Elevator to the scaffold
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | Elevator to the scaffold |
| Original title | Ascenseur pour l'échafaud |
| Country of production | France |
| original language | French |
| Publishing year | 1958 |
| length | 88 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 16 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Louis Malle |
| script |
Roger Nimier Louis Malle |
| production | Jean Thuillier |
| music | Miles Davis |
| camera | Henri Decaë |
| cut | Léonide Azar |
| occupation | |
| |
Elevator to the scaffold (original title: Ascenseur pour l'échafaud ) is a French black and white detective film from 1958 with Jeanne Moreau and Maurice Ronet in the leading roles. It was Louis Malle's first independent directorial work , who also largely edited the script. This in turn was based on the novel of the same name by Noël Calef . Jeanne Moreau became a star through this film, for Louis Malle it was the breakthrough as a director. The melancholy modal jazz by Miles Davis , who accompanies the film throughout, also became known.
action
Former officer Julien Tavernier and Florence Carala are lovers. But Florence is married to the much older armaments contractor Simon Carala, in whose company Tavernier works in a managerial position. Florence and Julien plan to get rid of him. Tavernier has devised an almost perfect murder plan for this purpose: On Saturday evening, he persuades his secretary to stay longer, but not to disturb him in his office. While she is sharpening pencils in front of his office door and thus provides him with an alibi, he secretly leaves his office through the window. Using a throwing anchor and a rope , he climbs a floor higher over the balcony of the skyscraper in which the Carala company resides, and penetrates his boss's office. After a short dialogue, he kills him in cold blood with his own pistol and cleverly arranges the act as a suicide . He then returns to his office and takes the elevator to the ground floor with the secretary and the caretaker Maurice. He says goodbye and goes to his car, which is parked across the street in front of a flower shop.
Young Veronique works in the flower shop, admires Tavernier and has just had a visit from her criminal friend Louis. Tavernier gets his car ready to go. He throws his trench coat on the seat, opens the convertible roof and starts the engine. At that moment he discovers that he has made a mistake. The rope is still clearly dangling from the facade of the company building. He rushes back into the building and takes the elevator up. At that moment, however, the caretaker Maurice switches off the electricity, which stops the elevator between two floors. The caretaker closes the building from the outside. Tavernier is stuck in the elevator.
Meanwhile, Veronique is talking to Louis about Julien Tavernier. Louis impulsively decides to steal the car that is parked with the engine running. Veronique accompanies him and together they leave Paris for the motorway. Florence, who is nervously awaiting Tavernier, notices her lover's car driving by, recognizes Veronique the flower seller, but cannot see the driver. She desperately believes Tavernier has left her. As if in trance, she moves through the beginning nightlife, accompanied by her off- screen thoughts and the haunting music of Miles Davis . In search of Tavernier, she wanders through the night rain, through bars and cafes.
Meanwhile, Veronique and Louis have discovered a pistol and a small camera in Tavernier's car. On the autobahn, they race against a Mercedes 300 SL from Germany, the occupants of which they meet at a motel . It's about Horst Bencker and his wife, who invites the young couple to his room. Veronique poses Louis as Julien Tavernier and claims to be his wife. The two couples spend the evening together, they get drunk and Ms. Bencker takes a few more photos with the stolen camera. Meanwhile, Tavernier desperately tries to get out of the elevator and Florence continues to wander through the Parisian nightlife in search of him.
It is now late at night. Louis wakes his girlfriend to get out of the motel with her. He tries to steal the Mercedes, but is clumsy and is caught by Bencker and his wife. He kills them both with Tavernier's pistol and flees to Paris with Veronique in a sports car. They get out of the car, go to Veronique's small apartment and plan their suicide there. Meanwhile, Florence has been arrested during a police raid and taken to the station. Shortly before she is let go, Inspector Cherier questions her. He wants to know if she knows Tavernier and when she last saw him. She describes her observation from the previous evening and learns that her lover is now wanted across the country for the murder of the two German tourists.
Irritated, she seeks Veronique and finds her and her boyfriend in the apartment after a failed suicide attempt. She understands the connections and anonymously notifies the police. However, Veronique and Louis realize that they are not wanted for murder, but Tavernier. But now they remember the little camera, the only evidence that could convict them. Louis rushes to the motel on a scooter, Florence follows him in the car. Police officers are now beginning a search of Tavernier's office. The caretaker Maurice opens the doors for them and turns on the electricity. The cops go upstairs and Tavernier can just escape the other elevator unnoticed. While Julien in turn begins the search for Florence, Maurice discovers the body of Carala. A few minutes later, Tavernier was arrested in a café. He was recognized immediately because his photo is on the front pages of all newspapers.
Meanwhile, Louis arrives at the motel, unobtrusively followed by Florence. He visits the photo lab where he suspects the film to be. He penetrates the darkroom where the lab technician is enlarging the photos of Louis and the German. But the lab technician is not alone, Inspector Cherier and a few policemen are already waiting. Louis is arrested and when Florence enters the laboratory, Cherier confronts her with the other photos that were in the camera: They show Julien and Florence as a happy couple. Florence realized in despair that it was all in vain.
History of origin
Script and preproduction
After Louis Malle had worked for Jacques Cousteau as a cameraman and assistant and his film The Silent World surprisingly won the Palme d'Or in Cannes in 1956, he received two offers: for Jacques Tati he was to direct the camera at Mein Unkel , and Robert Bresson offered to him, at A Condemned Man has fled the assistant director and the responsibility for the casting of the amateur actors and the equipment. Malle opted for his role model Bresson, but soon had to ask him to be released from his job when he received the offer to film the wreck of the Andrea Doria off the coast of Nantucket . An eardrum injury brought Malle back to Paris before the project was finally realized.
Malle had already worked on his first own screenplay - an autobiographical love story that was to play at the Sorbonne - in the fall of 1956 , but had not found a producer for it. In the spring of 1957, Male's friend Alain Cavalier drew his attention to the detective novel Ascenseur pour l'échafaud by Noël Calef , which he had bought at a train station kiosk. Malle recognized the potential of this material for a film and asked the renowned writer Roger Nimier to adapt the novel for a screenplay. Nimier thought Calef's novel was actually a “stupid book,” but he complied with Male's request anyway and wrote a screenplay that retained the core of the story - the ironic-paradoxical twist that Julien's perfect crime fails because of a second murder - but otherwise remains clearly different from the novel.
Henri Decaë , an established cameraman who had already worked with Jean-Pierre Melville , agreed to work with the young directorial debutante Malle. For the female lead of Florence Carala, which hardly appeared in the novel and only got a leading role through the adaptation of the script, Jeanne Moreau was won, a stage actress who had only appeared in B-movies in the film so far .
Production and post-production
At the beginning of the production, Malle worried whether he would be able to lead the actors, as he had previously only gained experience as a documentary filmmaker . The experienced Moreau helped him allay these concerns.
Only with the help of the new, extremely light-sensitive, but coarse-grained film material Tri-X, was it possible for the team to take night shots without artificial light. The scenes of Florence wandering through the city were filmed on the Champs-Élysées at night , with the camera filming the Moreau - almost without make-up and only illuminated by the light of the shop windows - from a stroller. The film technicians who subsequently developed the filmed material protested against the fact that the actress was portrayed so bare and without skilful lighting - but Malle recognized that Moreau could express her role much more intensely without the usual glamor. In fact, the elevator to the scaffold gave Moreau's career the decisive impetus. Two years later she played in Antonioni's Die Nacht and finally became a European star.
When the jazz- mad Malle tried to score the score , it was a stroke of luck that Miles Davis was in Paris at the time. Davis was at a club in town for three weeks and a few gigs. Boris Vian , writer, jazz trumpeter and director of the jazz music department of the Philips record label , helped Malle to establish contact with Davis. At first he was unsure whether he should record such a film music without his usual studio musicians, but two screenings of the film by Malle convinced him. In just one night, between ten in the evening and five in the morning, Davis recorded the soundtrack completely improvised in a studio on the Champs-Élysées.
Reception and aftermath
The critics of Les Cahiers du cinéma , the hotbed of the Nouvelle Vague , attested the film's lack of stylistic certainty with regard to the thriller genre, due to its slow pace, which required a tense, fast progression of the plot: “The shortcomings of the film necessarily result from the youth [of the director]; […] Above all, it is the slowness or, more precisely, a certain inertia, which the speed of the movements and the sequence of quick cuts cannot shake. ” A year later, during the discussion of the much more personal Die Liebenden , they discovered With his second film, Malle kept the promises he made with his first. For Malle, the elevator to the scaffold merely meant “a departure and a style exercise” .
But Male's collaboration with right-wing Nimier also led to severe criticism. Raymond Borde accused the film in Les Temps moderne magazine of being fascist . A “small, fashionable tough guy, a 35-year-old paramilitary and a capitalist neo-Nazi ” are “ the three fixed points of Male's inner dream” in this film . With its obsession for Mercedes cars and luxurious office palaces, the film serves "the fantasies of right-wing petty bourgeoisie" . In 1996 David Nicholls also criticized the figure of the misunderstood war veteran Tavernier, who contained “a kind of fascist purity” and who was a “defeated Parzival ” who had survived “the rite of passage of the colonial wars”, but “whose ultimate fate was not fame but humiliation “ Be.
Pauline Kael, on the other hand, praised the elevator to the scaffold as "limited in its means but gripping film" for which "Jeanne Moreau's sullen and sensual expression is just right" . The film has "an unusual sense of control and style, considering that the story itself is third-rate."
The lexicon of international films attests the film “a sophisticated crime act as a cinematic dream game” . “In the interplay of atmospheric photography, atmospheric music and the sparingly memorable play of the actors” , “a dark and poetic study of guilt and atonement, love and distrust, chance and fate, full of love for the narrative power of cinema” develops .
The film historian Ulrich Gregor classified the film as a 'perfectly made thriller'.
Due to its radical break with the narrative and style conventions of the French cinema of the 1950s, the film is now considered to be one of the groundbreaking films for the Nouvelle Vague . In his review from 2005, Roger Ebert clearly assigns the film to this movement. Together with Melville, Jacques Becker and others, Malle already used the same style in the low-budget crime films of the 1950s, for example by using jump cuts and breaking away from the formulaic nature of the “classic” crime novel, as Truffaut later used with Jules and introduced Jim and Godard to Out of Breath as a hallmark of the Nouvelle Vague.
In the same year David Denby also made the connection to the Nouvelle Vague clear in the New Yorker , but referred more to the subject than to the style, because “the street scenes, the bizarre, unreal experiences that Moreau had on her nocturnal wandering, the anarchistic ones Kids who just steal something and then run away, ” clearly pointed out the content of the upcoming cinema movement.
Film analysis
Between film noir and nouvelle vague
Malle did not belong to the group of film critics and enthusiasts around Chabrol , Rivette , Truffaut and Godard who - first theoretically with their articles in the cahiers , then practically with their films - fought for a renewal of French cinema. In the crucial years of group formation and theoretical constellation from 1953 to 1956, Malle was on the road with Cousteau on his journey across the oceans. However, they shared their mindset and approach to the medium of film: The French quality cinema of the 1950s with its strictly linear narrative structure, its artificial dialogues, the perfect, but perceived as boring lighting, shot in the aseptic atmosphere of the studios, was rejected. Role models were the fast-made, cheap crime films of film noir and filmmakers such as Alfred Hitchcock , Samuel Fuller , Robert Aldrich and Nicholas Ray .
Malle made extensive use of the theme and style of film noir for the elevator to the scaffold . The motif of the femme fatale , who wants to kill her husband with her criminal lover, but whose plan ultimately fails, refers to classic noirs such as woman without a conscience and in the web of passions . Malle exploited the viewer's voyeuristic fascination with being able to witness the planning and execution of a nefarious crime. He tried to build up a suspense arc of tension in the tradition of Hitchcock, but repeatedly broke it through detours and surprises that refer to his role model Robert Bresson in their narrative implementation .
In his rejection of the sedate imagery of traditional French cinema, Malle created an Americanized Paris that seemed futuristic at the time. He was filming in one of the first modern office skyscrapers in Paris, on the newly built city motorway and in what was then the only French motel, which was not near Paris, but 200 km away on the Atlantic coast. This creates an image of the city as a dehumanized, labyrinthine metropolitan juggernaut pervaded by hectic traffic, which corresponds to the function of metropolitan locations in American film noir.
Existentialist perspectives
Many motifs are already laid out in the film that ran through Male's later work, such as the unmasking of the mendacity of the bourgeoisie , the mutually seeking, fatefully entangled characters and the portrayal of characters in a personal or social upheaval. Male's protagonists come from the context of the French post-war period: the hero of the Indochina War , who is abused by an arms dealer for his own purposes; the nouveau riche, arrogant German; the young aimless couple who know no moral boundaries in their greed for consumption . In doing so, Malle places less value on psychologically coherent character studies than on the portrayal of the paradoxical situation of murder, which was uncovered for bizarre reasons.
The power of chance triumphs in the film over perfectly worked out plans, human life is characterized by absurdity and absurdity. This leads to a pronounced existentialist mood in the elevator to the scaffold ; to an " ironic , fatalistic tone" , according to Frey, which Malle achieves through a "dark, amoral realism " . Already in the first scene, when Moreau swears eternal love to her lover - only her face can be seen in extreme close-up - an atmosphere of loneliness and alienation becomes clear when the camera moves back and the viewer realizes that she is not in the same room with hers Loved one but only talks to him on the phone. The basic motif of the figure of Florence is the fear of the destruction of a relationship. She doubts whether her lover ran away with the flower girl after all. In combination with Davis' sad music, her wandering through Paris becomes a cinematic parable on the subject of the impossibility of finding fulfilled love.
Cinematic means
While in the first and third acts of the film, in the excessively sharp depiction of reality, aesthetic echoes of Italian neorealism and Male's background as a documentary filmmaker can be discovered, the expressive stylization of film noir comes into full effect in the second act, which takes place at night : it is wet with rain Streets as scenes, flashing neon lights that alternately bathe faces in darkness and glistening brightness, constricting image frames through grids or shafts, plus the use of the voice-over in Florence make the protagonists clear for the viewer in their inextricable fateful entanglement.
Malle refrains from any moral judgment about the actions of his film characters: There are hardly any point-of-view settings in the film that allow the viewer to slip into the role of the protagonist, but the viewer always remains in the distant role of an uninvolved voyeur, which the film withholds subjective values. This objectification goes so far that the murder of Carala itself is not shown, but the moment of the murder is replaced by an intercut to Carala's secretary in another room.
Film music
The use of jazz music in film was n't a novelty in the late 1950s . Already in Anatomy of a Murder was Duke Ellington been heard; the Modern Jazz Quartet played in Little Chances for Tomorrow . But Malle was the first to use a continuous jazz soundtrack, and although only about 18 minutes of music can be heard in the film, it has a high recognition and memory value in connection with the images of Moreau wandering through the city. Malle rates Miles Davis' contribution to the film very highly: “What he did was just amazing. He transformed the film. I remember how he looked without music; by the time we finished mixing the sound and added the music, the movie suddenly seemed brilliant. It wasn't that […] [the] music […] deepened the emotions conveyed by the images and the dialogue. She seemed contrapuntal , elegiac and somehow detached. "
The music for the film was released on the Fontana record label under the title Ascenseur pour l'échafaud , although alternative takes of the pieces that were not used in the film were also presented in some CD editions .
Award
The film, which was completed in 1957 and premiered on January 29, 1958, received the French film prize Prix Louis-Delluc in the year it was made .
Trivia
Jean-Claude Brialy has an appearance not listed in the credits as a chess-playing motel guest who later also testifies as a witness against Julien Tavernier.
literature
- Noël Calef : Elevator to the scaffold. Novel. (Original title: Ascenseur pour l'échafaud ). German by Paul Baudisch. Wunderlich paperback. Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg 1998, ISBN 3-499-26099-9 .
- Philip French (ed.): Louis Malle on Louis Malle. Alexander, Berlin 1998, ISBN 3-89581-009-6 .
- Hugo Frey: Louis Malle. Manchester University Press, Manchester and New York 2004, ISBN 0-7190-6457-0 .
- Norbert Grob , Bernd Kiefer, Thomas Klein: Nouvelle Vague. Bender, Mainz 2006, ISBN 3-936497-12-5 .
- Peter W. Jansen , Wolfram Schütte (Ed.): Louis Malle. Film 34 series, Carl Hanser, Munich, Vienna 1985, ISBN 3-446-14320-3 .
- Dieter Krusche, Jürgen Labenski : Reclam's film guide. 7th edition, Reclam, Stuttgart 1987, ISBN 3-15-010205-7 , p. 57
- Nathan Southern, Jacques Weissgerber: The Films of Louis Malle - A Critical Analysis. McFarland, Jefferson, North Carolina 2006, ISBN 0-7864-2300-5 .
Web links
- Elevator to the Gallows in theInternet Movie Database(English)
- Elevator to the scaffold atrotten tomatoes(English)
- Official website of the film on the Rialto Pictures website
- Review by Ulrich Behrens in the Filmzentrale
Individual evidence
- ↑ Release certificate for the elevator to the scaffold . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry , June 2011 (PDF; test number: 16 987 V).
- ↑ a b c d e French: pp. 30-42
- ↑ a b c d e f Southern / Weissgerber pp. 32-46
- ↑ Frey: p. 65
- ↑ Frey: p. 77
- ↑ Elevator to the scaffold. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed March 2, 2017 .
- ^ Ulrich Gregor, History of the Film from 1960. Bertelsmann, Munich 1978, ISBN 3-570-00816-9 , p. 39
- ↑ a b Miriam Fuchs / Norbert Grob: Agnes et les autres in: Grob / Kiefer / Klein p. 191
- ^ Review by Roger Ebert
- ^ Review ( memento of November 9, 2006 in the Internet Archive ) by David Denby
- ↑ Fritz Göttler: Capturing the whole life - Notes on the Nouvelle Vague in: Grob / Kiefer / Klein p. 77
- ↑ French: p. 11f
- ^ Gertrud Koch: Annotated filmography in: Jansen / Schütte pp. 49–61
- ↑ Frey: p. 3
