Birdy (film)
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | Birdy |
| Original title | Birdy |
| Country of production | United States |
| original language | English |
| Publishing year | 1984 |
| length | 120 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 12 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Alan Parker |
| script |
Sandy Kroopf Jack Behr |
| production | Alan Marshall |
| music | Peter Gabriel |
| camera | Michael Seresin |
| cut | Gerry Hambling |
| occupation | |
| |
Birdy is an American anti-war film directed by Alan Parker from 1984. It is based on the novel by William Wharton .
action
After a mission in Vietnam , two friends return home with injuries. Sergeant Al Columbato with physical, the other - called Birdy by everyone - with mental. He seems to live in an inner world in which, driven by his fascination for birds, he believes he is one himself. The film describes the sergeant's visits to his friend's psychiatric ward, where his fitness for war is to be restored. On different levels, the film describes the childhood and friendship of the two, Birdy's turn to ornithology , which should ultimately become the determining purpose in life, and finally the Vietnamese experiences that both have an impressive impact. If the convinced soldier tries first to persuade his friend to return, he gradually doubts whether the self-chosen life is not the right one for Birdy. After all, Columbato only has a few days left to bring his friend back to his reality. After this period, Birdy is to be moved to another institution and permanently immobilized.
Columbato succeeds in restoring Birdy's world of thought to a formative experience before the traumatizing experiences in the war and before the development of the bird hobby used as an escape. To do this, he presents his friend with a suitcase with the softball and baseball balls that he and Columbato and his friends had thrown into Birdy's mother's garden during all the years of their youth and that Birdy's mother said that her garden was not a playground. has retained. The whereabouts of the balls was always a mystery to the children and Columbato philosophized with Birdy about what his mother was probably doing with the balls. Obviously, the fact that Columbato's guess at the time that she was storing the balls was correct is of great importance to Birdy. In a subsequent attempt by Columbato to free the still apathetic friend from psychiatry in order to avert the impending transfer, both of them end up on the roof. There Birdy starts to jump from the edge of the roof to fly away like a bird . Below the edge of the roof, initially invisible to Columbato, there is a lower flat roof, on which Birdy, now fully able to interact again, lands safely and unharmed.
background
- William Wharton's submission was set in World War II .
- The soundtrack comes from Peter Gabriel .
Reviews
"Brilliant and thrillingly staged psychological drama with convincing actors. In highly emotional image-sound montages, the former commercial filmmaker Parker conjures up the utopia of a free life, the horrors of war and the solidarity of friendship between men. The concentrated use of cinematic refinements sometimes seems overly calculated and synthetic. "
Awards
- In 1984 Birdy was named one of the Top Ten Films of the Year by the National Board of Review .
- At the 1985 Cannes Film Festival , the film was awarded the Grand Jury Prize.
- In 1987 the film received the audience award at the Warsaw Film Week in Warsaw .
- The German Film and Media Assessment (FBW) in Wiesbaden awarded the film the rating of particularly valuable.
literature
- William Wharton : Birdy. Novel (original title: Birdy ). German by Hans Heimann. Approved paperback edition, 10th edition. Goldmann, Munich 1990, 349 pages, ISBN 3-442-06611-5
Web links
- Birdy in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Alan Parker: BIRDY. The making of the film, egg by egg. In: AlanParker.com. Accessed December 30, 2014. (English)
Individual evidence
- ^ Birdy in the Lexicon of International Films , accessed October 18, 2010