The pigeon on the roof
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| Original title | The pigeon on the roof |
| Country of production | GDR |
| original language | German |
| Publishing year | 1973 / 1990 |
| length | 82 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 0 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Iris Gusner |
| script | Iris Gusner, Regine Kühn |
| production | DEFA , "Babelsberg" group |
| music | Gerhard Rosenfeld |
| camera | Roland Graef |
| cut | Helga Krause |
| occupation | |
| |
Die Taube auf dem Dach is a German DEFA feature film by Iris Gusner from 1973. Banned immediately after its completion, the film only had its world premiere in 1990. He is one of the ban films of the GDR .
action
A construction site in the south of the GDR: Linda Heinrichs, a young woman from Mecklenburg , works as a construction manager here, where prefabricated apartment buildings are to be built. She gets to know two men who couldn't be more different: The student Daniel is spontaneous, takes them out to dance and collects unplanned donations for Vietnam. His interest in space travel and the future is repeatedly discussed in the film; the opening credits already show a rocket taking off . Building brigadier Hans Böwe, on the other hand, is an eternally restless person who has worked on construction in many parts of the GDR, but is nowhere really at home. Linda meets with both men, but confidently refuses to choose either.
The film consists of impressions from the life of Linda and her colleagues, which are often loosely joined together, some of whom live together in a confined space. Daniel, for example, shares accommodation with a Lebanese man who, with his tales of the sea rock "Nest of the Doves", a meeting place for lovers in Beirut , provides a second possible explanation for the film's title. First of all, the association with the saying “Better to have a sparrow in your hand than the pigeon on the roof”, which alludes to Linda's love triangle, should be mentioned, but this is never explicitly made in the film.
A linear action can only be partially recognized. Hans Böwe makes a marriage proposal to Linda and criticizes her pure work life - Linda does not accept the proposal, although she is still interested in Böwe. His occasional escapes into alcohol make Linda think about her own life - will she one day become like a gale? - and about the importance of happiness and love in current reality. Daniel, whose name was once mentioned as the title for the film, is also continuously promoting Linda. In the course of the film, however, there is no sign of Linda's decision for one of the men, nor any other solution to the dilemma.
background
Director Iris Gusner's debut film was made in the autumn and winter of 1972. a. in Arnstadt, and was not released for performance in the GDR in 1973, despite protests from renowned directors such as Konrad Wolf or Kurt Maetzig. The director was accused, among other things, of providing a distorted picture of the GDR reality, only showing people in crisis and stylizing an experienced worker into a tragic figure, which does not correspond to reality. They "spit in the face of the working class". Officially, the political ban was concealed by spreading rumors: The director had taken over with her first film and therefore canceled it. In contrast to other forbidden films, the film material did not end up in the State Film Archive of the GDR, but was destroyed in the studio - only a colored working copy remained, which was then considered lost. About the future of the director, the DEFA noted: Use on television in the GDR possible.
During the restoration of other prohibited films in 1989/90, the cameraman Roland Gräf discovered this working copy in the corner of a non-air-conditioned projection room in the DEFA feature film studio. Because it showed considerable delamination, he had a black and white dup-negative and a cinema copy made. So could The dove on the roof will be premiered on October 7, 1990 at the Berlin cinema "Babylon". Then all traces of the entire material are lost again. After years of searching, the DEFA Foundation succeeded in finding the black and white dup-negative in 2009 and reconstructing the film. The reconstructed version was shown on September 6, 2010 in Berlin, three days before the cinema release on September 9 - 37 years after the planned and then canceled premiere on October 5, 1973 and the disappearance of the DEFA, which was ordered by the chief director of DEFA and initially without a trace Footage.
Today's reception
In the Berliner Zeitung of September 9, 2010, Ralf Schenk stated that the audience at the time, used to conventional narrative cinema with closed dramaturgy, would have had difficulties with Gusner's ragged scene sequences. “She left everything open, did not come up with pleasant conflict solutions, delegated the answers to the questions asked in the film to the audience. [...] 'The Dove on the Roof' is deliberately staged in a brittle manner, although the film may seem even rougher to us today than it was planned at the time. "
Web links
- The dove on the roof in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- The pigeon on the roof at filmportal.de
- The pigeon on the roof. DEFA Foundation
Individual evidence
- ↑ Release certificate for The Dove on the Roof . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry , May 2010 (PDF; test number: 122 836 K).
- ↑ Oral information from the director Iris Gusner on November 20, 2013 on the occasion of a screening of the film in the Kommunale Metropolis Kino , Hamburg.
- ↑ a b Ralf Schenk: The sparrow in hand. Reality and utopia in a Defa prohibition film from 1973: "The dove on the roof" . In: Berliner Zeitung . No. 210/2010 , September 9, 2010, cultural calendar. Film, p. 2 .