The window cleaner serenade

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Movie
Original title The window cleaner serenade
Country of production GDR
original language German
Publishing year 1960
length 16 minutes
Rod
Director Rolf Schnabel
script Rolf Schnabel
production DEFA studio for documentaries
music Günter Frieß
Kurt Grottke
camera Harry Bremer
cut Irmgard hero

The window cleaner serenade is a documentary film by the DEFA studio for newsreels and documentaries by Rolf Schnabel from 1960 .

action

A group of window cleaners ride their bikes to their workplaces scattered around Berlin. One of them is deployed on Weinbergsweg, near Rosenthaler Platz and immediately starts cleaning the round panes on the front doors in order to then devote himself to a few shop windows in the street. This includes a ceramics and porcelain figurine shop , a pastry shop and a women's underwear shop.

A window cleaner cleans the outside of the shop window of a department store. Behind one of these windows, which is covered halfway up, he observes a decorator from his ladder , but she takes no notice of him while she dresses several mannequins . Another colleague is employed in a large office building with long corridors, but is not always let in by the employees who work there. Meetings, discussions, conferences, meetings, deliberations, assemblies are the reasons for the refusals, but then he still finds a free space, which turns out to be a toilet. Behind a door that says Archive , he discovers a couple kissing, whom he doesn't want to disturb. But there is still a colleague behind a door who cordially invites him in so that he still has something to do. When cleaning the revolving door at the company entrance, a visitor to the house absolutely wants to use it and it takes a long time to convince them to go through the normal door that is open next to it.

The glass cleaners also clean the letters on the neon advertising in Karl-Marx-Allee , just like the large windows in this street, so that even the Frankfurter Tor is reflected in them. But also small, heavily soiled windows that have turned really black due to the eight chimneys of the Klingenberg power plant are also part of her area of ​​responsibility, of course with the indication that this smoke will be a thing of the past in a few years.

The decorator in the department store puts their heads back on the dolls and mixes up which ones, which the window cleaner tells her with a smile. The time has now come for the decorator to smile back for the first time, something she has always avoided so far. After further eye contact, she comes out onto the street and they both go to a nearby café for an ice cream sundae. The colleague who cleans the windows of the shops has to realize that his work is not always crowned with success, because after he has laboriously cleaned the window of a greengrocer's shop and scraped off old sticky notes, the owner comes out and describes it with white paint Glass with the latest offers. But even children are not always very considerate, they smear the windows with their spit. As if in mockery, the film ends when a boy writes OFF on the window with a grease pen, which means the end of the film.

Production and publication

The lyrics came from John Stave and Rolf Schnabel, the song was sung by Lutz Jahoda . The music was played by the Günter Frieß sextet and Helmut Moenke sat on the organ.

The first known performance of the black and white film, shot under the working title PGH Berliner Putzbär, took place during the 3rd Leipzig Short and Documentary Film Week in November 1960.

The PGH Berliner Putzbären was a service company for glass and building cleaning in East Berlin .

Awards

  • 1960: Honorable recognition during the 3rd Leipzig Short and Documentary Film Week

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Neues Deutschland from November 27, 1960, p. 6