Europe chronicling the devastating impact of industrialization on the region’s environment and indigenous cultures, is preceded by a short about a tragic mining accident.Peter Nestler Program 4
Peter Nestler Program 5
Peter Nestler Program 6
Q&A with Peter Nestler on 6/25
Nestler reckons with Germany’s twentieth-century legacy and denounces the treatment of workers in these films about labor exploitation, fascism, and capitalism.Peter Nestler Program 7
Intro by Peter Nestler on 6/25
This selection features an urgent, anti-fascist documentary about political crises in Greece and another that confronts the persecution of the Roma and Sinti in Germany under Nazism and its persistence after the war; plus a short by Straub-Huillet about the persecution of Jews in Europe.Peter Nestler Program 8
Peter Nestler Program 9
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