September Wheat ( Septemberweizen )

September Wheat (DVD) (*)

~~$29.99~~ $23.97

Original Title: Septemberweizen
Screened, competed or awarded at:
Other Film Festival Awards

Language Selections:
English ( Dolby Digital 2.0 )
French ( Dolby Digital 2.0 )
German ( Dolby Digital 2.0 )

Product Origin/Format:
Germany ( PAL/Region 0 )

Running Time:
96 min

Aspect Ratio:
Fullscreen

Special Features:
Interactive Menu
Scene Access

Movie filmed in 1980 and produced in:
Germany ( Germany, Central Europe )

Directed By:
Peter Krieg

Written By:
Peter Krieg

Actors:
Ilse Böttcher ..... Narrator (voice)
Eleonor Holder ..... Narrator (voice)
Rolf Klein ..... Narrator (voice)
Berthold Korner ..... Narrator (voice)
Klaus Kreuleidies ..... Narrator (voice)
Peter Loth ..... Narrator (voice)
Ullo von Peinen ..... Narrator (voice)

Synopsis:

PETER KRIEG approaches the subject of wheat from every conceivable angle in his impressionistic documentary ''September Wheat,'' and wheat turns out to have a great many angles indeed. He details the farming, marketing and distibution of the grain, not to mention its political, social and culinary possibilities. ''September Wheat'' is an angry and sometimes hotheaded effort, but also an informative and very interesting one. It opens today at the Film Forum, accompanied by D.W. Griffith's 1909 short ''A Corner on Wheat,'' which delivers as handy an economics lesson in 11 minutes as Mr. Krieg produces over the course of his hour and a half. Some portions of Mr. Krieg's film are given over to startling facts, others to more generalized but no less startling impressions. In the impressions, there is the segment on the Cargill Corporation, the enormous grain company, with attention paid to the concern's lavish offices, its almost unimaginably huge facilities for wheat storage and the cool, impassive faces of its white-collar staff. This segment is followed by a look at frenzied wheat speculators at the Chicago Board of Trade, and their faces are also telling. Another of Mr. Krieg's memorable montages details the baking of Wonder Bread. This is presented by the film as a despicable process, but it appears, what with 5,000 evenly browned loaves flopping off the assembly line every hour, rather miraculo us. Mr. Krieg's methods do not permit him to interject the Wonder Bre ad-damning facts that might effectively color the episode; instead, his film offers a vague denunciation of American packaged foods , the news that Americancorporations spend huge sums of money on adve rtising, some shots of supermarket aisles and the ironic sight of a family eagerly wolfing down Wonder Bread. The viewer is bound to wan t more detailed, better attributed information. Those parts of ''September Wheat'' that are more factually precise paint a distressing picture, especially a section about the development of hybrid wheat strains. The film shows researchers from a seed company trying to replace perennial, self-pollinating wheat with a strain that must be planted from fresh seeds every year, in order to sell more seeds and more chemi cal fertilizers and pesticides. I n a freewheeling mood, and to the accompaniment of Rolf Riehm's squaw ky, atonal modern score, Mr. Krieg juxtaposes shots of poor people a nd fancy houses, uses powerful but only half-explained footage of a wheat crop being incinerated, and cuts periodically to aminister stan ding waist-deep in a wheat field, reading from the Bible.

This product was added to our catalog on Monday 28 December, 2009.