Berlin Excelsior

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Movie
Original title Berlin Excelsior
BERLIN-EXCELSIOR Kinoplakat.jpg
Country of production Germany
original language German
Publishing year 2017
length 87 minutes
Age rating FSK 0
Rod
Director Erik Lemke
script Erik Lemke, André Krummel
production Peter Rommel
music Tobias Burkardt
camera André Krummel
cut Erik Lemke

Berlin Excelsior is a 2017 German documentary directed by Erik Lemke and produced by Peter Rommel .

content

The documentary shows scenes from the lives of numerous residents of the “ Excelsiorhaus ” residential and commercial building , which is located in the Berlin district of Kreuzberg . The scenes depict the everyday lives of various residents, with André Krummel's camera apparently taking part in even the most intimate situations without being noticed. Individual residents of the Excelsior house "who unsuccessfully try to keep our society's promises of happiness" are portrayed in greater detail, including a former escort , an aging revue dancer, a failed start-up founder and a pensioner who sometimes works as a photographer, sometimes as a management consultant. They can be seen in different scenes that come together to form coherent stories.

The building itself is also the focus in numerous aestheticized sections. The film does not create a unity with the city behind it. The reinforced concrete structure appears on its own in a hardly defined environment and is only shown as a whole at the end in a night shot. In a sequence of SFB evening show excerpts from the past 50 years, major future plans for the building are announced, and at the same time reports of bankruptcies, foreclosures and murder.

The documentary, which was shot almost exclusively in the Excelsiorhaus, has a scene resolution and dispenses with interviews and voiceover .

background

As early as 1929, the previous building, the then Hotel Excelsior , served the writer Vicki Baum as a model for her novel Menschen im Hotel , which established the genre of group novels . Individual figures in the documentary Berlin Excelsior reveal parallels.

Director Erik Lemke, himself a resident of the house, sees the film's theme best described in a quote from Jonathan Swift : “Strictly speaking, very few people live in the present. Most are preparing to live soon. "

Reviews

“This is how (the filmmakers) succeed in tragicomic character studies that depict the contradictions of the late capitalist present; "Entrepreneurship" as a particularly desirable model of life on the one hand and an indifferent economy that has no dignified use for many people on the other. "

- Jan Jekal: Süddeutsche Zeitung

“Lemke and Krummel often select precisely these moments of self-expression and arrange strict-looking picture compositions that bring out every fold, every nervous twitch. Again and again, photos of the ailing charm of the reinforced concrete construction, which in the 60s stood for modern living. And now stuck in a kind of time capsule. The pool has not existed for a long time, and the "Solar Bar" exudes an attached, almost cheap chic. Everything and everyone looks covered in make-up and is reminiscent of the times when black light was all the rage in discotheques.

- Susanne Kim: Player

“They are pictures of strange beauty, for example when a powerful jet of water discharges onto a car in the underground car park when a pipe breaks. There is only one car, the beam hits it exactly in the middle. How did this picture come about? How much interference was made with reality to produce this recording? How documentary is this recording? Erik Lemke plays with the boundaries between the documentary and the fictional, the found and the prepared. A game that many of the people observed give an echo. Because self-portrayal is omnipresent in Berlin Excelsior : Smartphones, photo shoots, application videos run through the film and illustrate the tension between the illusion of "being there live" and staging efforts. "

- Manon Cavagna: critic.de

“If Lemke was concerned with the sometimes insecure, precarious living conditions of his protagonists - as the press release suggests - the social commentary remains rather vague; if, in the style of JG Ballard's High Rise , he wanted to investigate the influence of gigantic concrete structures on their residents, there is no clear evidence. The filmmaker has gathered a sympathetic mixture of new and old Berlin originals in front of the camera and the film works as a purely local patriotic ode to the life artists of the capital. Beyond that, however, Berlin Excelsior does not succeed in following a common thread that could lead to more than an entertaining and soon forgotten glimpse into the life of some big city dwellers. "

- Tim Lindemann: epd film

Awards

Berlin Excelsior premiered on October 27, 2017 at the 51st Hof International Film Festival. The film was given the rating of "particularly valuable" by the German Film and Media Assessment . The film critic Wolfgang M. Schmitt from Die Filmanalyse counts Berlin Excelsior among the 20 best films of 2018.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Certificate of release for Berlin Excelsior . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry (PDF). Template: FSK / maintenance / type not set and Par. 1 longer than 4 characters
  2. ↑ a b Manon Cavagna: Berlin Excelsior. Criticism. In: Critic.de. October 30, 2017. Retrieved October 24, 2018 .
  3. ↑ Vicki Baum | American author . In: Encyclopedia Britannica . ( britannica.com [accessed October 24, 2018]).
  4. ↑ a b Berlin Excelsior. A film by Erik Lemke and André Krummel. Press booklet. Pandora Film, accessed on October 24, 2018 (German).
  5. ↑ Jan Jekal: Kreuzberg dream dancers - agony of self-optimization: the documentary "Berlin Excelsior" . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung . Munich December 3, 2018.
  6. ↑ Susanne Kim: Berlin Excelsior - The paint is off. In: Player - The Leipzig cinema magazine. Retrieved April 17, 2020 .
  7. ^ Tim Lindemann: Berlin Excelsior . In: epd film . No. 12.2018 . Community work of Protestant journalism, p. 63 .
  8. ^ Berlin Excelsior. In: filmportal.de. Retrieved October 24, 2018 .
  9. ^ Berlin Excelsior. German film and media rating. FBW, accessed October 24, 2018 .
  10. ↑ Wolfgang M. Schmitt: Top 20: The best films of 2018. In: Die Filmanalyse. December 23, 2018, accessed April 17, 2020 .

Web links