The leaden time
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| Original title | The leaden time |
 | |
| Country of production | Germany |
| original language | German |
| Publishing year | 1981 |
| length | 106 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 16 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Margarethe von Trotta |
| script | Margarethe von Trotta |
| production | Eberhard Junkersdorf |
| music | Nicolas Economou |
| camera | Franz Rath |
| cut | Dagmar Hirtz |
| occupation | |
| |
Die Bleierne Zeit is a feature film by the German director Margarethe von Trotta from 1981. The drama is based on the biographies of the two sisters Christiane and Gudrun Ensslin . As a politically active journalist and militant women's rights activist, Christiane Ensslin was one of the founders of the magazine Emma ; her sister chose the route of armed struggle and joined the Red Army Faction (RAF). The film is based on a screenplay by Trottas and was her international breakthrough: For Die Bleierne Zeit she was the first filmmaker to be awarded the Golden Lion , the main prize of the Venice Film Festival . The film opened in German cinemas on September 25, 1981.
action
The two sisters Juliane and Marianne grow up in Germany in the post-war years , the so-called leaden time , in a Protestant pastor's family . Marianne is gentle and quiet, Juliane, on the other hand, is rebellious. In the shadow of the authoritarian father and the cruel political past, both went different paths in the following decades. Both advocate social change within the student movement . Marianne has a relationship with a troubled intellectual who, after breaking up, escapes into suicide. The 1968 movement became the turning point for the sisters . Marianne disappears into the terrorist underground and sees violence as the last resort for change, not so Juliane, who, on the other hand, is involved in political detailed work. She campaigns for women's emancipation, organizes demonstrations for legal abortion and works as an editor for a women's magazine.
One day Marianne is caught by the police and ends up in solitary confinement . Juliane stands by her sister and is the only one who visits her. In conversations, the two slowly approach each other again, encounter similarities and differences and reflect on childhood experiences. When Juliane was on vacation in Italy, she received news of the death of Marianne, who is said to have committed suicide. During the investigation, she suffers a nervous breakdown and, along with her father, she soon doubts the official cause of death. In search of evidence for this, Juliane goes through her sister's ordeal. She comes across evidence that calls into question the suicide, but the public no longer cares. Juliane takes care of her sister Marianne's little son. The orphan boy has become a victim of petty bourgeois mobs himself and at the end of the film tears up a picture of his deceased mother. “You are wrong,” says Juliane. “Your mother was an extraordinary woman. [...] I'll tell you about her. "Finally the boy asks:" But I have to know everything. Start ... start! "
The title
Von Trotta took the title of the film from Hölderlin's poem The Walk to the Country. To Landauer . She did not want to mark the 1970s of terrorist violence,
- “But the atmosphere of the 1950s. The film describes the careers of the sisters, their childhood and youth in the post-war period, that is my generation. I also described myself there, my feeling of having lived under a leaden sky in the fifties, under a lead cap of silence. You could feel that there was something in the past, in the war, but we were not informed about it. We wanted to break out of this ignorance. That was also a trigger for the first generation of the RAF to resort to violence. "
In Italy , where the film premiered at the Venice International Film Festival in 1981, the translated title Anni di piombo (literally: years / time of lead) was related to the projectiles with which armed extremists - in Italy above all the Brigate Rosse - shot around during their actions. This shift in meaning towards the years of terrorist violence took place accordingly in the French années de plomb and ultimately also in the German original title Die Bleierne Zeit , all of which became a household word in this meaning . In the English-speaking world, however, the title Marianne and Juliane was used , in Great Britain and Northern Ireland also The German Sisters .
"Come over! open, friend! to be sure, a little shines today
only down and the sky encloses us closely.
Neither the mountains have risen nor the forest's
peaks as desired and the air rests empty with song.
It's gloomy today, the corridors and streets are slumbering and it almost
seems to me that it is as if in leaden time .
[..] "
backgrounds
In an evangelical youth evening the father of the sisters takes the extremely controversial at the time in Germany film Night and Fog of Alain Resnais before. For Juliane and Marianne this film is a political awakening experience.
Reviews
“A mixture of a political-theoretical simulation game and psychological melodrama that tries to deal with the problem of political resistance on the basis of a subjectively illuminated sister relationship. Despite the partiality - the 'other side' of terrorism, that of the victims, is completely left out - a topically important contribution to the problem of terrorism that is worth discussing. "
"'Die Bleierne Zeit' is a film that puts no one right and no one wrong; it is a tragedy that the director and the actors intuitively modeled on, a tragedy of course that was not woven by supernatural heavenly powers."
reception
- As Renate Möhrmann writes, by winning the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1981 , the film was the first woman to receive “international attention”. According to Möhrmann, it is one of the so-called “women’s films” made around 1980 in the Federal Republic of Germany, which show the “non-reduced woman from the material of female fantasies”.
- The film gave Doris Hays the impetus to “ develop” her composition Celebration of No (1983) “ from the word and the feeling NO ”.
Trivia
- In the film, Juliane visits her sister Marianne several times in a rural prison whose name is not mentioned. The Butzbach correctional facility in Hesse partially served as the backdrop for this . Before the first visit can be seen Juliane on münzenberg castle down, eastward from Münzenberger neighboring Rocky Mount Coming to then west of it lies in the several kilometers JVA Butzbach to arrive.
- Actor and voice actor Rolf Schult (standard voice for Robert Redford and Anthony Hopkins ) makes a short appearance on the phone towards the end of the film.
- A secret meeting of the two sisters in Berlin, before Marianne's arrest, was filmed in the Kreuzberg Lapidarium (Berlin) . There Juliane first walks past the figures of the former Siegesallee from the Great Zoo in the outdoor area. The figures were temporarily stored in the lapidarium until 2009 and then taken to the Spandau Citadel , where they have been on view in a permanent exhibition since 2016 after restoration.
Awards
| year | price | Recipient | category |
| 1981 | Venice Film Festival | Margarethe von Trotta | Golden lion |
| 1981 | Venice Film Festival | Margarethe von Trotta | FIPRESCI award |
| 1981 | Venice Film Festival | Jutta Lampe and Barbara Sukowa | Golden Phoenix as best actress |
| 1981 | Chicago International Film Festival | The leaden time | Golden Hugo (named after Hugo Gold ) |
| 1981 | Valladolid International Film Festival | Margarethe von Trotta | Honorable Mention |
| 1982 | David di Donatello | Margarethe von Trotta | Best director for a foreign film |
| 1982 | German film award | Margarethe von Trotta | Best movie |
| 1982 | German film award | Barbara Sukowa | Best Actress |
| 1989 | German film award | Margarethe von Trotta | Special film award '40 Years of the Federal Republic of Germany ' (together with Farewell to Yesterday , Die Brücke and The Marriage of Maria Braun ) |
literature
- Renate Möhrmann : Women are conquering a new place of articulation: the film : In: Hiltrud Gnüg and Renate Möhrmann (eds.): History of women's literature. Writing women from the Middle Ages to the present. JBMetzlersche Verlagsbuchhandlung, Stuttgart 1985, ISBN 3 476 00585 2 , pp. 434-452.
Web links
- Video of the feature film on YouTube
- The German Sisters in theInternet Movie Database(English)
- The lead time at filmportal.de
- Movie poster on filmposter-archiv.de
Individual evidence
- ↑ Release certificate for Die Bleierne Zeit . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry , November 2007 (PDF; test number: 52 586 V / DVD / UMD).
- ↑ taz blog of June 7, 2009
- ↑ cf. Margarethe von Trotta . In: International Biographical Archive 06/2007 of February 10, 2007
- ↑ a b Christiane Peitz: The lead cap of silence . Interview with Margarethe von Trotta. The daily mirror of April 28, 2007
- ^ Project Gutenberg - Go to the country
- ^ Romuald Karmakar in the FAZ of September 16, 2008
- ↑ The leaden time. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed March 2, 2017 .
- ↑ Christian Schultz-Gerstein in Der Spiegel of September 14, 1981 (accessed March 4, 2012)
- ↑ Renate Möhrmann 1985, pp. 448 and 449.
- ↑ Doris Hays: Celebration of No: The woman in my music . In: Neuland - Approaches to Contemporary Music Volume 4 (1983/84), edited by Herbert Henck , Gisela Gronemeyer and Deborah Richards. Bergisch Gladbach April 1984. pp. 261-267; also in Emma (magazine) 1983 p. 58 books.google
- ↑ cf. The leaden time . In: The large TV feature film film lexicon (CD-ROM). Directmedia Publ., 2006. - ISBN 978-3-89853-036-1
- ↑ cf. German Film Award 1989 in the Internet Movie Database (English; accessed May 31, 2009)