Anonyma - A woman in Berlin
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| Original title | Anonyma - A woman in Berlin |
| Country of production | Germany , Poland |
| original language | German , Russian |
| Publishing year | 2008 |
| length | 131 minutes |
| Rod | |
| Director | Max Färberböck |
| script | Max Färberböck |
| production | Günter Rohrbach |
| music | Zbigniew Preisner |
| camera | Benedict Neuenfels |
| cut | Ewa J. Lind |
| occupation | |
| |
Anonyma - a woman in Berlin is a film drama from 2008 by Max Färberböck , who also wrote the screenplay. Nina Hoss played the main role . The plot is based on the autobiographical book Eine Frau in Berlin by Marta Hillers , which was originally published by C. W. Ceram .
action
In April 1945 the Red Army marched into Berlin. The women are raped in a half-destroyed house . One of them is a 30-year-old woman whose name is not mentioned. The educated woman was once a well-traveled journalist and photographer. She records the events in a diary for her partner, who was posted to the Eastern Front years ago . In her distress of the threat of assault and rape every day, she decides to look for a Russian officer who will protect her and in return may sleep with her. But then what she was least prepared for happens: she slowly approaches her protector, the polite and melancholy Andrej. A relationship with the officer develops that feels like love, were it not for the barrier that still keeps them enemies until the end. When her friend Gerd finally returns, she has become estranged from him.
background
The film was shot from May 28, 2007 to September 4, 2007 in Germany and Poland. The cinema release in Germany was on October 23, 2008, the German DVD was released on April 23, 2009. In the US, the movie was released on 17th July 2009 as a limited release (limited release) in nine cinemas and played one there around 294,000 US dollars. The dialogue coach for the Russian language was Olga Volha Aliseichyk , who also appears as a small actress.
reception
In her analysis of the reception of the film in Germany and Russia, Yuliya von Saal, a historian at the Munich Institute for Contemporary History , sums up that the latter is attempting a joint German-Russian approach to the subject of sexual violence and the "victims of rape with Nina Hoss" to give a face ] without demonizing the Red Army ”. But this is exactly how it was perceived by the Russian critics: as a film with the function of relativizing the crimes of the Germans, a tendency to reverse the perpetrator-victim, which excludes the approximately 27 million war dead in the Soviet Union due to the German war of extermination in Operation Barbarossa , "Stylized the Red Army as a troop of drunk mass rapists and relativized the crimes of the Germans". In Germany, on the other hand, the film was mostly viewed as a boring, politically correct “mainstream prestige project” in which the sexual violence inflicted on German women by Soviet soldiers was relativized by means of a “melodramatic to kitschy” relationship story. Since the film dealt with the historical context rather negligently, it could not avoid the danger of “setting up an antithesis to one's own perpetration” and, like no other, it reflects the “difficulties and fears in dealing with this very complex, highly sensitive and political sensitive topic. "
Reviews
“The ambitious film adaptation of this unique document of the times picks up on the laconic style of the original and leaves it primarily in the representation of sexual violence with allusions. The film quickly succumbs to the constraints of genre conventions and melodramatically rolls out the (excellently played) protagonist's attempt to get a high-ranking officer to protect herself from the pack, which leads to all too familiar clichés and images. "
"Above all, however, Färberböck and his producer Günter Rohrbach succeeded in staging a taboo subject in German history in such a way that it makes the current fears of falling from a cosmopolitan life of prosperity into the archaic form of the law of the fist understandable."
“There are films like this, not because the makers are interested in the topic, but because someone wants to earn money and then you look for topics that“ work ”. Because a producer wants to jump on a train that has been rolling safely and at high speed for a long time. And he has the money to buy the rights. [...] The result is a mainstream prestige project, is clean, high-gloss German cinema, as we know it - we almost said: "to the point of vomiting"; clean, outstanding German actresses down to the supporting roles, with black dirty make-up on their faces and a visibly scratchy cloth on their white skin, as if they had to perform a Hauptmann play, and then placed between neatly arranged ruins. "
“Regrettably, the film adaptation in no way achieves the urgency of the diary, but rather slips with the saccharification of the material through an attached… love story… to the level of melodramatic kitsch. The desire for a love story that dominates this film and the strenuous effort to conform to the dictates of political correctness have evidently led the pen in the script and the baton in the direction. The gruesome reality of mass rape remains hidden. A conversation among raped women about this topic becomes ... a giggle like about experiences in a dance class. "
Awards
The film was nominated twice for the German Film Award in 2009: In the category Best Sound Design and in the category Best Acting Achievement - female supporting role for the actress Irm Hermann . At the Polish film festival Camerimage 2008, cameraman Benedict Neuenfels was nominated for the Golden Frog award for best camera work . At the Santa Barbara International Film Festival 2009 Max Färberböck won the award for the best international feature film .
The German Film and Media Evaluation FBW in Wiesbaden awarded the film the title valuable.
literature
- Yuliya von Saal: “Anonyma - a woman in Berlin” - German discussions and Russian reactions. In: Andreas Wirsching , Jürgen Zarusky , Alexander Tschubarjan, Viktor Ischtschenko: Remembrance of dictatorship and war. Focal points of cultural memory between Russia and Germany since 1945 (= sources and representations on contemporary history. Vol. 107). De Gruyter Oldenbourg. Berlin 2015. ISBN 978-3-11-040476-0 , pp. 329-344.
Web links
- Innominate - A woman in Berlin in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Anonyma - A woman in Berlin at filmportal.de
Individual evidence
- ^ Rainer Walter Kühne: "Anonyma: A Woman in Berlin: A Historical Document Of The Author Marta Hillers" (2017)
- ↑ Yuliya von Saal: “Anonyma - a woman in Berlin” - German discussions and Russian reactions. In: Andreas Wirsching , Jürgen Zarusky , Alexander Tschubarjan, Viktor Ischtschenko: Remembrance of dictatorship and war. Focal points of cultural memory between Russia and Germany since 1945 (= sources and representations on contemporary history. Vol. 107). De Gruyter Oldenbourg. Berlin 2015, here pp. 335–338.
- ↑ Yuliya von Saal: "Anonyma - a woman in Berlin" - German discussions and Russian reactions, p. 344.
- ↑ Anonyma - A woman in Berlin. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed March 2, 2017 .
- ↑ Men, naturally cowardly , sueddeutsche.de of October 22, 2008
- ^ Forbidden love and precarious German masculinity . Review on Telepolis , October 25, 2008
- ↑ Ingo von Münch : Woman, come on! The mass rapes of German women and girls in 1944/45 . Ares-Verlag , Graz 2009, page 22. ISBN 978-3-902475-78-7 .