The great ecstasy of the carver Steiner

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Movie
Original title The great ecstasy of the carver Steiner
Country of production Germany
original language German
Publishing year 1974
length 45 minutes
Rod
Director Werner Herzog
script Werner Herzog
production Werner Herzog
music Popol Vuh
camera Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein
cut Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus

The great ecstasy of the carver Steiner is a documentary film produced for ARD by Werner Herzog from 1974 . The film portrays the Swiss ski jumper Walter Steiner and accompanies him to the 1974 KOP ski flying week on the Letalnica bratov Gorišek ski jump in Planica . Herzog himself regards this film as one of the most important of his films.

content

The film begins with an attitude that a jump Walter Steiner in slow motion shows. Then Steiner is shown working on an objet d'art in his wood workshop , and further slow-motion shots of ski jumps follow , but this time they end with falls. Then Steiner's jump will be shown at the opening of the large flying hill in Oberstdorf. Steiner reaches a distance of 179 meters. Herzog emphasizes the mortal danger that ski jumpers face, and sees ski jumping in the face of danger on the verge of inhumanity.

March 15th was the first day of training for the Ski Flying World Championship in Planica. Steiner feels a discomfort before his jump because the run-up for the jump is set very high and there is a risk that he will jump too far as in the previous jump. Steiner decides to jump carefully. During his jump, however, he ends up in the run-out radius , at a distance of 169 meters and thus four meters above the hill record that existed at the time. Steiner snubbed the organizers who, in his opinion, had set the hatch too high. The run-up is shortened by one hatch for the second training jump, but Steiner still jumps far too far - this time to 177 meters. He falls. With a bloody face he goes into the hospital tent and criticizes the organizers again for letting him jump. He desperately complains that you don't believe him, that the run-up is too far and emphasizes how nice it would be if you listened to him. According to Herzog, he then says: "I feel like I'm in an arena and fifty thousand are waiting for me to crash." After thinking about it for a long time, Steiner decided to jump further. With his third jump he comes to 166 meters.

On the first official day of competition, Steiner voluntarily starts a hatch lower than his competitors. He jumps 135 meters. On the second day of the competition, Steiner was in the lead overall. He jumps 166 meters that day. Steiner states that his jump was again borderline, he received three top marks for him. Although Steiner's jump went too far again, the run-up is extended and the tracks for the skis are heated with aluminum foil to make them even faster. Steiner starts two hatches below his competitors and comes to 154 meters. Somewhat sarcastically, he expresses the hope that his jump has lived up to the expectations of the Yugoslav audience. Steiner ultimately wins the competition with a lead over his competitors that has never existed before. The award ceremony is shown.

A shot of Steiner ice fishing is shown throughout the film . In these scenes he first reflects on the dangers of ski jumping. He assumes that the starting speed of the ski jumpers would have already reached their limit of feasibility at that time. He describes the feeling immediately before a jump as respect for the system, but not as fear. He expresses his wish to jump from smaller jumps again. Steiner also says that he always dreamed of flying in his childhood. He tells of a dream in which he flies over the runway and further over the slopes until he lands gently. In this dream he is flying like in slow motion. During his narration, one of his jumps is shown in slow motion. He tells another anecdote from his childhood: He found a raven and raised it with bread and milk until it could fly. Whenever the raven saw Steiner, he flew towards him. However, at some point the raven lost more and more feathers and could no longer fly. Other ravens tormented him. Out of pity Steiner finally shot the raven.

In the last sequence, Steiner's jump can be seen again in slow motion. A slightly modified quote from Robert Walser , taken from his short story Helbling's story , is displayed over this recording . Instead of the name of the first-person narrator Helbling in Walser's story, Herzog has used the name Steiner:

“I should actually be all alone in the world, me, Steiner, and no other living being. No sun, no culture, me naked on a high rock, no storm, no snow, no roads, no banks, no money, no time and no breath. In any case, I would no longer be afraid ”.

presentation

The storyline of the film, Steiner's path from training to victory, is repeatedly interrupted by slow motion shots of jumps and falls. The use of slow motion is an important element in Herzog's documentary. The slow-motion recordings were captured with high-speed cameras, which reproduce motion sequences with a 10 to 20-fold delay. These recordings are usually accompanied by music by the band Popol Vuh .

The storyline is also interrupted by a shot of Steiner ice fishing while reflecting on ski jumping and his childhood. The shot is divided into three parts and is shown at different points in the film. The first part is shown at the beginning, the second at the end of the first quarter and the last at the end of the film.

In places, Herzog himself appears as a reporter in front of the camera, and he also comments on the events from the off . He gives information about Steiner or ski flying, but also gives ratings. In a scene in which training jumps are shown in Bad Aussee , Austria, Herzog presents Steiner as an absolute exception among ski jumpers and expresses his appreciation for him; Steiner is the greatest jumper that has ever existed. In a comment from the off, he describes the jump on the second day of the competition as "probably the most accomplished jump in the history of ski flying."

reception

The documentary is often praised for the frequently used method of showing jumps and falls in slow motion, which is characteristic of the style of the film. For example, the use of slow motion in the film is seen as a way of “outsmarting the restrictive, logical mechanics of the world” and “giving back its actual duration” to a ski jump. In this interpretation Steiner is characterized as a visionary and a dreamer, but he can only achieve his longings through the constant risk of dying in a fall. This is seen as legitimation that so many falls are shown in slow motion, especially since these settings allow the viewer to experience "the challenge of death". The last shot in slow motion, a jump by Steiner, is seen as a return to reality: “Steiner blurs into a tiny stick figure against an infinitely white background. It is the human being traced back to his real size and at the same time a Walter Steiner entering into infinity. "

Jürgen Theobaldy also sees the use of slow motion as Herzog's intention to alienate the familiar. The slow-motion shots not only had a documentary character, they also created an aesthetic alienation: "A body snakes like a plant smoothly over the snow, and while one is still staring at the soft, flowing movements with which arms and legs wrap around the body, loosening up and looping around him again, everyone knows that he is watching a serious accident. This tension creates [...] a mild shock. It is the one with whom one realizes that one has waited for such an interruption in the flight spectacle. "

Kraft Wetzel, however, attests the slow-motion recordings an artificially exaggerated character: They make “ski flying appear dangerous to an extent that goes far beyond Steiner's brief remarks”. The slow-motion shots would also stylize “the slight, reserved” Steiner in front of the “emotional backdrop of danger and fear” they created into a superstar through the use of “superlatives that surpass each other”. These superlatives refer to Herzog's praise to Steiner in the film: "For me personally he is the greatest ski flyer that has ever existed."

Theobaldy also claims to have identified a distorted representation of Steiner's personality in the film. Here he accuses Herzog of an ideological bias: According to Theobaldy, Herzog “stylized the rather modest Walter Steiner, who was well aware of his dangers and limits, into a heroic ski flyer. Herzog makes him a descendant of his titanic film heroes and shows himself to this athlete as a whispering conjurer of the superlative. [...] Steiner, for whom it is more important to jump without fear than to win a title, not only remains a stranger in this competition, but also in this film, unimaginable by his fellow athletes, by the audience, the officials and also by Herzog who here is barely controlling the grid of his worldview over Steiner's person. "

The lexicon of the international film offers a contrary opinion , which sees no distorted representation of Steiner's personality: “The athlete does not appear as a star, but as a person who can cope with the expectations placed on him and his own ideas got to. Impressive through the interplay of impressive images of the ski flight, the music and the whispering commentary that highlights the "ecstasy" of the ski flyer Steiner. "

Wetzel, who puts the great ecstasy of the carver Steiner in the context of Herzog's previous films, sees this film as a “highly personal work, as a new formulation of that defiant titanic rebellion against the world that Herzogs feature films run through as a leitmotif and here for the first time on one authentic person projects [...]. "

production

The great ecstasy of the carver Steiner is a contribution to the ARD series "Border Stations" and was first broadcast on February 2, 1975 on television. Originally the film was one hour long, but since it had to be adapted to the format of the "Grenzstation" series, Herzog shortened it by 15 minutes. The film was shot from September 1973 to March 1974, primarily in Steiner's home town of Wildhaus ( Switzerland ), in Oberstdorf ( Germany ), Bad Aussee ( Austria ) and in Planica (former Yugoslavia ). The cost of the film was 50,000 DM.

Award

  • Grand Prize of the International Sports Film Festival 1975

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Werner Herzog: Herzog on Herzog . London: Faber and Faber 2002. p. 95.
  2. ↑ a b c The great ecstasy of the carver Steiner. In: documentary-scene.de. May 23, 2014, accessed June 7, 2015 .
  3. ^ Jürgen Theobaldy: Journeys into the monsters. In: Peter W. Jansen / Wolfram Schütte (eds.): Werner Herzog. Film series 22. Munich / Vienna: Hanser 1979. p. 34.
  4. ↑ a b Kraft Wetzel: The great ecstasy of the carver Steiner. In: Peter W. Jansen / Wolfram Schütte (eds.): Werner Herzog. Film series 22. Munich / Vienna: Hanser 1979. p. 109.
  5. ^ Jürgen Theobaldy: Journeys into the monsters. In: Peter W. Jansen / Wolfram Schütte (eds.): Werner Herzog. Film series 22. Munich / Vienna: Hanser 1979. p. 40.
  6. ↑ The great ecstasy of the carver Steiner. in the lexicon of international film
  7. ↑ Kraft Wetzel: The great ecstasy of the carver Steiner. In: Peter W. Jansen / Wolfram Schütte (eds.): Werner Herzog. Film series 22. Munich / Vienna: Hanser 1979. p. 109.
  8. ↑ Hans Helmut Prinzler: data. In: Peter W. Jansen / Wolfram Schütte (eds.): Werner Herzog. Film series 22. Munich / Vienna: Hanser 1979. p. 150.
  9. ↑ Werner Herzog: Herzog on Herzog. London: Faber and Faber 2002. p. 36.
  10. ↑ Hans Helmut Prinzler: data. In: Peter W. Jansen / Wolfram Schütte (eds.): Werner Herzog. Film series 22. Munich / Vienna: Hanser 1979. p. 150.
  11. ↑ The great ecstasy of the carver Steiner. In: mediendienste.info. Retrieved June 7, 2015 .