Bolwieser
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| Original title | Bolwieser |
| Country of production | Federal Republic of Germany |
| original language | German |
| Publishing year | 1977 |
| length | 201 (112) minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 12 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Rainer Werner Fassbinder |
| script |
Rainer Werner Fassbinder based on the novel by Oskar Maria Graf |
| production |
Bavaria Atelier under the direction of Henry Sokal |
| music |
Peer Raben , Gustav Mahler , Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart |
| camera | Michael Ballhaus |
| cut |
Ila von Hasperg , Juliane Lorenz Franz Walsch (theatrical version) |
| occupation | |
| |
Bolwieser is the title of a two-part television film by the German director, author and actor Rainer Werner Fassbinder , produced on behalf of ZDF . The theatrical version of the film was only shown in 1983. The screenplay is based on the novel of the same name by Oskar Maria Graf from 1931, which is based on a true story. It is Fassbinder's 28th feature film in eight years. The subject is the submissive relationship between station master Bolwieser ( Kurt Raab ) and his wife Hanni ( Elisabeth Trissenaar ).
action
The Prussian dutiful station master Xaver Bolwieser tries to please his wife Hanni wherever possible. He refrains from drinking bouts with his friends for her sake. However, Hanni is increasingly bored in her life as a housewife. That changes when her old school friend Frank Merkl takes over an economy in the village. She lends him money from her inheritance, sends her husband back to the pub to get business going and enjoys the dances in the pub. Since Xaver doesn't dance, she gets closer to Frank Merkl while dancing. This leads to a love affair that is observed by more and more villagers. At first Xaver doesn't notice anything, but is surprised once about an empty bed when he looks after Hanni on night duty. Only after he was exposed to the ridicule of the villagers at a funeral does Xaver Hanni dare to speak up on the gossip. She reacts with indignation and reproachful words. When Merkl learns that villagers have talked about him and Hanni, he sues them. Xaver appears as a witness and swears under oath that he never suspected anything.
Although Hanni gives up the relationship with Merkl, she is no longer happy with Bolwieser. When the Schaffaler hairdresser became interested in Hanni, she began a new love affair with him. This does not remain hidden from Merkl. He urges Hanni to continue the relationship with him. When she rejects him and also terminates his credit because of his intrusiveness, he takes revenge: he tells Bolwieser "as a friend" about Hanni's relationship with the hairdresser. He accepts that with resignation. He also allows Hanni to go away with the hairdresser for a week under a pretext. But Merkl's revenge is not over yet: he reports Bolwieser to perjury. In his sense of duty, he cannot help but confess.
background
"If I film other people's stories, it's because I might as well have written them myself, as they deal with problems and topics that I've already dealt with in my own subjects."
Director
“I said yes before I even read the book. When I read it, I was overjoyed. [...] He knew exactly which actor he needed for which role, and that was another step into the work. [...] At Bolwieser he said almost nothing to me about the role guidance. Obviously, I brought what he imagined. [...] A director has to have much more than a good knowledge of human nature in order to find in the actor [...] the person whose character traits and passions make the character bloom the most. Rainer had this ability. He could look very deeply into someone. "
production
The shooting took place on 40 days in October / November 1976, among other things in the Upper Franconian Marxgrün train station . The production costs amounted to approx. 1.8 million DM . The first broadcast of both television film parts (201 minutes) took place on July 31, 1977 on ZDF ; the shorter theatrical version (112 minutes) was premiered on the first anniversary of Fassbinder's death on June 10, 1983 for legal reasons.
“My first film with him as a director was Despair , the film was produced by Bavaria for Geria [...]. Rainer had previously shot Bolwieser with us and had a terrible row with the production manager and the unit manager. In the end they were banned from filming. When it was said that Despair was going to be made, the circle of people in Bavaria who were eligible for it was very limited. Some felt damaged by the previous production, others fled straight away. So it inevitably came to me. A great production. "
music
When asked whether he could give an example in which the collaboration with Fassbinder - between the music, the images and the story - worked perfectly, Peer Raben replied :
“Yes, that was especially the case with the film Bolwieser based on the novel by Oskar Maria Graf . In this film, Fassbinder wanted the music to come from a recognizable source. He had the idea that Mr and Mrs Bolwieser have a favorite record that they keep putting on the gramophone . Since I could persuade him that he is a Mozart - Minuet assumes an unknown. I then used that as a motive for further development. Because it is constantly changing, the relationship between Bolwieser and his wife could progress. "
In the film, Peer Raben uses the theme of primal light from the 2nd symphony ( Resurrection Symphony ) by Gustav Mahler and the minuet K334 by Mozart .
camera
“At Bolwieser we had a couple of very complicated journeys and adjustments that would probably take twice the time and three times the money today. Those were situations in which I passed on his ambition to definitely make it, the pressure he put on the team. I learned, I have to say, to be very precise, very precise and very fast, which later helped me a lot in America. "
criticism
“The special achievement of Fassbinder consists not least in the fact that in the novel material published in 1931, from the perspective of today, references to the petty-bourgeois-intellectual province, which formed the dregs of the big man's addiction and the brutality of fascism . If Bolwieser's apparently apolitical thinking, which also appears to be evident in his aversion to a railway strike, is compensated for in his behavior towards his subordinates in commanding airs, the oppressed are already preparing for the day of vengeance in Nazi uniform. But none of them are self-confident people, but jointed dolls, the strings of which you only had to pull. "
“It's the old story, but it's always new. New especially in Fassbinder's brilliant scenic translation. With his cinematic style he has, as it were, removed a dimension of its own from the book, which is by no means remarkable in terms of style: the flickering, scenting, arithmetic of the petty bourgeoisie , which always lives on the verge of brutality. The dog-like submissiveness of the board member Bolwieser turns just as quickly into command tone, piggy and puffiness. The film has the urgency of Staudte's Heinrich Mann film adaptation - The Subject , as perfect as perfidious as perverse. "
“Fassbinder stylizes this drama of the lie of life from private happiness into an exaggerated, grotesque petty bourgeois dance of death. He knows how to force the viewer into the role of an involuntary voyeur : he lets his characters be exposed to the extreme, leaves them mercilessly, observes them from a kind of keyhole perspective - through windows, doors, overgrown interiors. His camera movements shine, creating distance and constantly redefining the perspective, taking the viewer with them: a camera choreography for this perfectly composed melodrama . "
“Bolwieser continues the long line of betrayed lovers who were mostly played by Fassbinder himself in the early films and in Faustrecht der Freiheit . Bolwieser's strengths include those moments in which the character of Bolwieser and the people around him, especially his subordinates in the train station, become transparent for the social causes and consequences of their deformations when the type of subject is visible behind the immature petty bourgeois Bolwieser on which the subsequent Nazi regime could rely, and behind the railway workers, one of whom is already wearing SA uniform, the type of sadist that the " Third Reich " also needed, at least for "special" tasks. "
“In the theatrical version, which has been shortened by around an hour and a half, the background is largely left out. Yet at no moment does one have the feeling that something is missing. With a great ability to abstract, Fassbinder concentrated on the optical chamber play of a gradually failing marriage and yet in an incredibly skillful way left enough hints that no one could be in any doubt about the motives. This shortening alone is a masterpiece of craftsmanship that not only turns the movie into a completely new film, but also gives this marriage story a concentration and cohesion that can hardly be surpassed in terms of sophistication. "
“ Bolwieser is the story of a petty bourgeois provincial civil servant who breaks with his desire for love: his too beautiful, too refined wife smiles and kills him. (...) Only now, on the first anniversary of Fassbinder's death, will this Bolwieser film come to the cinemas. Even more decisively than in the two-part TV series, Fassbinder has pushed the novel panorama of a small town society aside and immersed himself completely in the interior of a marriage, in the rituals of a duel of lust and annihilation. Elisabeth Trissenaar versus Kurt Raab , Stroheim's glariness and lush, well-mannered melodrama, a Fassbinder psychological box - today Bolwieser seems like a fascinating first draft for Lola . "
“An instinctively deluded husband is betrayed and ruined by his wife. Hidden behind the private melodrama , Fassbinder staged a tragically caustic portrait of the German petty bourgeois soul in the run-up to National Socialism . Resolutely expressive and stylizing, the film exposes social illnesses in the characters without denouncing the people themselves . "
literature
- Oskar Maria Graf: Bolwieser: novel of a marriage. List, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-548-60987-4 .
- Oskar Maria Graf: Bolwieser - a husband's novel. Drei Masken Verlag, Munich 1931 (first edition).
Web links
- Bolwieser in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Bolwieser at filmportal.de
- Bolwieser (TV version) , film and background information, Rainer Werner Fassbinder Foundation, Berlin
- Bolwieser (cinema version) , film and background information, Rainer Werner Fassbinder Foundation, Berlin
Individual evidence
- ↑ It is better to enjoy pain than just suffer it , interview with Christian Braad Thomsen, 1977; P. 401, in: Fassbinder on Fassbinder , Robert Fischer [Hrsg.], Verlag der Autor, Frankfurt, 2004
- ↑ Luftzeichen, not tangible , interview by Juliane Lorenz with Elisabeth Trissenaar , p. 308 in: The whole normal chaos , conversations about Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Juliane Lorenz (ed.), Henschel Verlag, Berlin, 1995, ISBN 3-89487-227 -6
- ^ Rainer Werner Fassbinder retrospective program , Rainer Werner Fassbinder Foundation (Ed.)., Berlin, 1992
- ↑ Almost a transfigured story , interview by Juliane Lorenz with Dieter Minx, p. 273 in: The completely normal chaos , conversations about Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Juliane Lorenz (ed.), Henschel Verlag, Berlin, 1995, ISBN 3-89487-227 -6
- ↑ Work without end point , Peer Raben in an interview with Herbert Gehr, p. 75 in: The completely normal chaos , conversations about Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Henschel Verlag, Berlin, 1995, ISBN 3-89487-227-6
- ^ Fassbinder on Fassbinder , Robert Fischer (Ed.), Page 641, Verlag der Autor , Frankfurt am Main, 2004, ISBN 3-88661-268-6
- ↑ A new kind of reality , interview by Juliane Lorenz with Michael Ballhaus , p. 204 in: The completely normal chaos , conversations about Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Juliane Lorenz (ed.), Henschel Verlag, Berlin, 1995, ISBN 3-89487- 227-6
- ↑ a b Critique quoted by Bolwieser on FassbinderFoundation.de ( Memento from December 28, 2008 in the Internet Archive ), accessed on January 26, 2012.
- ↑ a b Critique quoted from Rainer Werner Fassbinder Werkschau - Programm , Rainer Werner Fassbinder Foundation (Hrsg.)., Berlin, 1992
- ^ Annotated filmography, Wilhelm Roth, in Rainer Werner Fassbinder , Film 2 series, Hanser 175 series, page 168, Munich, 1979, ISBN 3-446-12946-4
- ↑ Critique in Der Spiegel No. 23, 1983, quoted from Spiegel.de
- ↑ criticism CinOmat.kim-info.de