The fiend

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Movie
German title The fiend
Original title The Ogre
Country of production Germany ,
France ,
Great Britain
original language English
Publishing year 1996
length 117 minutes
Age rating FSK 12
Rod
Director Volker Schlöndorff
script Jean-Claude Carrière ,
Volker Schlöndorff
production Gebhard Henke ,
Ingrid Windisch
music Michael Nyman
camera Bruno de Keyzer
cut Nicolas Gaster ,
Peter Przygodda
occupation

Der Unhold (original title: The Ogre ) is a German - French - British film drama from 1996 . Directed by Volker Schlöndorff , who wrote the script together with Jean-Claude Carrière based on the novel Der Erlkönig by Michel Tournier .

action

The slim, backward, pale orphan boy Abel Tiffauges is brought up in a strict French convent school. Ad colaphum! (To the slap!) Is the call of the Fathers to every boy who is guilty of an offense against the school rules. The child must then collect the corporal punishment in a punishment room. Nestor, the caretaker's overweight son, is Abel's protector and caregiver in this empathy-free environment. Nestor indulges in nocturnal feasts during which Abel reads to him from a Canadian trapper adventure book .

Abel wants the whole school to burn down. In fact, minutes later a fire breaks out and the chapel falls victim. Abel is sure that his wish was fulfilled through magic. The source of the torment, the school, has been burned. Unfortunately Nestor, his friend and protector, also dies in the flames. Nestor and the trapper adventures of the book remain the center of his thoughts for Abel even as an adult.

Years later: Abel is now a man, tall and strong in stature. He lives alone and earns a living with a small auto repair shop. You quickly understand that Abel's mental development stopped at the level of a twelve-year-old. The woman who comes by once a month, does the bookkeeping and sleeps with Abel is what he calls the feminine element in his life. Mentally, he has no access to women. His mechanical nature during sexual intercourse makes the woman exclaim: “ You fiend! You are a fiend! ".

Due to his emotional standstill, Abel feels drawn to children as the soul mate . He thinks he has to protect her from the adult world. As a hobby he photographs children. A little girl wants to try out her precious camera. Abel doesn't allow that. Shortly afterwards, the child is harassed on the street. One suspects Abel, who lives alone. During a confrontation at the police station, the child takes revenge for Abel's refusal to give her the camera by accusing him of being the molester. Abel escapes prison sentence by promising to prove himself at the front .

His stay in the French army is very brief. Abel is entertaining the officers with pigeons and white wine in the open field, when everyone suddenly looks into the muzzle of German rifles. Abel is now a prisoner of war . He is brought to East Prussia in a cattle wagon . There it is immediately useful again. The forester is looking for a car mechanic among the prisoners of war. Abel allowed the prisoners enforced leave and is driven by it in the state forests. Deep in the forest, a fairytale castle was built for General Field Marshal Hermann Göring , morbid, extravagant and unreal with marble stairs, colorful church glass windows, high halls: the Reichsjägerhof Rominten . Goering, infantile and omnipotent, resides and hunts there.

Meanwhile the Eastern Front is drawing closer. A telegram from the Führer orders Göring to return to Berlin and the forester also has to go to the Eastern Front. Abel asked his mentor to be allowed to work as a prisoner of war at the nearby Napola Castle in Kaltenborn . The request is granted to him. He receives a mighty Friesian black horse as a farewell present, as it is no longer needed to move the hunting route after Göring's departure.

Abel meets the representatives of the new power at Kaltenborn Castle. Count Kaltenborn, the legitimate heir of the traditional crusader castle, was pushed back into a single room, the castle is occupied by a Napola, a Nazi cadre forge with two hundred boys, which is run by SS-Obersturmbannführer Raufeisen.

Abel, caught in his mind by fairy tales and trappers, is fascinated by the outer splendor of the castle, the sporting exercises, the competitive games, and Nazi initiation rituals. He looks after the boys like a pedell . Raufeisen quickly realizes that Abel's naivety inspires the trust of children and sends him out into the area to recruit more offspring for the cadre school.

When the children are being trained for hand-to-hand combat with dummies , a boy suffers severe burns from the recoil of a bazooka . In the sickroom the boy mumbles in agony : "... now he's touching me!" (The death line from Goethe's ballad Der Erlkönig ). Soon after, the child dies.

Count Kaltenborn is arrested as a suspected conspirator of the assassination attempt on Hitler and gives Abel his diary beforehand.

The Russian front is fast approaching. All older boys and ruffians have to go to the front. Six months later, Raufeisen has returned, the Red Army is standing at the gates of Kaltenborn Castle. Raufeisen, meanwhile fanatical, confused, brutalized, wants the children to defend the castle against the approaching Russians. Abel realizes that this would be the death of his innocent charges. But the seeds have sprouted. The children want to go into battle as brave soldiers for their fatherland. Abel's last attempt to prevent a massacre, the planting of the White Flag on the highest pinnacle of Kaltenborn Castle, is prevented by ruffians. He shoots Abel. The children misunderstand the shot as a signal to attack. The Russians counterattacked with tanks . As learned, the children lie in trenches . The tanks drive over the trenches and turn on them to kill the children. The castle goes up in flames.

Abel rescues a small Jewish boy from a concentration camp - Death March , which led past the castle and hid it. All Napola boys are killed in the fighting. Abel is almost blind from his eye injury. The boy guides him out of the castle. The Russians let Abel pass with the boy on his shoulders because the child is shouting Russian words. Outside they flee through the forest, behind them swamps stretch to the horizon. When Abel wades through the swamp up to his neck in the ice water and feels the burden of the boy on his shoulders, he remembers a story from his boarding school days, told by a priest. The priest had said: “ Always remember: all of you are under the sign of St. Christopher . You are all carriers of the child, always remember that! As long as you are carrying a child, you can hide under the cloak of innocence and then you can walk through rivers and storms and even the flames of sin. And then ... “ The swamp flattens out, Abel finds solid ground, wades on. The film ends with the priest's words, comfort and warning at the same time.

Symbolism - emblematic

  • The literary film adaptation of Michel Tournier's novel Le roi des Aulnes , 1970 (German: Der Erlkönig, 1972) contains a symbolic reference to the Erlkönig figure of the Goethe ballad of the same name in the figure of the apparently friendly black knight on the black horse . The Erlkönig ballad occurs so alluring and friendly as Abel , the fiend . As in the poem the father on the horse, so Abel also takes the boys on the horse with him. The apparently attractive calls of the Erlkönig lure the boy to his death in the Erlkönig ballad, and the apparently tempting Napola Castle is ultimately a place of annihilation and death that costs the boys there.
  • The figures of Abel and Raufeisen can be read as symbolic embodiments of the principle of peace and war if they are placed in relation to the Old Testament Bible passage of Abel and Cain . ( Genesis 4,1-24) Abel , the shepherd, looks after and protects his (children's) flock, is through and through peaceful and thus illustrates the principle of peace. Cain, the tillage man who tills the fruits of the earth, (breeds the children to war maturity) is angry, kills the brother, kills the principle of peace: the principle of war destroys the principle of peace. (The innocent children die as a result of Raufeisen's wrath (order to shoot)) - As a punishment, so Cain's fear in Genesis - whoever finds me kills me . This is how the film ends: Raufeisen is shot by a Russian soldier. The soldier climbs unmoved over the dead iron.
  • A Christian metaphor is the final scene in which the powerful Abel, in dire straits, wades through the water with the Jewish boy on his shoulders in order to save the boy. The scene refers to the legend of one of the fourteen helpers in need, St. Christopher, who carried Jesus on his shoulders through the water. ("... Christ was your burden. You carried more than the world ...")

background

The shooting took place from late July to early December 1995, Paris , in the south of Gdansk located Marienburg , in Castle Schoenberg and in Norway instead. The monster was shown at the Toronto International Film Festival , among others , and was released in Germany on September 12, 1996. The film is dedicated to the director Louis Malle , who died in 1995 and a companion of Schlöndorff, who also wrote the story of a French collaborator in Lacombe Lucien in 1973 thematized.

Reviews

The lexicon of international films sees the film as an “ambitious, lavish film adaptation of literature that tries to examine the fascination of the National Socialist cult for its mythical and romantic roots. A bulky sheet of images that strives to differentiate historically and politically, but its intention remains rather confusing. "

The film, which is as eerie as it is visually powerful, vividly demonstrates "how effective the manipulation through the" power of images "worked in the Nazi regime. Maybe a bit too "educated middle class", but worth seeing and discussing German cinema of the exciting kind, " says Filmtipps.at.

Stephen Holden writes in the New York Times , In its most disturbing moments in the Ordensburg the monster appears like a stirring theatrical version of a Wagner opera ( “suggests the stirring cinematic equivalent of a Wagner opera” ). He is said to have that tremendous, tortured similitude that Central European filmmakers have long specialized in ( "the sort of grand, tortured allegory in which Central European filmmakers have long specialized" ). Although the reviewer highlights the portrayals of John Malkovich, Armin Mueller-Stahl and Gottfried John, although demanding and in some places brilliant, according to Holden, the film appears inconsistent, even unfinished ( "for all its ambitions and moments of brilliance [... ] doesn't feel unified or even complete " ). Episodic and slightly unreal, the film forms an antithesis to current Hollywood productions in that it raises a multitude of moral questions, but deliberately leaves them open and thus also leaves the audience to their own emotional state ( “Episodic and vaguely surreal, it is the antithesis of a Hollywood film that tells us what to feel. Having unfolded an ever-widening series of moral questions, it deliberately leaves them hanging ” ).

Renate Holland-Moritz wrote in Eulenspiegel : “Psychologically completely unreflected, Abel, who is completely miscast with John Malkovich, stumbles through the confusion like a slightly moronic stooge of the real monsters” and criticized the blood-and-soil bombast , but praised the performance Volker Spenglers.

The film was not a box office success. The style of the literary film adaptation was not accepted by the cinema audience. The project did not bring in the production costs of 26 million DM.

Awards

Volker Schlöndorff was nominated for the Golden Lion at the Venice International Film Festival in 1996 and received the UNICEF Award from the same festival. The Wiesbaden film evaluation agency awarded the film the rating “valuable”.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. see ogre
  2. The name alludes to the Kaltenborn forest ( Neidenburg district ), which belonged to the hunting area of ​​Gauleiter Erich Koch .
  3. It is different in the literary model, which leaves open whether or not Tiffauges sinks under the weight of Ephraim.
  4. Text Gen 4, 1-24 Text Gen 4, 1-24
  5. Christophorus legend
  6. Text Gen 4, 1-24 Text Gen 4, 1-24
  7. The Ogre  ( page no longer available , search in web archivesInfo: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Variety, September 8, 1996, accessed July 3, 2011@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.variety.com  
  8. The fiend. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed March 2, 2017 .Template: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used 
  9. Der Unhold , filmtipps.at, accessed on July 3, 2011
  10. ^ The Ogre: An Allegory of Nazidom Centered on a Castle , New York Times, December 11, 1998, accessed July 3, 2011
  11. ^ A b Renate Holland-Moritz : Cinematic phenomena of the dispensable kind . In: Eulenspiegel , 42./50. Vol., No. 11/96, ISSN  0423-5975 , p. 48.
  12. cf. Thilo Wydra : Volker Schlöndorff and his films. Heyne, Munich 1998, pp. 207-221
  13. Jury statement of the German Film and Media Assessment (FBW)