The mischief
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| Original title | The mischief |
 | |
| Country of production | Germany , France |
| original language | German |
| Publishing year | 1972 |
| length | 96 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 12 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Peter Fleischmann |
| script | Peter Fleischmann, Martin Walser |
| production | Peter Fleischmann |
| music | Xhol caravan |
| camera | Dib Lutfi |
| cut | Odile Faillot |
| occupation | |
| |
Das Unheil is a socially critical film drama by director Peter Fleischmann from 1972. The German premiere was on March 23, 1972 in a Munich cinema. The film is a German-French joint production by Hallelujah-Film GmbH, Munich, Artemis Filmgesellschaft mbH, Berlin and Productions Artistes Associés, Paris.
With dialogues by Martin Walser , the film scrutinized the German petty bourgeoisie a quarter of a century after the end of the war and Nazi rule and prophesied in gloomy images that this society was about to destroy itself. Smoking industrial plants poison water and breathing air, people become sick, animals die and helicopters loom overhead.
action
A small West German town at the beginning of the 1970s: Hille Vavra is about to graduate from high school, but has great difficulty in motivating herself to do so. His father Leonard Vavra is a Protestant pastor in this city and is currently preparing an anniversary festival for the Silesian expellees to celebrate the rescue of the church bells from National Socialism. According to statements by the Silesians, Pastor Vavra saved the bells from Hitler himself.
Mother Vavra and Hille's sister Diemuth Vavra still live in the rectory. Hille has a relationship with the attractive wife of an industrialist and seduces a classmate. His sister returned from Italy disaffected and lovesick. A flashback shows how she had the city's photographer take nudes of herself, which one day end up in the bathtub for all to see, resulting in blows from her father.
While the Silesians practice again and again for the upcoming bell festival, all sorts of mischief is brewing around the rectory and the cathedral. A nearby industrial complex emits clouds of smoke and poisons the water. Elderly people begin to cough, and almost all animals die in a pet shop near the chimneys. The tap water is soon inedible. There are protests and demonstrations. The director of the industrial company doesn't want to know anything about it and supports the festivities.
Hille hides a deserter on the cathedral tower and gets into trouble with the police about it. Soon a student who has been particularly loud about pollution is found dead in a river. The residents of the small town are now starting to complain about the situation. At the bell festival there are collisions, but afterwards you calm down again.
Production background
The name of the city is not mentioned in the film. The central Hessian industrial city of Wetzlar served as the filming location , with a well-preserved old town with a cathedral and parsonage as a backdrop. The smoking industrial plants are the Buderuswerke in Wetzlar, which at that time still had a blast furnace system with three blast furnaces. A site commander also appears in the film. At that time, Wetzlar was one of the largest Bundeswehr locations in Germany and the largest garrison town in Hesse . At the beginning of the film you can see the demolition of a dilapidated bridge over the Lahn in the early 1970s. A new four-lane bridge had already been built right next to it, which is part of the Karl-Kellner-Ring , the main road through Wetzlar.
Werner Hess , the director of the Hessischer Rundfunk at the time, played the role of manufacturer . Bernhard Kimmel , a colorful personality and friend of the director, played a Bundeswehr deserter in the film. At the time, Kimmel had just served a nine-year prison sentence for gang-style burglary and theft and was to become a criminal again a few years later.
The soundtrack comes from Xhol Caravan , a Krautrock band from Wiesbaden , which at that time only called themselves Xhol and disbanded in April 1972. They can be seen in a film clip at a band rehearsal.
Reviews
When the film premiered in a Munich premiere cinema on March 23, 1972, it met with such massive rejection from critics and audiences that it was withdrawn from the program after a few days and was no longer shown in cinemas nationwide. After the film disappeared into the archives for decades and was hardly received, the critic Hanns-Georg Rodek described it in 2017 as a “forgotten masterpiece” that is urgently looking for its place in film history.
“ The calamity spreads an intolerance that is nothing but that, that causes nothing but a feeling of nausea. The anger that this film would like to direct on its subject, he draws himself. It is not difficult to arouse aggression. It is an art to direct them. "
"Fleischmann's unleashed picture arc, packed with laconic details, seems exaggerated, sometimes hysterical, but only through this evocation of the monstrous, which is full of sadness, does the creeping catastrophe reveal itself as general everyday life that is not that banal."
“In his evil political satire, director Peter Fleischmann shot a few broadsides about the social grievances of the time. The dream of an ideal world is, deliberately exaggerated, countered by a nightmarish panorama of disturbance and destruction. Oversized as if under a magnifying glass, many negative elements of the political, ecological and social developments in the Federal Republic are concentrated in a fictional provincial town. "
“Ultimately, Das Unheil is a film about a collective social overload, a film about a time of upheaval that nobody knows how to cope with and where it will lead. In other words: not much different than today. "
Broadcasts and availability
The film was first broadcast on ZDF on August 26, 1974 . A copy of the first broadcast can be obtained from the local program service. In this version, however, you can see a large timecode bar at the top of the screen. The film has not yet been released on VHS or DVD.
Awards
The film won the Prix Luis Buñuel in Cannes in 1972 , with director Buñuel leaving the screening early.
Web links
- official website
- The disaster in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- The disaster at filmportal.de
Individual evidence
- ↑ Archived copy ( memento of the original from December 24, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ http://www.feature-film.org/21032/das-unheil/
- ↑ The misunderstood home 36/1974 . In: Der Spiegel . No. 36 , 1974 ( online - 2 September 1974 ).
- ↑ Hanns-Georg Rodek: Panned, ostracized, rediscovered: The cinema satire "Das Unheil" . In: THE WORLD . June 22, 2017 ( welt.de [accessed February 18, 2020]).
- ↑ Archive link ( Memento of the original from March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ^ Hanns-Georg Rodek: Not socially acceptable . In: Die Welt Kompakt , 23 June 2017, p. 18.
- ↑ http://www.cinema.de/film/das-unheil,1318122.html
