The architects

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Movie
Original title The architects
Country of production GDR
original language German
Publishing year 1990
length 102 minutes
Age rating FSK 0
Rod
Director Peter Kahane
script Thomas Knauf
Peter Kahane
production DEFA
music Tamas Kahane
camera Andreas Köfer
cut Use Peters
occupation

Die Architekten is a contemporary feature film by DEFA , Babelsberg Group, by Peter Kahane , which was released in 1990.

action

The focus of the film is the architect Daniel Brenner. Since the end of his studies, the 38-year-old Brenner has been waiting for his professional breakthrough. Despite top marks, he has to be content with designing department stores, transformer houses and bus stations. Only with the help of his architecture professor do new opportunities seem to open up for Brenner. The architect is commissioned to design a new socio-cultural center for a satellite city in Berlin where he himself lives with his family. The investment should amount to 85 million GDR marks. Brenner accepts the order, but makes the condition that he can choose his employees himself. This request is complied with, but the search is proving to be very difficult. Some of his former fellow students have gone to the West; others have withdrawn into inner emigration . Although Daniel Brenner succeeds in putting together a collective , the architects encounter insurmountable obstacles in the implementation of their project. The project fails almost completely due to the conditions of the real socialist system. A large part of the collective does not want to and cannot continue to support this development, they give up or fall into defensive cynicism. Daniel Brenner sticks to the project until the end, but the adversity of the system threatens to break him too. The professional problems are increasingly overshadowing family relationships. The group of the collective is getting smaller and smaller. His wife falls in love with a Swiss man and leaves the GDR with their daughter. Instead of an imaginative, new meeting place, a desolate building is approved. Disaffected, Brenner collapses in front of the grandstand where the official celebration of the start of construction took place.

Background and origin

In no other DEFA feature film is the criticism of the existing system expressed in such an open and relentless manner. The film problematizes the hindrance to the free development of creativity, it addresses the generation conflict in the GDR and points to the lack of identification with one's own country. In addition, however, he also addresses the failed state building policy; it shows the limits of the socialist model of emancipation and the problems of the wall . In Kahane's film, an illusion is made to fail, but the system does not (yet) fail, the protagonists fail: “And of course it was the story of a dismantling. A dismantling of an illusion. It was written that way and you couldn't do it any other way. ”( Peter Kahane in an interview with Ralf Schenk ).

On the basis of his synopsis, Thomas Knauf wrote the script together with the film director Peter Kahane in 1988, which was approved in the same year and included in the shooting schedule for 1989. In the original script version, the protagonist Daniel Brenner was supposed to get involved in society at the end of the film, despite all the setbacks, resistance and hopelessness, and change the system of the GDR from below, which was achieved through a final scene at the Brandenburg Gate between the father in the east, “his face Pain but also shows energy ”, and daughter in the west, who both look at each other over the Berlin Wall . The real events made Knauf and Kahane doubt whether it would make sense to continue, because much of the content of the film became obsolete.

production

Filming

Due to various politically motivated delays, shooting of the film did not begin until October 2, 1989 in the Defa Studios in Babelsberg , when the transition in the GDR was approaching its climax. The film was shot in East Berlin and at Lindstedt Palace in Potsdam . On the evening of November 9th, a scene was filmed in front of the house of the electrical industry on Alexanderplatz and after Günter Schabowski talked live on GDR television about the opening of the Wall, the camera team, which was visible from afar, was asked by US reporters what they were doing with their newly won freedom will do. The scene at the Brandenburg Gate with a view of the Berlin Wall was shot with official filming permission in December after the Wall had opened , and the camera or the angle of view through the Brandenburg Gate had to be aligned so that the cameras and lamp towers on the west side of the Wall could not be seen. During the filming, many actors and production members traveled to West Berlin and / or West Germany, but no one fled and the film was shot in full. The scene of Wanda Brenner and daughter's departure was filmed at the GDR border crossing point at Bahnhof Friedrichstrasse after the Berlin Wall fell , and so bizarre scenes occurred during the filming when friends of the actors and the production team walked past them to legally leave what was happening in filmed film was only possible after an approved exit application .

Filming ended in February 1990.

music

publication

When the film was premiered at Kino International on June 21. and then hit the cinemas the following day, it found very little audience response from just 5,354 or 8,000 paying people. Written in 1988, shot as a contemporary film 1989-90, a film about the past was made through the events of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1990 - with the message to get involved in society despite all resistance and hopelessness and to change the system of the GDR from below , was a film as a swan song for the GDR.

In 2003 the film was shown for the first time on all-German television ( Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk ).

Movie quotes

  • “I admire anyone who goes on under these conditions, but I can't go on and what's worse, I think it's pointless. At 39 I want to finally be an adult. ” - Martin Bulla, min. 58:40
  • “There's nothing left that pleasantly surprises me: I go to the department store and have been finding the same thing for years. The only surprise is that suddenly it is no longer long-life milk but onions that are scarce and that I have to run even more after every pair of children's pants and that it is more expensive again. ” - Wanda Brenner, min. 60:56

Reviews

“The film acts like you just had to let it be done and everything would be fine. (…) It was made too easy for oneself: Neither the situation of the architects nor the anti-architects are psychologically thoroughly recorded and felt. But courage alone can no longer be rewarded. "

- Berliner Zeitung

“A film that bundles the experiences of the younger GDR generation like a parable and deals with the agony of late Stalinism. Conceived before the fall of Honecker, the highly explosive, melancholy study, a swan song for the GDR, only came to the cinema after the fall of the Berlin Wall. "

- Lexicon of international film

Prices

swell

  • Ingrid Poss, Peter Warnecke (eds.): Trace of the films, contemporary witnesses about DEFA , Berlin 2006.
  • Berliner Zeitung of June 22, 1990, p. 9.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Release certificate for the architects . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry , August 2004 (PDF; test number: 99 240 DVD).
  2. ↑ a b c d e f Defa-Film becomes a swan song for the GDR. In: Märkische Allgemeine. November 9, 2019, accessed March 23, 2020 .
  3. ↑ a b c d e f Interview with Peter Kahane about his film "Die Architekten" (1990) · architekturvideo.de. In: architekturvideo.de. May 22, 2008, accessed on March 23, 2020 (German).
  4. ^ The Architects (1990) - IMDb. Retrieved March 24, 2020 .
  5. ↑ a b c film details: Die Architekten (1990). Retrieved March 23, 2020 .
  6. ^ The architects. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed April 3, 2017 .Template: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used