Date/Time
Date(s) - 12/01/2019
3:00 pm - 5:00 pm
Location
Clinton Street Theater
Categories
In our Monthly Film Series, we will show a variety of GERMAN or GERMAN language films from Germany, Austria and Switzerland. On the 2nd Wednesday of each month, audiences will now have a chance to see these films on a regular basis at the CLINTON STREET THEATER. (Children movies will be playing on Sunday afternoons – please check our website.) All films are with English subtitles.
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 1, 2019 – 3:00 PM (Special Screening)
Germany 2017, 102 min.
Director: Andreas Dresen
Cast: Arved Friese, Justus von Dohnányi, Axel Prahl
Timm Thaler is poor, but he laughs a lot, and often. His laughter is so charming and contagious that a diabolical Baron wants, at all costs, to have it for himself. And so the world’s richest man makes the boy a dubious offer: if Timm agrees to sell him his laugh, he’ll win every bet he ever makes in the future. After hesitating at first, Timm signs the contract. But though he can now seemingly fulfill his every wish, without his laugh, he is a different person. Only Timm’s friends can save him now.
THE LEGEND OF TIMM THALER OR THE BOY WHO SOLD HIS LAUGHTER is based on the children’s book of the same name written by James Krüss in 1962. An immediate best seller, it was successfully adapted as a TV series in 1979. In German literature, the basic motif – the selling of one’s soul to the Devil – has a long tradition, from Goethe’s “Faust” to Adelbert von Chamisso’s “Peter Schlemihl’s Miraculous Story” (in which the title character sells his shadow) to Thomas Mann’s “Doctor Faustus”. The motif also turns up often in German silent films, such as in the various versions of THE STUDENT OF PRAGUE (in which the object of the Devil’s desire is the poor student’s reflection in the mirror).
