The wall (film)
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| Original title | The wall |
| Country of production | Austria , Germany |
| original language | German |
| Publishing year | 2012 |
| length | 108 minutes |
| Age rating |
FSK 12 JMK 12 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Julian Pölsler |
| script | Julian Pölsler |
| production |
Rainer Kölmel Antonin Svoboda Bruno Wagner |
| camera |
JRP Altmann Christian Berger Markus Fraunholz Martin Gschlacht Bernhard Keller Helmut Pirnat Hans Selikovsky Thomas Tröger Richi Wagner |
| cut |
Bettina Mazakarini Natalie Schwager Thomas Kohler |
| occupation | |
| |
Die Wand is a literary film adaptation based on the novel of the same name by Marlen Haushofer from 2012. Martina Gedeck plays the lead role in the Austrian-German drama based on the script and directed by Julian Pölsler .
action
Together with a couple of friends, a woman goes to a lonely hunting lodge in the Austrian mountains. When the couple went to the village in the evening, the woman went to sleep and discovered the next morning that they had not returned. Together with the dog Lynx, she goes on a search and hits an invisible, smooth wall that she cannot break through and behind which all human life, but not nature, appears to be frozen.
Isolated from civilization , the city woman is forced to come to terms with her new situation. She becomes a farmer and huntress. A cow and a cat run to her. The cow then gets a male young animal; the cat also gives birth to a young, which it calls "pearl" because of its white fur. In summer she takes the animals to the alpine pastures . In the second summer she meets a man there who kills the young bull and her dog with an ax. She then shoots him with a hunting rifle .
In the third year, based on her notes, the woman writes a report on her time in the forest on the back of calendar sheets and business letters. The film ends when she has filled up all the paper in the hut.
background
Due to its metaphorical approach, Marlen Haushofer's novel was not considered filmable for a long time. Director Julian Pölsler , who described the original as his “book of life”, had read Die Wand as early as the 1980s and repeatedly toyed with the idea of a film adaptation. However, the film rights had changed producers several times over the years. Most recently they were with Klaus Maria Brandauer and his wife Karin , after whose death Pölsler was finally able to acquire the rights. It then took Pölsler seven years to complete the final version of the script. In doing so, he was largely based on Haushofer's novel, changing the first-person narrative situation of the book by deleting it for cinematic purposes, but not making any additions. The breakout scene in which the leading actress drives the Mercedes against the wall does not appear in the novel. He received support from the éQuinoxe Germany eV Screenwriters' Workshop, through whose participation Pölsler got to know the US scriptwriters Janet and David Webb Peoples , Syd Field and the English scriptwriter Martin Sherman , who encouraged him in his own vision of screen implementation. However, he turned down Field's recommendation to add a typical Hollywood ending to the film .
Was filmed The wall at a total of 63 days of shooting in Upper Austria Dachstein Mountains , divided into individual rotating blocks, between February 2010 and January 2011. The long rotation also the large number of cameramen explained. The Bavarian mountain sweat dog Luchs belongs to the director and screenwriter Pölsler and was also trained by him. The film is a production by coop99 Filmproduktion Wien and Starhaus Filmproduktion Munich and was produced in coproduction with Bayerischer Rundfunk , ARTE and in collaboration with ORF . The international project received funding from the Austrian Film Institute (ÖFI), the Vienna Film Fund , Upper Austrian Culture, the FilmFernsehFonds Bayern (FFF Bayern), the German Film Funding Fund (DFFF) and Eurimages , the Council of Europe's Film Funding Fund .
The world premiere of Die Wand was at the Berlinale 2012 , the Austrian premiere took place on October 2, 2012, a few days before the cinema release in German-speaking countries.
Martina Gedeck dubbed herself for the French-language edition.
In some scenes from We kill Stella (2017) reference is made to “The Wall”. In an interview, Pölsler stated that he saw We kill Stella as a prequel to Die Wand because Haushofer wrote the novel We kill Stella (1958) before Die Wand (1963). He also plans to film the Haushofer novel Die Mansarde (1969). All three works are written in the first person and are about a woman who wants to write something of her soul. Pölsler tried to work the same way in the style of both films, so Gosau, the dog and Ulrike Beimpold also appear again. For financial reasons, he started with Die Wand because, in his opinion, the other two parts would not have been funded.
reception
Reviews
“The Austrian director Julian Pölsler has now tried it anyway and modeled a haunting film from the idiosyncratic material, which, despite the uneventful plot, maintains its inner tension from beginning to end. You are slowly but inexorably drawn into the seclusion of this world, although the first-person narrator reports from the off about her fate in an emphatically sober tone. "
“However, all attempts to find out what the film is trying to tell us fail because of its sheer boredom. Even if Martina Gedeck were a bigger actress than she already is, she couldn't bring any life to this dead allegory. (…) The images of nature are quite beautiful, the starry sky, the dew in the grass, the crows on the tree, the reddish twilight. But you have to love this blue-shaded forest loneliness very much in order not to look at the clock. Having to look into the melancholy, mute face of the table setting for almost two hours, the strongest man cannot stand. "
“In the lo-fi science fiction drama Die Wand, the protagonist's isolation opens the way to an oceanic feeling. No longer used to interacting with people, their individualism gradually dissolves and transforms into a cosmic sense of unity, into a 'we' that overcomes species boundaries and connects women with their animals. The wall may have separated them from their fellow human beings - but at the same time the partition between humans and nature has been torn down. The civilization criticism of the narrative also grows from this dialectic. "
"In his remarkable film adaptation, Pölsler succeeds in staging animals and nature without sentimentality, without kitsch, but with the greatest possible empathy. Someone films with respect, even humility, for nature [...]. Pölsler takes time to look at the landscape, to perceive changes in light and the seasons. [...] A real stroke of luck for his work is the leading actress: Martina Gedeck. "
Awards
The wall won the prize of the Ecumenical Jury in the Panorama section at its world premiere in 2012 at the Berlin International Film Festival . Leading actress Martina Gedeck has been nominated for various film awards for her leading role (2012: Bambi , 2013: Prize of the German Film Critics , Romy , Viennale ). In 2013, Christian Bischoff, Uve Haußig and Johannes Konecny received the German Film Prize for the best sound design and two other nominations (film and leading actress).
At the beginning of September 2013, Die Wand was selected by a jury convened by the Association of the Film and Music Industry as the official candidate of the Austrian Film Commission for an Oscar nomination in 2014 in the category Best Foreign Language Film , but did not make it.
The German Film and Media Evaluation FBW in Wiesbaden awarded the film the title valuable.
Web links
- The wall in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Official page for the film
Individual evidence
- ↑ Release certificate for Die Wand . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry , March 2012 (PDF; test number: 132 078 K).
- ↑ Age rating for Die Wand . Youth Media Commission .
- ↑ The wall. School supplies. (PDF; 2.7 MB) (No longer available online.) AustrianFilm.at, archived from the original on October 17, 2014 ; accessed on October 15, 2014 .
- ↑ a b c d e f press booklet DIE WAND. (PDF) (No longer available online.) AustrianFilm.at, archived from the original on December 8, 2015 ; accessed on October 10, 2014 (subscription access).
- ↑ a b c d ORF premiere for Marlen Haushofer's bestselling novel "Die Wand" . In: ORF . APA-OTS . 5th June 2014.
- ↑ Alexandra Seitz: The now-time woman. In: Ray Film Magazine . Retrieved October 7, 2012 .
- ↑ Director Julian Pölsler on "We kill Stella", the second part of his Haushofer trilogy ( memento from September 26, 2017 in the web archive archive.today )
- ↑ Martin Schwickert: Caught in oneself. Die Zeit , October 11, 2012, accessed on October 24, 2012 .
- ↑ Ulrich Greiner : Back to nature. Die Zeit , October 11, 2012, accessed on October 24, 2012 .
- ↑ Martin Gobbin: The wall. kino-zeit.de, accessed on November 1, 2012 .
- ↑ Dorothee Krings: Martina Gedeck fights against isolation. In: RP Online , October 11, 2012.
- ↑ 86th Oscars: Austria sends "Die Wand" into the race for an Oscar abroad. In: Vorarlberg Online , September 3, 2013.