The Sixth Sense
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | Sixth Sense The Sixth Sense - The sixth sense |
| Original title | The Sixth Sense |
 | |
| Country of production | United States |
| original language | English |
| Publishing year | 1999 |
| length | 107 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 16 |
| Rod | |
| Director | M. Night Shyamalan |
| script | M. Night Shyamalan |
| production |
Kathleen Kennedy , Frank Marshall , Barry Mendel , Sam Mercer |
| music | James Newton Howard |
| camera | Tak Fujimoto |
| cut | Andrew Mondshein |
| occupation | |
| |
The Sixth Sense [ də sɪksθ sɛns ] ( dt . "The Sixth Sense") is an American feature from director M. Night Shyamalan from the year 1999 . The film is assigned to the genre of psychological thriller because the tension and horror are not created by bloodthirsty monsters or excesses of violence, but by a subtle threat scenario and a psychology of fear. It tells the story of a little boy who claims to see dead people and is therefore being treated by a psychologist. With its surprising but cleverly constructed resolution, the film is one of the best-known examples of a so-called twist-ending .
After The Sixth Sense was largely positively received by the critics, the film received six nominations at the 2000 Academy Awards . The worldwide box office result was around 670 million US dollars.
action
content
The well-known child psychologist Dr. Malcolm Crowe is honored by the City of Philadelphia for his services. While he is celebrating this with his wife, the couple are surprised by an intruder in the bedroom. It turns out to be a former patient of Crowe, Vincent Gray, whom he had been unable to help as a child to overcome the fears that torment him to this day. The desperate, insane man shoots Dr. Crowe and then kills himself.
In the following year, Dr. Crowe the nine-year-old Cole, who strongly reminds him of his former patient Gray, which is why the case irritates him. Cole seems to be plagued by great fears that he does not confide in anyone. He is teased and shunned by his classmates as a "psycho". However, he pretends to his mother that he will be accepted at school. Even so, Cole's mother is distraught over his fears. Dr. Crowe doesn't seem to be able to help the boy at first. When Cole is invited for a birthday, he is bullied by other children and experiences something locked in a little room that traumatizes him deeply and makes him pass out. In the hospital, the psychologist visits his little patient and promises not to leave him alone. Cole finally reveals his secret to him: “I see dead people. They are angry. They don't know that they are dead. "
At first, Dr. Crowe doesn't and diagnoses delusions, but then doubts, and when he is going through the case of his former patient Vincent Gray, he notices strange voices on an old tape recording he made during a session with this boy. He realizes that Cole was telling him the truth and that his former patient Vincent Tote must also have seen or heard of him. He advises Cole not to be afraid of the dead, but to listen to them and try to help them. Cole succeeds in doing this for the first time in the case of little Kyra, who has gradually been poisoned by her own mother (see Münchhausen proxy syndrome ). Cole helps the dead girl to uncover the murder case for the bereaved and at the same time to protect Kyra's younger sister from her mother as a possible next victim. From then on, his life changes positively. It becomes clear that the people Cole sees have all died violently and need his help to finish with their lives.
Since then Dr. Crowe treats the boy, he is estranged from his wife. The two do not speak to each other, not even on their wedding day, when Crowe runs into his wife late at a restaurant and she leaves when he arrives. Dr. Crowe is heavily burdened by this, also because he believes he is watching his wife as she gradually falls in love with a work colleague and begins a new relationship. Cole advises him to speak to his wife when she has just fallen asleep. Conversely, the psychologist suggests that the boy should also confide in an important person. Then Cole takes heart and tells his mother that he can see the dead and that his grandmother visits him sometimes. At first the mother doesn't believe her son, but when Cole tells her secrets that only she and the dead grandmother can know, she embraces Cole, shaken but happy.
After Dr. Crowe's wife fell asleep while watching her wedding video, her husband tries to talk to her again; she reacts to him and asks him half asleep why he left her. Crowe is confused and protests that he has not left her when his wedding ring falls from her hands to the floor. This makes him realize he's been dead since Gray shot him that night. Only Cole could see him, just like the other dead. He now also realizes that his wife is mourning him. He finally accepts his death and leaves his sleeping widow. He sees his task of helping Cole and thus compensating for his failure on Gray as fulfilled.
shape
The plot of the story is divided into two parallel storylines that are linked in many places. One of the storylines tells Cole's story as it has been since first meeting Malcom Crowe. The other narrative thread, without the observer noticing it, is about Malcom's story since the evening he was shot by his former patient. Both lines of action taken individually are described from the personal point of view. Since the narrative is neutral and like that of an observer, an authorial narrative attitude can be ruled out. This parallelism between the storylines is maintained until the end, because after Cole has told his mother that he can see ghosts, Malcom opens up to reality and suddenly realizes that he himself is a ghost that his wife cannot see. In this parable-like story, the mother and wife serve as a projection for the main characters in order to achieve self-knowledge and thus change. Both main characters need the other in this search for knowledge and come to the solution by getting involved with the other.
Emergence
After his autobiographical film Praying with Anger was well received by the critics for the most part, but the audience did not care for it and the drama Wide Awake at the American box office with a budget of six million dollars had recorded only $ 282,175, took Shyamalan finally a commercial success. The filmmaker began to create a script. But he soon distanced himself from it. "It was the most banal thing you have ever read, with clichéd sentences and meaningless one-liners and trite arcs of tension," he recalled in an interview. The subsequent second draft again ended unsatisfactory for the author. With the idea of including a hypersensitive child in the story who can see dead people, he started a third design. He found inspiration in the television series Are You Afraid of the Dark? by David Winning . When Shyamalan was looking for a film distributor with the finished script, which now met his expectations, he met David Vogel from the Walt Disney Company .
According to James B. Stewart's Disney War book , after Vogel, after reading the script, without consulting his superiors, acquired the rights for $ 3 million and hired Shyamalan to direct. When the Disney executives found out, they resold the rights to Spyglass Entertainment , but secured 12.5% of the box office sales .
Shyamalan was looked after by the producer couple Frank Marshall and Kathleen Kennedy . Bruce Willis was hired for the role of child psychologist. He “can finally show his soul and cry: It is his often tear-soaked look at poor little Cole who mobilizes the handkerchiefs in the audience, and this gift makes Willis the ideal secondant of the real“ Sixth Sense ”star [...] Haley Joel Osment ". The then 10-year-old Haley Joel Osment played Cole Sear and later received an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor for his performance. Other roles were cast with Toni Collette , Olivia Williams , Mischa Barton and Donnie Wahlberg . Director M. Night Shyamalan himself has a cameo as a doctor speaking to Cole's mother.
Filming took place from September 21 to November 13, 1998 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Staging
camera
Tak Fujimoto's camera work remains primarily an observer and adapts to the protagonists' emotional and physical movements. This alignment has two consequences for the representation of the supernatural: "either we see it explicitly or not at all". Furthermore, several scenes are recorded with a single camera or a single camera setting. An example: Cole and his mother have breakfast in the kitchen. She gets up and leaves the room to get a tie for her son. The camera follows her. When she comes back, all the drawers and cupboards are open. The viewer is disturbed as it becomes clear that a little boy would not have been able to do this in such a short period of time.
The scene in which Dr. Crowe and his wife, sitting across from him in the restaurant, are also filmed in a single shot. The camera wanders past Crowe's wife towards the talking psychologist. His gaze is fixed on the other person who is outside the picture. When the bill is put on the table, the camera follows Dr. Crowe's hand down, catches Anna's hand, which is reaching for the bill, and takes it completely into the picture, hiding her husband. Westerboer notes, “This central and action-driven pan has a dual function: First, it represents Anna's potential annoyance with Malcolm [Dr. Crowe] with a rough gesture, later Malcolm's actual absence. Second, and that is its functional nature, it literally undermines the implied but impossible response to Malcolm's gaze through Anna. "
For the scene in which the psychologist and Cole play the game in which the boy always has to take a step forward or one step back - depending on whether Dr. Crowe makes a right or wrong guess, Shyamalan leaves the camera on any false statement Dr. Crowe makes, drive back. This is to emphasize his feeling that his patient is slipping away from him.
Cut and sound
For The Sixth Sense, Shyamalan opted for a few cuts and a slow, rhythmic narrative style. The important scenes are separated by long black screens. These bezels also represent the time when Dr. Crowe sees nothing, since as a ghost he can only perceive what he really wants. The shocks and dramatic moments of a scene are mostly generated acoustically or by James Newton Howard's film music. Furthermore, the dramaturge Marco Kreuzer analyzes that the supernatural is “transported almost exclusively through the story and the characters” and “not through manipulation with the help of the film editing”. The end of the film includes what is known as a twist . In other words, a completely different view of the entire film opens up for the audience through newly acquired information.
Themes and motifs
The ghosts
The ghosts in the film "don't necessarily pose a physical threat to Cole, although that fact isn't discovered until late in the film." The horror itself is only evoked by their frightening appearances and by means of a “monstrous fusion of the categories living and dead”. The ghosts are not represented by the classic image of “a floating, translucent spirit being”, but rather resemble the walking dead from The Night of the Living Dead . Kreuzer saw Coles double in the ghosts, “who embody his inner conflict of isolation from fellow human beings and, in addition, the need for communication. They stand for the part in Cole's soul life that wants to communicate his fear of life and cannot do this through external convention, the ( sic? ) Claim to be a normal member of society ”. Dr. Crowe, who is himself a ghost, is more or less his own doppelganger, "who embodies the distance from his wife in full measure: he died for her, emotionally unreachable because his work removes him from her".
Shyamalan "prepares meticulously" for the encounter between Cole and the dead, for example when he first shows every corner of the house in the idyllic night before he confronts Cole, "completely at the mercy and only dressed in underwear, with a suicidal woman". The reasons for the death of ghosts lie in their own homes, in their own families: a woman's suicide goes back to her husband's oppression, a boy accidentally shoots himself with his father's pistol, and a girl was killed by his mother . Kreuzer analyzes: "The earthly and the supernatural world break through the matter of course with which we assume security in our own home."
Belief and religion
Religion fails to protect against ghosts, which adds to the tension in the film. The church is Cole's refuge from the dead. Churches have served many people throughout history as protection from persecution. So Cole always flees to this place because he feels safe there. He also steals figures of saints, which he then lined up in his tent made of blankets and fabric in his children's room, as in his small personal cathedral. This “place of belief” is disempowered with the appearance of Kyra's spirit. “Due to the religious symbolism, it is not only the child's belief in crawling under the covers that turns out to be ineffective, but also the flight into the religious rite. The scary thing here is the disappointment in a safe haven, ”notes Kreuzer.
The disappointment through the faith can also be seen in Cole's mother when she once said to Cole that "your prayers will not be answered and you will have to solve the problems in your small family yourself by answering each other's prayers".
The child
Cole Sear is portrayed in the film as a child of divorce, and "one of the things that can be seen in his need to identify with a father figure is the fact that he wears his father's glasses and wristwatch". In addition, the feeling of being forgotten and neglected by his father is always present: "The father's watch does not work and Cole removed the glasses because they hurt his eyes." Westerboer notices that in The Sixth Sense Cole "forms the symbolic gateway to alternative worldviews that still seem to be little shaped by rational-stereotyped thinking". A form of childhood is present in the film, "which takes the existence of ghosts [...] for granted and which, in a sense, represents an allegory of the constructivist-based freedom of the inner gaze".
reception
Publication and criticism
| source | rating |
|---|---|
| Rotten tomatoes | |
| critic |
 
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| audience |
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| Metacritic | |
| critic |
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| audience |
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| IMDb |
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When The Sixth Sense celebrated its world premiere in the United States on August 2, 1999 in Philadelphia and opened in theaters on August 6, the reviews were largely positive (85% of the collected reviews on Rotten Tomatoes ).
The renowned film critic Roger Ebert gave the film three stars out of four and wrote that he was completely surprised by the end of the film. The scenes between Cole and the psychologist would "give the film its weight" and "make it as convincing as possible." He was also of the opinion that The Sixth Sense had a quiet, deceitful self-confidence that the film needed to "lead the audience to the end of a mysterious, fascinating path". The San Francisco Chronicle praised the performance of the actor and said that Shyamalan was able to create an eerie atmosphere that he knew how to maintain. This means that the film is better than 90% of the films of the same genre.
James Berardinelli , on the other hand, gave the film only one and a half stars out of four possible and judged that the script was not "strong enough and effective" and that there was a lack of "internal coherence and logic". The film does contain some interesting ideas, but they are not sufficiently evident. He also believed that the film's “surprising” ending was completely predictable.
When the film, which follows the tradition of films like Rosemary's Baby , Ekel or Das Omen , finally came out on December 30, 1999 in Germany and on January 5, 2000 in France, the judgments were also overwhelmingly positive. Der Spiegel was of the opinion that Shyamalan's work shows "a downright precocious sense of style in dealing with the actors as well as in the dosage of the horror elements and a very self-confident, very conservative elegance of the play with light and shadow" and it was a relief to see Bruce Willis in to see the role of the psychologist. Olivier Joyard's terse criticism in the Cahiers du Cinéma, however, described the psychological thriller as a boring and intricate film about the supernatural.
The Lexicon of International Films judged that the film draws - even if it partly uses the means of horror cinema to create a threatening atmosphere - “its emphatically calm narrative style and the unobtrusive imagery as a serious and extraordinarily carefully staged approach to the subject of the human mortality ”. Heiko Rosner from the film magazine Cinema wrote that The Sixth Sense was a classic of the genre. This is a true ghost film, the horror of which is a natural part of normality and which, unlike any nightmare, has no redeeming awakening. He also said that the film was a chamber horror play that was reminiscent of the early novel Polański and that the outstanding interplay between Willis and Osment gave it a fascinating, shimmering " shining " note. Reclam's film guide included the film in his selection and was of the opinion that Shyamalan had created a film that skillfully combined mild horror, suspense and poetry.
The German film and media rating in Wiesbaden awarded the film the rating valuable .
Popular success
The Sixth Sense was the 1999 most successful film after Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace and was on the list of the 100 most commercially successful films to date. He grossed around $ 26.7 million on the opening weekend in the United States. In the Federal Republic of Germany, 1,006,235 viewers were counted in the opening week, which is the most successful start of a Shyamalan film in Germany. After eight weeks, the film by the Indian-born filmmaker had grossed US $ 670 million worldwide with a budget of US $ 40 million, including approximately US $ 294 million in US cinemas. A total of 4.5 million visitors saw the film in Germany. The audience ratings in the Internet Movie Database were rather positive with 8.1 out of 10 points (as of February 2019).
Aftermath
André Götz writes that The Sixth Sense , with its autumnal range of colors, its sedate rhythm and its open melancholy close to Larmoyanz, has given a tone for a new wave of "serious, dark, adult horror film (s)" in Hollywood. The impression coincides with Bernd Zywietz's observation: "On the other hand, Shyamalan's film and success resulted in a wave of films that on the one hand tried to copy the surprising ending or explored the positive, humanistic approach in the supernatural and its genre" . Notable films include The Others (2001), in which the living turn out to be ghosts, Dragonfly (2002) and The Mothman Prophecies (2002), which focus on a male protagonist struggling with the loss of his wife and in Echoes - Voices from the intermediate world ( Stir of Echoes , 1999) the viewer witnesses a marriage breakdown.
Shyamalan's revival of the plot twist - sometimes interpreted by media scholars as a cinematic adaptation of the literary technique of so-called unreliable storytelling - resulted in a number of films with surprising endings: The Gathering (2002), Dead End (2003) and Lost Things (2003).
Awards
The Sixth Sense won 32 film awards and was nominated for 37 more. The film received six Oscar and four BAFTA nominations. The following list gives an overview of the various awards and nominations.
British Academy Film Awards 2000
Screen Actors Guild Awards 2000
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Blockbuster Entertainment Awards 2000
ASCAP Film and Television Music Awards 2000
Empire Awards 2000
Bram Stoker Awards 2000
Broadcast Film Critics Association Awards 2000
Chicago Film Critics Association Awards 2000
Teen Choice Awards 2000
Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Awards 2000
Writers Guild of America Awards 2000
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synchronization
The film was dubbed by Neue Tonfilm, Munich. The diaglogbook and direction are from Matthias von Stegmann .
| figure | actor | Voice actor |
|---|---|---|
| Malcolm Crowe | Bruce Willis | Manfred Lehmann |
| Cole Sear | Haley Joel Osment | Sebastian Günther |
| Anna Crowe | Olivia Williams | Claudia Urbschat-Mingues |
| Dr. Hill | M. Night Shyamalan | Manfred Trilling |
| Spirit in the dungeon | Sean Oliver | Andreas Neumann |
| Kyra Collins | Mischa Barton | Jana Kilka |
| Lynn Sear | Toni Collette | Elisabeth Günther |
| Sean | Glenn Fitzgerald | Tobias Lelle |
| Mr. Collins | Greg Wood | Andreas Neumann |
| Mrs. Collins | Angelica Torn | Martina Duncker |
| Stanley Cunningham | Bruce Norris | Ulrich Frank |
literature
- Britta Hartmann: About the power of first impressions. In: Fabienne Liptay, Yvonne Wolf (ed.): What's wrong now? Unreliable storytelling in literature and film. Edition Text + Criticism 2005, ISBN 978-3-88377-795-5 . Pp. 154-174.
- Peter Lerangis: Sixth Sense Movie Novelization , Romanadaption , Scholastic Paperbacks, ISBN 978-0-439-20163-6
- Marco Kreuzer: The dramaturgy of the uncanny in M. Night Shyamalan. VDM Verlag Dr. Müller , ISBN 978-3-639-05921-2 .
- Nils Westerboer: The Inner Look: On the Construction of Seeing and Knowledge in M. Night Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable and Signs. VDM Verlag Dr. Müller, ISBN 978-3-8364-7005-6 .
- Bernd Zywietz: Seeing dead people. M. Night Shyamalan and his films. Edition Screenshot, Volume 1. ISBN 978-3-00-025297-6 .
Web links
- The Sixth Sense in theInternet Movie Database(English)
- The Sixth Sense in the online film database
- The Sixth Sense at Metacritic (English)
- The Sixth Sense atRotten Tomatoes(English)
- Structuralistic interpretation on F.LM - texts for the film
References and comments
-
↑ Cynthia Freeland: Horror and Art-Dead. In: Stephen Prince (Ed.): The Horror Film. New Brunswick, New Jersey, London 2004, p. 189
Another film by M. Night Shyamalan is Signs (2002). - ^ The Sixth Sense (1999) - Box Office Mojo. Retrieved August 2, 2019 .
- ↑ Wide Awake grossing income. In: Box Office mojo. Retrieved February 18, 2009 .
- ↑ a b DVD : The Sixth Sense. Making of
- ↑ Biography and Trivia. In: Internet Movie Database. Retrieved February 18, 2009 .
- ↑ a b When the dead awaken. (PDF) In: Der Spiegel . December 27, 1999, accessed February 28, 2019 (Marc Fischer interviews Bruce Willis).
- ↑ Business. In: Internet Movie Database . Retrieved February 18, 2009 .
- ↑ a b Marco Kreuzer: The dramaturgy of the uncanny in M. Night Shyamalan. P. 52
- ↑ Marco Kreuzer: The dramaturgy of the uncanny in M. Night Shyamalan. P. 50.
- ↑ Nils Westerboer: The Inner Look. P. 44 f.
- ↑ a b Sixième Sense. (No longer available online.) In: film et culture.de. Archived from the original on February 13, 2009 ; Retrieved February 16, 2009 (French).
- ↑ a b Westerboer, Nils: Der Innere Blick , p. 90
- ↑ a b Marco Kreuzer: The dramaturgy of the uncanny in M. Night Shyamalan. P. 74
- ↑ a b Marco Kreuzer: The dramaturgy of the uncanny in M. Night Shyamalan. P. 90
- ↑ a b Marco Kreuzer: The dramaturgy of the uncanny in M. Night Shyamalan. P. 65
- ↑ a b Marco Kreuzer: The dramaturgy of the uncanny in M. Night Shyamalan. P. 85
- ↑ a b Nils Westerboer: The inner look. P. 101
- ↑ a b c The Sixth Sense at Rotten Tomatoes (English)
- ↑ a b The Sixth Sense at Metacritic , accessed March 29, 2013
- ↑ a b The Sixth Sense in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- ^ Roger Ebert: Review: The Sixth Sense. In: rogerebert.com. Retrieved February 16, 2009 .
- ↑ Mick LaSalle: Boy Is Dead-On Amazing In 'Sixth Sense' Thriller. In: San Francisco Chronicle. Retrieved February 18, 2009 .
- ↑ James Berardinelli: The Sixth Sense. In: reelviews.net. Retrieved February 18, 2009 .
- ↑ Olaf Schneekloth: It couldn't be more creepy. In: Spiegel Online . December 27, 1999, accessed January 28, 2019 .
- ↑ Olivier Joyard: Le sixième Sense - Critique. In: Cahiers du Cinéma. Volume 542, 1/2000, p. 72
- ^ The Sixth Sense. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed April 24, 2017 .
- ^ Heiko Rosner: The Sixth Sense. In: Cinema.de. Retrieved February 16, 2009 .
- ^ Reclam's film guide. 13th edition. Reclam-Verlag , 2008, ISBN 3-499-60662-3 , p. 658
- ↑ so-called list of the most successful films of all time . In: Insidekino. Retrieved February 18, 2009 .
- ^ Weekend Box Office. In: Box Office mojo. Retrieved February 16, 2009 .
- ↑ M. Night Shyamalan: The best starting weeks. In: Inside Kino. Retrieved February 16, 2009 .
- ^ The Sixth Sense (1999). In: Box Office mojo. Retrieved February 16, 2009 .
- ^ A b André Götz: Torn souls, broken lifeworlds. New Trends in American Horror Films. In: epd film . Volume 7/2002. Pp. 20-25
- ↑ Bernd Zywietz: Seeing dead people. P. 57
- ↑ a b Bernd Zywietz: Seeing dead people. P. 57 f.
- ↑ cf. Britta Hartmann: About the power of first impressions.
- ^ Awards for Sixth Sense. In: Internet Movie Database . Retrieved December 20, 2012 .
- ↑ dubbing , German dubbing index
