End of the line freedom
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| Original title | End of the line freedom |
| Country of production | Germany |
| original language | German |
| Publishing year | 1980 |
| length | 108 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 16 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Reinhard Hauff |
| script | Burkhard Driest |
| production |
Eberhard Junkersdorf , Dieter Schidor |
| music | Irmin Schmidt |
| camera | Frank Bruhne |
| cut | Peter Przygodda |
| occupation | |
| |
Endstation Freiheit is a German feature film drama from 1980 by Reinhard Hauff with Burkhard Driest , who also wrote the (autobiographical) script, and Rolf Zacher as two former prisoners with different life paths.
action
Nik Dellmann is freed after eight years in prison. He gets off the train in Munich and is met by his former girlfriend Eva. Her husband and Janni, their son, are also present. Nik feels strangely repulsed by this intimate homeliness and the resulting narrow-mindedness radiating family happiness and does not accept their offer that one would like to take care of him first. Nik wants to go his own way and finish with his past. Using the name of his former cell mate Henry Kirscher, he contacts his pen pal Leila, a middle-class employee who lives under one roof with a Mr. Beekenbrandt. Since Leila has never seen Henry, Nik can move in with Leila without any problems, always eyed with suspicion by the other tenant.
Nik had already started writing while he was in prison. Obviously, he has developed a remarkable talent. He plans to process his experience as a prisoner in a novel that is supposed to be entitled "The Man Without a Shadow". The focal point of the story should be the sophisticated kidnapping of an industrialist, planned down to the last detail. Eva, whom he visits from time to time, is an important critic of his notes and soon becomes a central support in his writing. As Nik's book project begins to take shape, Henry Kirscher breaks out of prison. A pistol bullet fired at him by a prison guard brushed his ankle. Henry immediately seeks out Nik, who treats him. Nik actually wants to finally finish with his criminal past, but is not completely averse to new atrocities, especially since Henry tries hard to convince him to risk another coup.
At a book publisher cocktail party, Eva introduces Nick to an influential editor. On the one hand, Nik feels deeply repelled by the smug, complacent cultural people who consider themselves to be the crown of intellectual creation, on the other hand, he also knows that the contacts made there will be important if he wants to find a publisher for his novels. Nik's mind stumbles for a moment and proposes to Henry, who is still brooding over an “ingenious” plan for a coup, to kidnap Leila's boss, the industrialist Dorsil. Nik's plan is to exploit this crime for his kidnapping novel. Together they do the preliminary work, everything goes exactly according to plan. When Nik goes to a pharmacy to get painkillers for Henry's gunshot wound in the ankle, he pretends to call a doctor, but is actually talking to Eva. She happily informs him that the publisher has decided to publish his novel.
Now Nik's idea of another crime, the kidnapping of Dorsil, bursts like a soap bubble in a second. Nik makes it clear to Henry that he will no longer participate in the kidnapping. Henry against is determined to carry out this plan because, unlike Nik, he sees no new perspective for his messed up life. When Nik can no longer be convinced, Henry leaves him angry and disappointed. The book advertising hype will soon start, the hitherto completely unknown author Nik Dellmann is to be presented to the readers in a large advertising campaign. Nik's dislike of the hype hasn't changed, but he's inevitable. Meanwhile, Henry Nik's plan goes through and kidnaps Mr. Dorsil, whom he holds and hides in a disused side shaft of the Munich subway. Henry demands a ransom, and soon he gets his headlines too.
Meanwhile, Nik takes part in a literary talk show on television. Dorsil notices that Henry who is guarding him is battered and has even temporarily lost consciousness. Because Henry's gunshot wound just doesn't want to heal and to top it all off, it got infected. At that moment the rich industrialist managed to escape and alerted the police. A large contingent of state power blocks the "Münchner Freiheit" station. Henry, now conscious, stumbles out of hiding and is shot. A television crew recorded the end of the hostage drama for the news. After the talk show ends, Nik sees his former prison buddy and friend dying on screen in the TV studio.
Production notes
Endstation Freiheit was shot on 38 days from April 28 to June 20, 1980 in Munich and Hamburg and was premiered on October 29, 1980 during the Hof Film Festival. The mass start took place two days later.
The film structures were made by Toni and Heidi Lüdi .
Main actor Rolf Zacher received the gold film tape for his performance in 1981 .
useful information
Leading actor and screenwriter Driest commented on the film project as follows: “The end of freedom is inseparable from my life, and maybe I'll figure out what the film was about when I find out why I'm writing. The main character Nik Dellmann answers this question superficially by saying that it is a legal way of making money. This is a provocative answer, designed to protect him, the injured outcast, from being devoured by overly ambitious claims. For eight years his position was outside of society. And like everything that is inside it, i.e. conventional, he also approaches public writing, namely his public ideology, closed and suspicious. He had already written before, in jail, a process that seemed self-defense to him and the result of which the officers stole from him when he was released. […] One of the jokes in my collaboration with Reinhard Hauff was that after I had written the first version for Endstation Freiheit, I held the flag for the general, especially for social reflection, while he relentlessly pushed me towards the special. He complained about a scene until I didn't know what the script was like and, cornered, shouted angrily: Now I want to tell you how it really was. He listened and then said: That's good. "
Reviews
“'Endstation Freiheit' by Reinhard Hauff is the story of Nik Dellmann, writer and criminal, and his unstoppable rise in the cultural scene. […] Burkhard Driest wrote the script and plays the leading role, and the autobiographical component is likely to be even stronger than in the first Driest / Hauff collaboration ' Die Verrohung des Franz Blum ' (1973). Perhaps Hauff (' knife in the head ') was so fascinated by the image of his main actor that he lost all distance. His attempt to show the damage and destruction of society in cool, functional images, especially in the tension between the underworld and the upper world, crime and freedom, art and crime, is exhausted in a number revue in which Driest 'experienced' in the self-satisfied poses Experience 'alternately acted as noble knacki, brutal bird and citizens fright. It is an embarrassing panopticon of the vanities with an exquisite group of amateurs (Veit Relin, Hark Böhm, Hans Noever), which only confirms clichés and is even more annoying due to the meaningfully interspersed pseudo-profound core sentences of Driest's provenance. "
“Driest wrote the script for 'Endstation Freiheit'… and plays the main role, the released convict Nik Dellmann, who tries to be a writer in order to process his experiences in this way. Perhaps this character and the subject matter were too close to him, in any case the film does not gain a relationship with her. Dellmann moves with an anti-bourgeois habitus in the cultural scene and yet is only too clearly a part of the pathetic literary scene that the film creates. […] 'Endstation Freiheit' does not necessarily look like a product of our committee culture, but in the end it remains a good understanding film, the images of which do not develop a life of their own, do not oppose reality. There are a couple of excitingly conceived scenes that betray knowledge of the milieu, but how obnoxiously sedate and at the same time self-important they are filmed, brought down to short-winded effects with critical lights put on. […] 'Endstation Freiheit' ultimately only juxtaposes conventional clichés from bourgeois life and brutal clichés from the underworld. Even medium-sized French gangster films ... are superior to him in terms of drawing and conveying the two milieus as well as the dramaturgical implementation. New German films, however, have developed a real mastery in presenting their awkwardness and inaccuracy precisely as an artistic achievement or a realistic point of view, and Hauff's film is no exception. "
"The autobiographically inspired script by leading actor Burkhard Driest, which astutely analyzes the contradicting situation of a proletarian who has fallen among the intellectuals, is only poorly implemented under Hauff's staid direction."
"Well-photographed exit from the underworld."
Web links
- Terminus freedom in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- End of the line freedom at filmportal.de