Follow me
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| Original title | Follow me |
| Country of production | Germany |
| original language | German , Czech , Russian , French , English , Polish , Romanian , Hungarian , Bulgarian , Austrian |
| Publishing year | 1989 |
| length | 104 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 12 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Maria Knilli |
| script | Maria Knilli, Ulrich Weiß (under the pseudonym Vera Has) |
| production |
Monika Aubele , Norbert Schneider |
| music | Marran Gosov |
| camera |
Klaus Eichhammer , Reiner Lauter |
| cut |
Fritz Baumann , Maria Knilli |
| occupation | |
| |
Follow Me is an east-west film drama by Austrian director Maria Knilli from 1989 . It was her second full-length feature film after her feature film debut Lieber Karl from 1984. Follow me was the official German competition entry at the XVI. International Film Festival in Moscow in 1989 and celebrated its world premiere there. The German cinema premiere took place on November 2, 1989, a week before the fall of the Berlin Wall. In 1990 - after the Velvet Revolution - the film was shown at the 27th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival .
The writer wrote Maria Knilli together with the DEFA director Ulrich White (pseudonym Vera Has).
action
After the Prague Spring , the Czech was Professor Pavel Navrátil, who at the university in Prague taught philosophy, dismissed from his chair. From then on, he ensured his survival as a gravedigger in a cemetery. At the same time, he continues to secretly meet his former students and teach them in his apartment, secretly, spied on by the secret service. Soon he will no longer be tolerated as a grave digger and has to leave his home. He stages his farewell with a theatrical departure by inviting his students to the funeral of a deceased named Hrdlicka, whom he does not know, but who is given an unusually large tombstone. He also distributes his philosophy books among them and says goodbye to both his mother and his wife and son, whom he left a long time ago. He leaves Prague without any difficulties.
In exile in an unspecified western country, he found work as a porter at an airport that became synonymous with no man's land. During the day he does physical work on the airfield, passes the time at the Czech hairdresser and in the evenings and days off he goes back home in his imagination.
In this foreign country he meets different people who all also seem stranded: an Austrian violin fool, a German Jewess and many other bizarre characters from a poetically inflated emigrant scene. Among other things, he meets the melancholy and wise Russian Ljuba, who owns a brothel where girls from all over the world work. With them he celebrates outdoor parties, picnics full of longing and magic.
After five years abroad, Navrátil flies back to Prague one more time to say goodbye to his homeland for good. With a trick he manages to jump behind the iron curtain. When he arrived in the Golden City, he visited the places he remembered: the house in which he lived, the cemetery and Hrdlicka's grave, which he could no longer find. Instead, he meets a young Red Army soldier with whom he drinks vodka all night and discusses - since neither one nor the other speaks the other's language, they communicate with each other with their hands and feet.
At dawn, Navrátil is picked up by the state police and deported back to the west by plane. As he parted, he was told: “Listen carefully. You weren't in Prague. Nobody saw you. You forget and we forget that you exist! ”The jet plane leaves Prague at a steep flight. Buckled up and with the backrest folded up, Navrátil returns to the West with one laughing and one crying eye.
Production and Background
Filmmaker Maria Knilli had been working on the subject of emigration since 1983. The impetus for the film project came from her encounter with the Czech actor Pavel Landovský , who, as one of the initiators of the Charter 77 petition , had also been expelled from his home country. He told Knilli how he once had to fly from Vienna to Helsinki for a film set and stay on the plane as the only passenger during a stopover in Prague. There he met a Czechoslovakian cleaning lady, to whom he told his story before he finally flew on and saw "his" city one last time from a bird's eye view. Knilli later took up this idea in her film.
Work on the script finally began in the summer of 1985. Knilli wrote it over two years together with DEFA filmmaker Ulrich Weiß . For a long time his authorship was hidden behind the pseudonym Vera Has for political reasons. Typical for white are the ideology-free thinking about the world and the universal-human view. During his career, Weiß had dealt intensively with Czechoslovakian cinema, especially with the film Vom Fest und die Guests (1966) by Jan Němec .
Follow me was shot in 1988 and completed in 1989.
Knilli hired Pavel Landovský for the lead role, who was a member of the ensemble at the Vienna Burgtheater in the 1980s and who also appeared in numerous film and television films during this period. Knilli got to know him when she was assistant director to the Czech director Vojtěch Jasný in 1983 for the television play See you later, I have to shoot myself . While shooting this film in Helsinki, Knilli also met the Russian-born French actress Marina Vlady , who played a leading role alongside Landovský and the Polish actor Daniel Olbrychski .
Marina Vlady later wrote in her memoirs about Follow me: “The script is one of the best I've read in years. It is full of poetry, a poetry of images, a poetry of human relationships. "
The melancholy music of the film was composed by the Bulgarian filmmaker, film musician and writer Tzvetan Marangosoff, who, as Marran Gosov , had been one of the most important directors from the “Munich group” a few years earlier. His composition unites numerous Eastern European musical styles.
The well-known German production designer Winfried Hennig was responsible for the equipment .
Style of the movie
Follow me is characterized by its extensive renunciation of linear narration. Instead, states of consciousness are visualized using a variety of formal stylistic devices. “The concrete story is broken open. Even on the outside, unfamiliar perspectives, supervision and crane journeys cancel out reality in favor of an over-reality. Contemplative attitudes lasting minutes are not simply aimed at the finished picture, but require further fantasizing. "
This creates a game of signs and images. Knilli explained her approach as follows: “'Follow me' is reduced to the inside. I've been looking for variations on a visual level for the inner state. (...) I tend to look at things from a certain distance. I observe for a very long time, and when I work on it, then only when I am no longer completely entangled in feelings. I hate sentimentalism. "
Another characteristic of Knilli's special approach is the multilingualism of the film - over half a dozen languages are spoken during the course of the film and the actors sometimes speak several languages, most notably Pavel Landovský and Marina Vlady.
criticism
“The poetic attempt to show the state of mind of people critical of the regime in Prague, who fluctuate between love for their homeland and the desire to emigrate, illustrated by the example of a philosophy professor who has to work as a grave digger and baggage transporter at the airport. Stressed calm passages reinforce the elegiac mood of the film. "
“The second film by the director, who was born in Graz and lives in Munich, weaves a carpet of associations that leaves the viewer with a bit of their own imagination. With admirable obstinacy, she insists on her claim to art, which works completely if one does not deliberately ignore the poetry, the scenic and theatrical care of this film. "
"However, in my opinion Maria Knilli has proven to be worthy of her author and made an unusual and, in a bohemian-tricky way, moving film."
Festivals, broadcasts
Follow Me has been invited to numerous festivals, such as the 40th Berlin International Film Festival in 1990 in the series "New German Films", the Cannes Film Festival in the side series Un Certain Regard in 1990, the 23rd Hof International Film Festival in 1989, the 3rd Festival of European Films in Prague in 1996, the Festival International de Films et Videos de Femmes de Montreal in 1990 and the Braunschweig Film Festival in 1989.
In the following years, the film was also broadcast on television in Germany, France, Austria and Turkey.
Web links
- Follow me in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Follow me at filmportal.de
- Follow me at prisma.de
- Screening in the Filmmuseum Potsdam
- Screening on May 31, 2018 at the Goethe-Institut in Prague
Individual evidence
- ^ DEFA Foundation - Weiß, Ulrich. Retrieved May 29, 2018 .
- ↑ a b Hans-Dieter Seidel In: FAZ of December 28, 1989.
- ↑ Erika Richter: On the oeuvre of Ulrich Weiß. Annotated filmography. In: apropos Film 2003 - The Yearbook of the DEFA Foundation, Berlin 2003, p. 187.
- ↑ Marina Vlady In: 24 Images / Seconde. Fayard, Paris 2005, p. 300.
- ^ Maria Knilli In: FAZ from December 28, 1989.
- ↑ Follow me. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed June 11, 2018 .