The Navigator (1987)

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Movie
German title The navigator
Original title The Navigator - A Medieval Odyssey
Country of production New Zealand ,
Australia
original language English
Publishing year 1987
length 90 minutes
Age rating FSK 16
Rod
Director Vincent Ward
script Geoff Chapple ,
Kely Lyons ,
Vincent Ward
production John Maynard ,
Gary Hannam (Co-)
music Davood A. Tabrizi
camera Geoffrey Simpson
cut John Scott
occupation

In the New Zealand - Australian fantasy film Der Navigator (also: Der Navigator - Eine Odyssey durch die Zeit, The Navigator - A Medieval Odyssey ) by Vincent Ward from 1987, a tunnel through the globe turns from a medieval pilgrimage to a journey through time . The film also tells of the plague .

Alongside the work of director Geoff Murphy and Roger Donaldson , it is one of the most important films in the development of New Zealand cinema since the New Zealand Film Commission Act 1978 came into force in New Zealand, where a tradition of documentary film predominated.

The leading roles are played by the young Hamish McFarlane and Bruce Lyons . The film strongly assumes a “what if” arrangement in the sense of a thought experiment . The navigator is partly black and white , the Middle Ages form a narrative bracket around the middle section. That being said, most of the movie is over night.

action

Cumberland , England, March 1348 , Darkest Middle Ages. The navigator , a visionary nine-year-old boy named Griffin, is plagued by visions in a snow-covered mining village at the time of the Black Death . He sees: a burning torch in flight, the moon, the sky, a ladder; “A cathedral , people digging in the ground” , a falling glove, a falling figure, a face in a headwind, water, a lake on which a coffin floats, a copper cross.

His beloved big brother, Connor, the wanderer of the village, is finally coming back. Connor has seen far too much death and plague. Refugees on boats have to be pushed away. They hope to redeem the village if they follow the boy's visions and go on a pilgrimage to the other side of the earth . By the next full moon, which would bring death, they must have erected a cross on "the tallest spire in Christendom" (actually St. Patrick's Cathedral on Wyndham St., Auckland). Willing to follow the villagers into a black abyss, where they in the mud with wooden equipment with the excavation begins. Five men will accompany him: Connor, Searle, the pragmatist, Searle's fat and kind-hearted brother Ulf, the philosopher Martin and the one-armed ferryman Arno. In the narrow, damp tunnel, the miners soon wonder how far it is. The people are desperate, Ulf is afraid.

Finally they break through to present-day nocturnal Auckland . Dressed in rags, they recognize the sea of ​​lights as “God's city” , and “all evil was over there with us” . The first hurdle is a motorway on which dramatic scenes take place. Ulf is attacked by a truck. You are forced to leave him on the opposite side. The five figures meet two workers of a foundry, so everything fits into the prophecy of the quest . They have their copper ore with them, despite the Cumbrian pronunciation they manage to get the two of them to cast a cross for them. They don't like the modern canned beer .

To get to the church building, they have to cross a harbor basin in a rowboat with a stolen white horse . They encounter a nuclear submarine in which Griffin recognizes the " Queenfish " who is snorting with rage . The horse remains rigid, otherwise panic breaks out. Griffin makes another prophecy , foreseeing death. Connor recognizes himself in it.

Connor pushes his little brother away: "Stay away from me" and disappears rushed.

Further delusional encounters with monsters of the modern age follow, for example with a sorting grab in the junkyard, a squeaking scrap shears , heavy transporters and one with a copy of the D-Zug type , which takes one of theirs with it. On television in the shop window, a politician tells the Navigator that New Zealand is free of nuclear weapons, and a commercial in which the Grim Reaper makes a cameo announces the AIDS pandemic .

You can't find the building. Connor has the spire reached the church with a ladder and the Cross wants to build. The boy loses his gift and can be blindfolded to “see” again. Griffin manages to keep Connor from falling in the rungs of the ladder at the last second. Police, emergency services and the local foundry workers rush in at dawn. Griffin gets the ritual glove high up. With Connor's help, he erects the cross at the last minute. The sun rises, the bells are ringing, to be heard in their home village. The navigator slips and falls to his death.

It all turns out to be the dream of the medieval Griffin, whom he is portraying the hero in a cave in the village. However, the village was saved.

There is rejoicing, celebrations and dancing. However, there is a plague bump under the boy's arm; his brother Connor had brought the plague to the village. Connor defends himself: "Where should I go ..." The boy dies. The vision of the floating coffin has come true.

reception

  • “Dark and exciting fantasy. […] The point is to carry the beliefs of medieval characters into our skeptical age ”( Caryn James : The New York Times )
  • “Imaginative adventure story with sincere criticism of civilization, which depicts the modern world as a hellish inferno. The confrontation of medieval perspectives with the modern world gives the visually powerful film its special charm. "( Lexicon of international film )
  • "Hallucinatory beautiful [...] with the impression of an instinctive nightmare " (Moria)
  • "[A] somewhat strange story [...] Without using the phrases and clichés that are unfortunately far too often used in fantasy films, Ward relies on the power of his pictorial symbolism and thus created a ray of hope for the genre." ( Dirk Hauska : The big one Film lexicon: all top films from A – Z.)
  • “In places hard on the verge of the laughable. […] Don't you expect panic, discord, violence? [...] You sit quietly around the campfire, as if you were about to visit an unwelcome acquaintance. [...] the message is clear: the artist must die the symbolic death [...] as metaphorical sentiment in order, in the face of a real plague like AIDS or the plague overly romantic [...] The problem is perhaps that he is too reminiscent of the real one Power of art believes. "( Hal Hinson : Washington Post )
  • "Ward comes from a fourth generation of New Zealand farmers and you can see that." ( The Bulletin )
  • "Ambition and imagination, but somehow seems incomplete." (Rec.arts.movies.reviews)

Individual critics compared with Tarkowski's Andrei Rublev , Ivan's childhood , with The Seventh Seal or with Carl Dreyer .

  • “ The Navigator depicts a pilgrimage to blessed eternity , read and re- exaggerated by a modern expressionist artist, one with his own moral concepts, but who can no longer work from Bunyan's secure religious environment . […] An alternative reading […] is that of Russell Campbell: one could place the film in the surrealist tradition, 'only the idea of ​​medieval miners stumbling through Auckland' has the 'insane impossibility of a dissolving pocket watch '. He cites the autobahn sequence as an example of the incongruent (surrealistic) juxtaposition [...] as an acceptance of surreal logic. [...] This 'alternative view' does not understand New Zealand's stance on the nuclear issue as a 'rational refutation of the logic of nuclear deterrence', but rather as 'a gut feeling because a nuclear warship is repulsive.' "( Lynette Read : Vincent Ward: The Emergence of an Aesthetic)

As is so often the case in the cinematic Middle Ages , the past is here significant , not signified , i.e. H. it is not meant, Arthur Lindley states critically, referring to Eco .

backgrounds

The director got an inspiration for the film when he hitchhiked in Germany and got stranded on foot on a German autobahn (with no speed limit).

Ward and producer Maynard moved to Australia for production.

Ward researched, among other things, on the De Re Metallica from the 16th century, and remarkably aligned himself with the color distribution of the present sequences on the Très Riches Heures .

Wooden houses or a coffin on the water would probably not have existed there in the 14th century . Read notes that the visionary Ward does more extensive research and then discards the results because the pictures are ultimately more important to him (Ward comes from painting ).

The New Zealand Film Commission sponsored the film with more than one million dollars, more than any other New Zealand film to date. The Australian Film Commission was later added. The film ultimately cost $ 4.3 million, which is on the order of Mad Max II .

The Cumbria scenes were filmed on Lake Harris . The shooting continued in Auckland , at Mount Ruapehu in Tongariro National Park , in the Southern Alps , New Zealand and in the Waitomo Caves , Waitomo, Waikato , New Zealand.

The shooting took about ten weeks, but the total production and research over seven script drafts took four years. Cinematographer Geoffrey Simpson stated that nothing that had previously been seen in the cinema was “even close” to what they had done here.

The world premiere was on September 16, 1988 at the Toronto Film Festival . The film had its premiere in the Federal Republic of Germany on April 13, 1989, on October 18, 1989 it was shown on video.

Concerning the course of world history, Vincent Ward noted: “Some historians compare the fourteenth century with the twentieth. Both are catastrophic epochs. The 14th century had epidemics, war and the Holocaust, this century had large-scale wars and showed potential for further Holocausts. " And on European cultural heritage: " We Pākehās have as much right to the Middle Ages as the English or the French. "

According to producer Maynard, it's simply about "the power of storytelling."

Elsewhere Ward stated, “It is a story of people who meet their ancestors, who meet their predecessors. She is naive, needs suspension of disbelief , she is very childlike. I wanted a trace of miracles . " And the film deals with " the basic need for persistence of belief in something, anything, no matter what. "

Awards

Cannes Film Festival 1988

Fantafestival 1988

  • Best film for Vincent Ward

Fantastic postage 1989

  • Audience Jury Award for Vincent Ward
  • International Fantasy Film Award in the Best Cinematography category for Geoffrey Simpson

Sitges - Catalonian International Film Festival 1988

  • Best film for Vincent Ward

Australian Film Institute 1988

  • AFI Award in the Best Film category for John Maynard
  • AFI Award in the Best Director category for Vincent Ward
  • AFI Award in the Best Achievement in Cinematography category for Geoffrey Simpson
  • AFI Award in the Best Achievement in Editing category for John Scott
  • AFI Award for Best Achievement in Costume Design for Glenys Jackson
  • AFI Award in the Best Achievement in Production Design category for Sally Campbell

New Zealand Film and TV Awards 1989

  • 11 awards including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actor (Hamish McFarlane)

literature

  • Lynette Read: Vincent Ward: The Emergence of an Aesthetic. PhD thesis . University of Auckland, Auckland 2004 (English, online ( memento of October 15, 2008 in the Internet Archive )).
  • Ian Conrich, Stuart Murray: New Zealand Filmmakers . Wayne State University Press, 2007, ISBN 0-8143-3017-7 (English).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Release certificate for Der Navigator . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry , July 2008 (PDF; test number: 61 614 DVD).
  2. ↑ cf. Read, p. 249. cf. Conrich, Murray, p. 5 ff., P. 285.
  3. ^ "They're pagan Christians essentially" (Ward), Read, p. 253.
  4. ^ Read, p. 232.
  5. ↑ a b Dirk Hauska (ie) in Dirk Manthey, Jörg Altendorf, Willy Loderhose (eds.): The large film dictionary. All top films from A-Z . Second edition, revised and expanded new edition. Verlagsgruppe Milchstraße, Hamburg 1995, ISBN 3-89324-126-4 , p. 2054 .
  6. ^ Read, p. 219.
  7. ^ "The nuclear thing was more important to me, certainly than the AIDS thing" (Ward) Read, p. 218.
  8. ^ Caryn James : The Navigator (1988). In: The New York Times . June 28, 1989, accessed on March 1, 2009 (English): "dark, thrilling fantasy [...] intent on carrying the faith of its medieval characters into our own skeptical age"
  9. ↑ a b The Navigator. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed December 29, 2016 .Template: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used 
  10. ^ The Navigator: A Mediaeval Odyssey. In: Moria. Richard Scheib, September 12, 2008, accessed on January 18, 2016 (English): "hallucinatory in beauty [...] a primal nightmare quality"
  11. ↑ a b Hal Hinson: 'The Navigator: An Odyssey Across Time' (PG). In: Washington Post . July 29, 1989, accessed on March 1, 2009 (English): “There are times when it comes dangerously close to being laughable. […] What you expect is panic, dissension, perhaps even violence. […] Sitting calmly around their flickering fires, they seem to be preparing for the arrival of a particularly unpleasant relative. […] His message is clear: It is the artist who must die the symbolic death […] As a metaphoric sentiment, this is all well and good, but in the face of an actual plague, like AIDS or the Black Death, it is excessively romantic [...] The problem may be that his faith in the real power of art is too great "
  12. ↑ Read, p. 251: "Ward comes from a family which has been farming in New Zealand for four generations and it shows."
  13. ↑ Read, p. 249 f., P. 252, p. 257.
  14. ↑ a b The New Zealand Film Archive, p. Web links.
  15. ↑ cf. Read, pp. 254 f., P. 221.
  16. ↑ Read, p. 245 ff .: “The Navigator is a Pilgrim's Progress read and re-interpreted by a modern Expressionist artist, an artist who has his own moral values ​​but is no longer able to operate in Bunyan's secure world of belief. […] An alternative reading […] is that of Russell Campbell who suggests aligning the film with the surrealist tradition, and sees “the very concept of medieval miners stumbling round Auckland” as having “the lunatic impossibility of a flaccid pocketwatch”. He cites the motorway sequence as another example of an incongruous (surrealist) juxtaposition […] as the assertion of a surreal logic. The film thus explores “an alternative vision” that regards New Zealand's position on the country's nuclear-free policy as stemming not from “rational refutation of the logic of nuclear deterrence” but from the “gut feeling of revulsion that a nuclear warship provokes”. " After Russell Campbell: The Blindfold Seer Illusions 10 (1989): 15-16.
  17. ^ Arthur Lindley: The ahistoricism of medieval film. In: Screening the Past # 3. May 29, 1998, archived from the original on December 13, 2012 ; accessed on March 2, 2009 (English, original website no longer available): "The past is signifier, not signified"
  18. ^ Read, p. 217.
  19. ↑ Read, p. 216.
  20. ↑ a b Read, p. 222.
  21. ^ Read, p. 237.
  22. ↑ a b Read, p. 235.
  23. ^ Read, p. 223.
  24. ↑ Read, p. 226 ff.
  25. ^ Read, p. 231.
  26. ↑ a b IMDb , s. Web links.
  27. ↑ Read, p. 230 f.
  28. ^ Read, p. 234.
  29. ^ The Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey - 1988. In: www.nzvideos.org. www.nzvideos.org, accessed on March 1, 2009 (English): “Some historians have likened the 14th century to the 20th century. They were both calamitous ages. The 14th century had plague, war and holocausts, and this century has seen wars on vast scale and the potential for further holocaust "
  30. ↑ Read, p. 251: "have as much claim to the medieval as the English do, or the French or anyone else." (Ward)
  31. ↑ Read, p. 253: "It is a film about the power of stories" (Maynard)
  32. ↑ Read, p. 244: “It's the story of people meeting their ancestors, of people meeting their descendants. It's naïve, involves a suspension of disbelief, is very childlike. I wanted a sense of wonder [...] the basic need to maintain belief in something, anything, no matter what " (Ward)