The new desk

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Movie
Original title The new desk
Country of production Germany
original language German
Publishing year 1914
length 11 minutes
Rod
script Karl Valentin
production Peter Ostermayr , Munich
occupation
  • Karl Valentin: office clerk Dürr

The new desk is a short, German silent film grotesque from 1914 with the Munich folk comedian Karl Valentin , who also wrote the screenplay, in the lead role. The script was written by Emil Reinicke after the publication of the same name in the Munich Bilderbogen , No. 1018 .

action

The office clerk Dürr receives a new desk. It is delivered by a pair of movers reminiscent of Pat and Patachon : the tall carpenter who made the piece and his tiny assistant. Both of them heave the piece of furniture off the street into the skinny secretary's office. It quickly becomes clear to the person delivering that the writing furniture is a standing desk, unsuitable for writing while sitting. Dürr wants to complain at once, but the gigantic carpenter puts on a grim face and demands payment despite the objection of the secretary, and even the tiny man does not want to leave without a tip.

Now the clerk stands perplexed in front of his new work tool. Then he has an idea: He takes a saw and begins to shorten the table legs. In doing so, Dürr saws off so much wood that the standing desk becomes a desk that is too low. Now the chair that was also delivered is clearly too high, so that it has to be shortened accordingly. Secretary Dürr picks up the saw again. In sheer frenzy, angry about the desk allegedly made in the wrong dimensions, the accompanying chair, the carpenter, who in his eyes bears all the blame for the mess and ultimately also himself, the mishap takes its course: Dürr saws and saws until he's literally sitting on the floor. The chair no longer has legs, the desk only stumps.

To make room for Dürr's endlessly long legs, the desperate man is now drilling holes in the floor. Now everything seems perfect and Dürr can finally start writing. But the floor beneath him has become so unstable that Dürr and his mutilated work tool crash through the ceiling one floor below, into the barber shop below his office. Finally he was thrown out into the street, where all the misery began with the delivery of the desk.

Production notes

The film, made in 1913 or 1914, largely a one-person piece , passed the censorship in 1914 and was probably premiered that same year. The length of the one-act play is 206 meters, which corresponds to an approximate playing time of a good eleven minutes.

As in Valentin's best early works, this film thrives entirely on Valentin's ragged physicality and the protagonist's struggle with the intricacies of the object, which degenerates into pure actionism and ends in chaos.

assessment

A century later, the assessment of this film said: “The new desk” is certainly Valentine's early masterpiece. The film takes up a favorite theme of the early film grotesque, which is remarkably hidden in German cinema: the systematic destruction of the bourgeois house as the epitome of bourgeois order. "

Jan-Christopher Horak writes:

“Valentine's war against his own body and the problem of the object takes on extreme forms here. The second shot of the film already points to the physical, when Valentin's long, emaciated figure counteracts the giant von Tischler with his short assistant. Sitting at his new desk, Valentine's legs dangle over the floor, his long arms can barely reach the inkwell, and his head is too low to see what he is writing. So he tries hard to get his legs down on the chair in a kneeling position. Growing anger takes hold of him until he hits the desk with his hand and injures himself in the process. After he has fetched the saw and folding rule, he has to twist in an impossible way because he does not want to put the saw down while measuring the table. He almost cuts off his thumb as he tries to reach the measured point with the saw. The more he saws, the wilder and more confused he acts, until he finally takes a hammer and simply knocks off the chair legs. (...) The more convulsively he tries to cope with the desk, as it were an extension of his own body, the more he destroys it. Finally, Valentin groans, sitting on the sawed-off chair on the floor, legs stretched horizontally under the desk: "Oh God, how deep have I sunk!" (...) For the cinema audience, this spectacle of agony and agony offers the opportunity for sadistic pleasure. "

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Thomas Brandlmeier in CineGraph: Early German Comedy Film 1895–1917
  2. ↑ Schadenfreude. German film comedies and Karl Valentin , in: Early film in Germany. KINtop. Yearbook for the Study of Early Film. 1st ed. Frank Kessler, Sabine Lenk, Martin Loiperdinger. Basel - Frankfurt / Main: Stroemfeld / Roter Stern 1992, pp. 65–66, 68–69

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