Views of a Clown (film)

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Movie
Original title Views of a clown
Country of production Germany
original language German
Publishing year 1976
length 111 minutes
Age rating FSK 12
Rod
Director Vojtěch Jasný
script Vojtěch Jasný
production Heinz Angermeyer
Maximilian Schell for independent film
music Eberhard Schoener
camera Walter Lassally
cut Dagmar Hirtz
occupation

Views of a Clown is a German feature film from 1976 based on the story of the same name by Heinrich Böll . Directed by Vojtěch Jasný played Helmut Griem the title role.

action

The Federal Republic of Germany in the late phase of the Adenauer era . Hans Schnier, the offspring of a family of industrialists, cannot overcome the senseless death of his sister. In the last days of the Second World War , his mother, who was oriented towards National Socialism , urged the 16-year-old to “voluntarily” report to the flak in order, as she put it, to “defend the holy German earth” at the front. A decade and a half later, Hans seems to have suppressed all the people around him who have always been familiar to him. People have made themselves comfortable in the economic miracle paradise of West Germany.

In protest against these perfect repression mechanisms and mendaciousness in his family environment, Hans begins to play the clown. But now he has injured his leg and has to pause for a long time. Money is tight. He plans to visit his parents at home in Bonn. This is the starting point of the film, the three narrative levels of which often oscillate between the present and the past.

Schnier travels all over Germany. With his appearances as a clown or as Charlie Chaplin in poorly attended performances in poor venues, he can barely survive financially. In flashbacks, he reflects on his life and the difficult relationship with his great love, the religious Marie Derkum. She had once left him to marry the devout Catholic Züpfner. Since then Schnier is no longer able to build up a relationship with another woman, this broken partnership has too much of an effect.

After many years, Hans returns to his parents' villa in Bonn. In the midst of a society given by his mother, in which the papal prelate Sommerwild also takes part, he immediately feels again the bigotry and social mendacity he has known and deeply hated since childhood . All of the terrible memories of the fateful last days of the war in the spring of 1945, when his childhood friend Georg was killed while handling a bazooka, come back immediately . The icy coldness of his mother that surrounds him repulses him deeply. The once ardent Hitler supporter has become a hypocritical grande dame of the Federal Republican present, who has also integrated a Jew into her tea party . In the face of this concentrated falsehood and cheap opportunism, Hans seeks an argument and confronts his mother with her Nazi-ideological views from the past.

In a personal conversation with the Catholic prelate, Hans later shows himself bitter that Marie left him because of this arch-Catholic Mr. Züpfner. Angry and frustrated, Hans leaves his parents' villa to visit his brother Leo, who has become a Catholic layman, in the monastery. But he is unsuccessful; the porter says that Brother Leo must not be disturbed now.

In the following flashbacks, Hans remembers the beautiful hours full of love and familiarity with Marie. One day Marie was gone to Cologne, as Hans found out from her father, and he was going after her. There he finds out that Marie's Catholic faith has taken on ever stronger and deeply alienating features. Hans took every opportunity to tease Marie and others present provocatively against Catholicism, Protestantism and even atheism in intimate rounds.

The discussion with his father, who was no less Nazi but less dogmatic than his mother until 1945, also fails. While Hans doubts and despairs about the present and the past, the father who visits him in his apartment calls on his eldest son to "come to terms" - to come to terms with the present and the past, to come to terms with the various forms of failure and futile opposition.

What remains is Hans Schnier's hope, which he places in his little brother, although the relationship between them has been clouded since the moment Leo became a Catholic brother in faith. A meeting between Hans and Leo takes place at short notice. But Hans, noisy and once again very tight on cash, falls on deaf ears with his Weltschmerz, even with Leo. In a provocative clown masquerade, Hans comes to the common meeting point in a park. However, he and Leo talk past each other. Leo's world is not compatible with that of the older brother. At the end, in his mask, Hans Schnier sits resignedly in front of the train station and sings sad melodies with content critical of religion.

production

Views of a Clown premiered on January 14, 1976 and was released for teenagers aged 12 and over.

Most of the film is in color; only flashbacks that take place in World War II are in black and white.

Joachim von Vietinghoff was production manager, the costumes were designed by Charlotte Flemming . The buildings came from Georg von Kieseritzky, and Bernhard Kellermann was responsible for the sound.

criticism

Wolf Donner wrote for Die Zeit in 1976: “The translation of the novel into the film, the memories and many phone calls made by Schnier in real flashbacks is credible and very precise: an optimal film adaptation, so to speak. Much authentic text is preserved in Schnier's continuous inner monologue as well as in the dialogues written by Böll, and Walter Lassally's camera serves as a template with functional realism. ” And about the performance of the actors can be read: “ Helmut Griem as Schnier, nuanced, sympathetic; convincing himself, where he intones problems from yesterday, saves the film over all topics of the early years. His face, up to now mainly used in the cinema as a blue-eyed, blonde Germanic larva, reflects the most varied processes and emotions, love, disgust, resignation, his alert sensitivity. He has wonderful scenes with his father (Gustav Rudolf Sellner) and that of Marie (Hans Christian Blech), at the age of 43 he plays the beautiful, shy first night of love of a schoolboy in a completely believable way. Next to him, Marie Hanna Schygullas remains strangely lanky and old German. A cloudy winding tower landscape, a train, the melancholy, tired face of the clown at the window: a journey into the past and into the sick German soul, a road picture into the inner world, in search of himself. "

In 1976, Wolfgang Limmer criticized Spiegel for the fact that the film adaptation of the Böll novel had chosen a material that had long been overtaken by the trends of the times: “The controversies that the book sparked when it was published in 1963 have long since become obsolete . West German reality developed in the intervening decade on the basis of other confrontations, and Böll followed them. So why the filming of the “Views of a Clown” today? Which could at best be ascribed a literary historical value? Vojtech Jasný (“When the hangover comes”) didn't even ask himself this question during his adaptation. His clown Hans Schnier (blown through with High German seriousness: Helmut Griem) torments himself through a Rhenish reality that you can only see in the old taxis that it was located in the early 1960s. That typical Cologne clerical-industrial complex, in which the capitalist-transcendental concept of the economic miracle manifests itself in such a congenial way, is atmospheric nowhere noticeable. Jasnýs Cologne and Bonn seem aseptic simply because they do not use dialect coloring. " The majority of the acting performances were also criticized: " The social forces appear in figures that are flattened in bursts [...] Only Schnier's father (Gustav Rudolf Sellner) wins in the best Scene, a long, futile discussion with the prodigal son something of the complex plasticity that one would have wished for all persons. " Limmer's conclusion: " Here a Böll is warmed up again, whose helpless remedy of total refusal he himself has long since overcome . "

In the lexicon of the international film it says: “Jasný's sensitively designed film adaptation of Heinrich Böll's novel convinces with its complaint of pure humanity about the fatal entanglement of the individual in the net of opportunistic group claims. In the tone of elegiac to resigned, the film also rarely manages to do justice to the snappy humor of the original. "

The Zoom film consultant explains : “Jasný adheres so slavishly to Heinrich Böll's literary model that he only lives up to the letter, not the spirit of the novel. The German citizens of the sixties, who were held up in the mirror by a disaffected and crazy clown, did not experience the explosive unmasking that Böll's novel still makes up to date today. Rather, the film gives the impression of a formal but belated settlement with the child prodigies of that time. "

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Wolf Donner : Views of a Clown . In: Die Zeit , No. 5/1976
  2. ↑ Wolfgang Limmer: Views of a clown . In: Der Spiegel . No. 4 , 1976, p. 108 ( online ).
  3. ↑ Klaus Brüne (Red.): Lexicon of the film . Reinbek near Hamburg 1987, volume 1, p. 160
  4. ↑ Quoted from: Robert Fischer, Joe Hembus: Der neue Deutsche Film 1960–1980 . Citadel film books, Wilhelm Goldmann, Munich 1981, p. 182