The Sermon of the Bird or The Screaming of the Monks

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Movie
Original title The Sermon of the Bird or The Screaming of the Monks
Country of production Switzerland , Italy
original language Swiss German
Publishing year 2005
length 88 minutes
Rod
Director Clemens Klopfenstein
script Clemens Klopfenstein
production Clemens Klopfenstein
music Ben Jeger ,
Polo Hofer's ButterBand
camera Clemens Klopfenstein
cut Remo Legnazzi ,
Lorenz Klopfenstein
occupation

The Bird Sermon or The Screaming of the Monks (international title St. Francis' Birds Tour ) is a Swiss feature film by Clemens Klopfenstein from 2005 . It combines elements of comedy , satire and horror film and addresses the problems of Swiss filmmaking.

action

The actor Max and the musician Polo are on their way south in the car. They want to meet the film director Clemens “Klopfi” Klopfenstein in Italy to present Max's film idea to him. They don't know whether Klopfenstein will even be there and receive them - Max wrote him a letter, but the director cannot be reached by phone. Max and Polo want to make a mainstream film with “Sex and Crime” that “resonates with the audience”. Max hopes to finally be able to play "important characters in important situations that do something important" instead of characters like caretakers and geranium growers. Both are in a rather bad mood: Polo is upset about the mixing of his new CD, Max complains about the difficulties an actor has when looking for an apartment.

On the way, Max Polo describes his vision of the planned film, an action-packed drama in the African desert. In between, he indulges in daydreams in which the same young woman always appears, a cashier working in a Migros branch in Bern . A breakdown makes it impossible to continue your journey. When Max again sinks into a dream, he falls into the street and injures his head. The two are admitted to an Italian convent where Max is being treated. The nurse porter also has the face of Max's "dream woman". Through a small window, Polo and Max spot a monk who is practicing an anti-capitalist-Christian monologue in the church - «Capital must be destroyed and condensed with Jesus' blood ». A living Pietà with Ursula Andress as Madonna is enthroned on an elevated position . The monk despairs at his monologue and begs the Madonna in vain for help.

Max and Polo continue on foot. After a march through a snow-covered mountain landscape, they arrive in the Valle Umbra , where they hope to find the director. They get on a bus that takes tourists to the forest, where Francis of Assisi is said to have given his sermon on the bird , and which drops them off near Klopfenstein's house. When they arrive at Klopfenstein, both sides are initially rather confused: Max and Polo find the director with his rampant beard strangely overgrown and his house in dangerously shabby down, while Klopfenstein only replies to Max's enthusiastic action film project with chases across Africa reacts with head scratching.

Klopfenstein invites Max and Polo to dinner. He used pages from a script entitled Der Mondscheinmönch as material for lighting the fireplace . Max finds the scene in it that he and Polo had observed in the monastery. During the meal, Klopfenstein finds cautious friendly words for Max's project, but sees a problem in tackling another major film project after having worked on one for just four years. Ursula Andress and Mathias Gnädinger had participated, he had also received film funding , but the project on “Monasteries, Capitalism, Consumerism” had failed because of the costs. Max and Polo think nothing of "monastery films" and rant about Swiss filmmakers who let the state finance films that no one wants to see. Klopfenstein should write poetry if he wanted to make art - he replied that there was no federal poetry funding. General laughter.

In a dreamed-of dialogue with his actor Gnädinger, Klopfenstein complains that he cannot find an actor for the role of Francis of Assisi. Following a suggestion from Gnädinger, Klopfenstein goes into the forest the next morning with Max and Polo to take test shots. The two deliver Franz's sermon on the bird. Klopfenstein disappears into the forest to take a long shot of a rock . When he no longer appears, Max and Polo go in search of him and wander around in the forest in their monk's robes, calling for Klopfenstein. You spend the night in the forest. When they came across the ruins of a church in the forest the next day, Max saw “Migros”, his dream woman, in a weathered fresco. You will find Klopfenstein's camera and bloody clothes - the footage in the camera documents in found footage style how Klopfenstein fell victim to an attack by wolves in the forest.

Max and Polo march back through the mountain landscape. Polo is disappointed, bitter and just wants to go home while Max tries to encourage him - he knows a Finnish director in Portugal, and they would go to see him now.

Alternative ending

The DVD edition of the film also contains an “alternative ending, mystical”. It begins with a statement by the director that this original ending with Ursula Andress and Mathias Gnädinger was expensive, but did not fit with the rest of the film. In this version, Max and Polo only find their way out of the forest after they have "cleaned up" the ruin of Franz's church in the forest and put a fallen bell back in its place. Ursula Andress cooks spaghetti for Gnädinger and Klopfenstein's son Lukas - with eggs brought from the forest by Klara of Assisi in the form of Max's dream woman. When the church bell rings again, Andress opens the window and exclaims: “The bells of Santa Chiara! Miracolo, miracolo, miracolo! " In between, Klopfenstein goes into more detail about his failed project Der Mondscheinmönch and the filming of the rejected end of the bird sermon .

background

The Bird Sermon is the fourth feature film that Clemens Klopfenstein has made with Max Rüdlinger and Polo Hofer. This was preceded by E Nachtlang Füurland (1981) and Füürland 2 (1991) in co-direction with Remo Legnazzi and Das Schweigen der Männer (1996). Rüdlinger and Hofer were also the actors in Klopfenstein's 33-minute traveling film Die Gemmi - a transition from 1994. In his role as Max, Rüdlinger addresses the film The Silence of Men , which they made with Klopfenstein, and regards his project as a continuation with the same people, "but now completely different".

In a “statement by the director” in the form of text panels on the DVD, Klopfenstein goes into the background of the production: A producer asked him for a “weird gothic story” for a German private television broadcaster. He immediately wrote The Moonlight Monk, but nothing more had happened. When he got a script credit "from the state television", he wrote it for three years and the budget grew enormous. The exasperated producer said at the end that she couldn't finance such a film and that he should shoot something in "his style" with the rest of the script money.

“When the keyword“ your style ”comes up, I know immediately what hit it: I'm supposed to do everything myself again, as always, from the financing to the camera. I was depressed and began to paint lonely old men who sit alone in front of the fire in the evening and drink a lot of cheap wine. "

- Clemens Klopfenstein : DVD The Bird Sermon

After meeting Ursula Andress on the occasion of an invitation to the Swiss embassy in Rome, the actress agreed to play the Madonna in the Moonlight Monk . But Klopfenstein couldn't get beyond this part of the story. He was "no longer in the mood to bring this twisted Klosterjohnny into the world". Now that his “old friends Max and Polo” had pushed themselves back on the scene, he wanted to combine everything: “The big, heavy film, the small, light film and a found camera film”.

reception

The German-language criticism was mostly positive. In an article in the WOZ on the Solothurn Film Days 2005, which were opened by the Vogelpredigt , Veronika Rall described the film as a “bitter excursus on the subject of filmmaking in Switzerland”. The film was compared to The Blair Witch Project on Kino.de and the Süddeutsche Zeitung . For the lexicon of international film , Die Vogelpredigt is a “highly comical reflection on art and commerce” and Thomas Binotto wrote in his review in the NZZ that the film is “highly entertaining because it is full of allusions and self-deprecating” for those familiar with the Swiss film scene. However, according to Binotto, The Bird Sermon for the uninitiated should be "about as entertaining as a papal encyclical ". On the website of the Swiss film yearbook Cinema , Marcy Goldberg as well asks herself whether punch lines with the names of television editors and film politicians are “not too closely related to topical issues, so that hardly anyone will laugh at them in five years”.

Awards

  • Audience Award Grenzland-Filmtage Selb 2005

The bird sermon was nominated in 2006 for the Swiss Film Award in the category of best feature film. Max Rüdlinger was also nominated in the category Best Leading Role for his role in this film.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Marcy Goldberg: The Bird Sermon . In: Cinema . Retrieved November 2, 2014.
  2. The Gemmi - a transition . Swiss Films. Retrieved November 2, 2014.
  3. a b c Statement by the director, in: DVD Die Vogelpredigt , Praesens-Film 74185
  4. Veronika Rall: Swiss films couldn't be better . In: WOZ The weekly newspaper . February 3, 2005. Retrieved November 2, 2014.
  5. The Sermon on the Bird . In: kino.de . Retrieved November 2, 2014.
  6. Quotation in the bonus material of the DVD Die Vogelpredigt , Praesens-Film 74185: “Filmed in terrific poverty on mini-DV as a genuinely Swiss“ Blair Witch Project ””.
  7. The Sermon on the Bird or The Screams of the Monks. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed November 2, 2014 .Template: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used 
  8. a b Thomas Binotto: If Max, Polo, Mathias and Ursi National… . In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung . May 20, 2005. Retrieved November 2, 2014.