The wonderful years (film)
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| Original title | The wonderful years |
| Country of production | Germany |
| original language | German |
| Publishing year | 1980 |
| length | 104 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 12 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Reiner Kunze |
| script | Reiner Kunze |
| production | Franz Seitz |
| music | Rolf Wilhelm |
| camera | Wolfgang Treu |
| cut | Barbara von Weitershausen |
| occupation | |
| |
The Wonderful Years is a German feature film made in 1979 about the lifestyle of young GDR citizens in the mid-1970s. The director was Reiner Kunze , who filmed his literary original of the same name here .
action
August 1968, tanks of the socialist "brother states" roll through Czechoslovakia to brutally crush the flourishing socialism there with a human face. At the time, the young Cornelia was just nine years old. Seven years later, at the school in her small, Thuringian hometown, she is still feeling the consequences of this act of violence on her life as a GDR citizen. Your teachers watch with eagle eyes on any critical and off-line comment and action. They carefully note down all the utterances that could make the teenage Cornelia a traitor to socialist ideology. Because Cornelia is the daughter of Dr. Bergmanns, a translator from the Czech, who once resigned from the SED in protest against the invasion of Czechoslovakia, because GDR troops had participated in the attack along with Soviet soldiers. Cornelia gets to know the one year older and musically gifted student Stephan. Under his influence, she gradually found her own identity, which she had always sought as a young, independently thinking person. She can discuss with Stephan, exchange ideas freely and without socialist tutelage, and research the value of life in a world in which a lot needs to be changed. The escape from the socialist-bourgeois narrow-mindedness, the formulas in a dictatorial system are offered by the regular meetings with the pastor, around whom she and some of her friends gather because the man of God answers her questions and does not evade or answer with rehearsed phrases. A jointly prepared organ concert will be a key experience for the young people.
Cornelia's conversations in the rectory and her commitment to the organ concert lead to the state's distrust of the headstrong woman growing ever stronger; for the socialist ideology reacts extremely critically, sometimes even aggressively, to independently thinking and acting individuals in a country in which the mass is everything and the individual is nothing. Cornelia's specially built, internal value structure, over which the SED has neither influence nor access, is seen by the regime as a constant threat, which has top priority to be eliminated. One day the state organs see an opportunity to make an example of one of the young people who are perceived as unruly, namely Stephan. After a critical statement on his part to his headmaster, a member of the SED, the young man was deprived of the opportunity to concentrate fully on music professionally in the future. Despite their intense relationship, which has turned into love, Cornelia cannot prevent her Stephan from an act of desperation. At the moment of his death she collapses. Cornelia organizes an ostentatious act of mourning and silent protest, all classmates wear black ribbons. But soon she too sees no way out for herself and decides to follow Stephan and to escape the murderous narrowness, also and above all in the heads of the party comrades, in this country in the ultimate way. At the end of the film there is a car with the hazard warning lights on: At the last moment, Cornelia's parents were able to save their daughter from following Stephen's act of desperation. But the question remains whether in the GDR in 1979, when this film was made, there is actually still hope for young people with their own ideas and thoughts.
Production notes
The wonderful years is a film-television production and was shot on 42 days from June 5 to July 27, 1979. The film passed the FSK on December 6, 1979 and was premiered on February 29, 1980 in Berlin, Hamburg, Nuremberg and Bayreuth .
Theater director Rudolf Noelte , who had started the 2.7 million D-Mark (approx. 1.3 million euros) film, dropped out of the project after only ten days of shooting due to artistic differences. Kunze then took over the direction. Gottfried Wegeleben was in charge of production.
In 1980 Kunze received the Bavarian Film Prize endowed with 50,000 DM for his work .
Reviews
“The film dragged me back to my time in the GDR. The old props created old reflexes, the Stasi food, the two-stroke noise of the Wartburg limousine, the blue shirts, the jargon. I saw the east again with east eyes. The Pavlovian bell rang, the old saliva flowed. The upright narrative, the good film cuts suggest a DEFA film. And even if we make fun of the kitsch, it is still in our bones. The characters are like a picture book, templates for good and bad. (…) Kunze's film fooled and smashed me. I starve to death with a feeling of fullness in my heart. GDR smells, but little GDR. GDR wounds, but little GDR. GDR truths, but little truth. Victims of the system are shown, but no really progressive, no really reactionary opponents. Picture book bigwigs are shown, but no people. Is half a truth a whole lie? How can a work of art that is so utterly honest still deceive? The virtue of this film is a crushing truthfulness. (...) I can only judge the narrow-minded Kunze according to my narrow-minded measure. But I can't judge him. And even if I were right with all of my criticism, the real effects of such a film are probably more mediated and different than I can imagine in my head. Perhaps this film does not generate this dull, self-righteous hatred of everything that is GDR, of everything that is left or wants to be in the general public. "
“That the actors sometimes declaim like they do in children's theater ... that the film is heavy on words and the direction remains stiff and awkward ... that the style, from tremendous pathos to agonizing symbols, clichés and black and white paintings, leaves no embarrassment - all of this is what cinema likes - Debutants credit Kunze. But that one has the oppressive impression of not seeing a film about the GDR, but a GDR film, namely one from the 1950s, that Kunze involuntarily creates the atmosphere of the bourgeois muff he denounces in image and sound wants to discover himself as the uptight product of that stuffy milieu. (…) Kunze always defends only one truth and makes himself comfortable, stubborn and astonishingly self-righteous and superficial, in the ideal world of his soulful one-sidedness, in the stuffy prop room of his petty-bourgeois cultural ideology. And of course he knows that a film inevitably coarsens up again, works with stronger effects and affects and reduces the complex reality of the literary model once more to a template. The film 'The Wonderful Years' delivers emotions instead of arguments, it denounces and agitates and thus fits fatally with the latest mood in the West. "
“Reiner Kunze's film is an energetic - not free from oversubscription - protest against a total state that does not allow its citizens to walk upright, but rather to allow their backs to bow. The author himself points out that this film could not only take place in the GDR. One should bear this in mind when watching the film and not misunderstand it as a propagandistic pamphlet against the other German state. The debate with Reiner Kunze is the freedom of the individual, he makes it firmly attached to the GDR based on his authentic experiences and comes to a devastating result: the much-invoked socialist freedom turns out to be an apparatus of perfect oppression. "
“First film whose visual implementation of the story was not entirely successful; even the intention to make the problems of an oppressed youth transparent does not seem entirely successful. "
Web links
- The wonderful years in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- The wonderful years at filmportal.de
Individual evidence
- ↑ "Storming the Heights of Culture" in Spiegel on February 11, 1980
- ↑ The wonderful years. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed March 2, 2017 .