The boxer and death

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Movie
German title The boxer and death
Original title Boxer a smrť
Country of production ČSSR
original language Slovak
Publishing year 1963
length 106 minutes
Age rating FSK 12
Rod
Director Peter Solan
script Peter Solan,
Józef Hen ,
Tibor Vichta
production Bratislava film studio
music Wiliam Bukový
camera Tibor Biath
cut Bedřich Voděrka
occupation

The Boxer and Death is a Czechoslovak literary film adaptation by Peter Solan from 1963 based on the short story of the same name by the Polish writer Józef Hen .

action

The concentration camp commandant Walter Kraft spends many hours alone in the training room set up especially for him in the camp in order to maintain the form he needs as a prize boxer . When he comes back into civil life, he wants to earn his living as such again. He rejects his wife's advice to find a sparring partner among the inmates because these “flies”, as he calls them, have far too little strength.

When, after attempting to escape, he tried to hit prisoner Jan Kominek again with a punch, he recognizes that he was once a boxer. He takes the starved Kominek with him to hold a practice fight, which Kraft gains after 1½ minutes. Stimulated by this and tired of fighting against a sandbag, the commandant ordered the planned execution to be suspended and the prisoner to be prepared for a real boxing match. In addition, he gets all the freedom to reach his fighting weight again and improve his training condition. The concentration camp doctor, who also acts as a referee, recognizes him as an object of study for his medical experiments. The Slovak SS guard Willi becomes his personal advisor and only the SS officer Holder is against this development.

Kominek had a difficult time with his fellow prisoners, as they did not like his privileged location. Only in prisoner Venzlak, who is housed in another barrack, does he find a supporter. Venzlak knows a little about boxing and becomes his secret trainer. During the next competition, Kominek already holds out two rounds, which means that the supervisor Willi wins a bet. A training run outside the camp also helps the two boxers to improve their condition. At the end of the run, Kraft invites the inmate to a pub for a glass of beer. Here Jan sees the landlord's daughter Halina for the first time and tells Venzlak about it. During his next training session on the other side of the fence, he and his friends ask him to ask how many refugees she is able to hide, because she is the liaison to the helpers outside the camp. There is no new run, however, because Holder has pointed out his limits to the commander.

After a long time, Kominek is able to try a ten-round competition in front of a larger audience. At the beginning of the fight, Holder learns that Venzlak is Kominek's friend and shoots him. The fight is even, both go down several times, Kraft is declared the winner with 7: 3 rounds, but getting through the full number of rounds is also a success for the prisoner. Immediately afterwards, Kominek runs to Venzlak to tell him about it and learns about his death here. He is so excited about it that he can use a trick to persuade the commander to start another fight immediately in order to knock out him, which he succeeds in doing . That's why Holder gets the job of looking after the prisoner, which means certain death.

Thanks to his wife's persuasive skills, Kraft changed his mind, brought Kominek back and gave him the release papers of a prisoner who had already died. But Jan only wants to leave if no alarm is triggered after he has left the camp and the 40 prisoners in his barracks are not sent to the gas chamber , as is usually the case with an escape . He received this promise, but later the SS officer Holder wanted to telephone to Berlin to report the process to the higher-level office, which would have bad consequences for Kraft. Therefore he decides to trigger the alarm. When Kominek arrives at Halina and tells her that several prisoners want to break out so that she can prepare for it, the sirens start to howl. He goes back to the camp to save the lives of his comrades.

production

The Boxer and Death was shot as a black and white film in the film studios of Bratislava based on the actual experiences of the Polish boxer Tadeusz Pietrzykowski and had its premiere on April 12, 1963 in the ČSSR. Its first demonstrable performance in the GDR took place on July 7, 1963 in the Berlin open-air theater Weißensee . The film was broadcast on German television on May 10, 1968.

The film was released on DVD and Blu-ray in 2018.

criticism

Tobias Sunderdiek writes in the Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung :

"The absurdity in hell: To show the horror of camp life, the film only needs a few simple pictures: abandoned belongings of people, then black smoke from a chimney that darkens the sun - such scenes make you shudder in their reduction."

“Intense drama that dares to take an extraordinary perspective on the Nazi crimes and uses the sports metaphor and space for ambivalent sequences of images. In their unmelodramatic, almost sober reserve, these appear particularly drastic. "

- Film service

Awards

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Certificate of Release for The Boxer and Death . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry (PDF). Template: FSK / maintenance / type not set and Par. 1 longer than 4 characters
  2. ↑ Berliner Zeitung of July 7, 1963, p. 8
  3. ↑ Berliner Zeitung of May 1, 1968, p. 10
  4. ↑ "The Boxer and Death" - a rediscovery Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung from June 28, 2018
  5. ↑ The Boxer and Death. In: Filmdienst . Retrieved September 6, 2018 .