Friendship's Death

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Movie
German title Friendship's Death
Original title Friendship's Death
Country of production Great Britain
original language English , Arabic
Publishing year 1987
length approx. 78 minutes
Rod
Director Peter Wollen
script Peter Wollen
production Rebecca O'Brien
music Barrington Pheloung
Martyn Phillips
camera Witold Stok
cut Robert Hargreaves
occupation

Friendship's Death is a 1987 feature film directed by Peter Wollen (screenplay and direction) . It was the only directing work he wanted, the second film by actress Tilda Swinton and the first by producer Rebecca O'Brien .

action

The historical background and thematic framework of the film is the " Black September ", the civil war-like conflict between the Jordanian army and Palestinian militias in September 1970. The prologue contains original film recordings of several hijacked passenger planes being blown up by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) on Seen September 12, 1970. From the off a voice, that of the main actor, can be heard: "This is the image that we will remember ... an image from which all meaning has been erased" (in the original: That's the image we all remember ... an image with all the meaning drained out of it ). During the further course of events, the original film sequences of streets destroyed during the fighting are juxtaposed with the chamber play-like scenes that consist almost exclusively of dialogues between the two main actors.

The actual plot begins a few days before the demolition with the meeting of the English journalist Sullivan ( Bill Paterson ) and a young woman, apparently a student from England ( Tilda Swinton ), in the Jordanian capital Amman . She was picked up by the militia without a passport or papers and he is supposed to help identify her. Sullivan takes them to the hotel where he lives, writes his reports and waits for the papers for his departure.

The main part of the film is chronologically divided into several consecutive days by fading in the respective date and consists almost entirely of the dialogues of the two protagonists. Already in their first conversation, the woman explains that she is an extraterrestrial, more precisely a very highly developed machine, sent from a planet of the star known as Prokyon . All organic life on their world had been destroyed in a nuclear winter . Only computers and machines had survived this catastrophe and now devoted themselves to exploring space, whereby they were particularly fascinated by the earth and the people. Her actual destination was the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , she explains, where she should contact the brightest people on earth and convey her message of peace and friendship. From this task she also explains her name, “Friendship”, because this word would best sum up her mission and her nature. Having taken the wrong turn, she had just landed in the fighting-torn Middle East .

Sullivan, skeptical but curious, shows an interest in her story, and the two spend day after day in the rooms of the hotel in conversations about the nature of the people, observing the warlike events in the country - gunshots can often be heard, and several times armed men storm the room to shoot out of the windows - contributing not insignificantly to the observations. But also seemingly banal things, like a football game on television, arouse Friendship's interest. She is amazed that the camera is following the ball, of all things, the most uninteresting object on the field in her eyes, and not the individual players.

One day, when Friendship is once again out and about in the markets, where she is watching people and collecting mechanical objects or even parts of them, Sullivan steals a handful of differently shaped and colored objects from a box in her room that look like building blocks made of cloudy- transparent plastic. The following night he is woken up by noises emanating from them. Finally, words mix with the sounds. Frightened and now finally convinced that Friendship's story is true, he fetches her. She is not upset that he has taken the items, takes most of the items back and gives him one of them as a souvenir, as a token of their friendship.

The discussions now revolve more and more about existential questions of life, about community and loneliness and about life and death, as well as, based on the current situation on site, about political questions of power and living together. Friendship appears most human when it reflects its existence as a machine. Sullivan's typewriter, for example, regards her as a distant cousin and urges the journalist not to pound it on. From her existence as the only one of her kind on earth, she develops a feeling of solidarity with the Palestinians who fight on the streets for their place on the map.

When Sullivan finally holds papers for herself and Friendship with which to leave the country, she explains to him that she has changed her plans. After everything she has learned about people in the meantime, she no longer sees any point in explaining herself to the scientists at MIT. By them and by the military, whether in the US or the UK, it would only be locked away and broken down into its individual parts. So the two say goodbye, and Sullivan departs. Friendship's fate is not reported any further.

The end of the film takes place almost 20 years after the events of "Black September". Sullivan is convinced that Friendship perished in the turmoil of the war in Jordan. He gives the item she has received to his daughter, a talented young student who studies cybernetics and higher mathematics . You manage to recognize its purpose as a recording and transmission medium, and even to transfer the information stored in it onto a video tape. The film ends with father and daughter looking at the friendship recordings together. The sequences range from microscopic film recordings of blood vessels, parts of the football game on television and pictures of destroyed buildings, to close-ups of Sullivan's beard, which she was fascinated by. Seemingly secondary details like a page from an Arabic-English dictionary alternate with elementary representations of organic life.

backgrounds

In terms of content, the film arose from the question of wanting, how one could make a political film. Formally, he is focused on the two main characters and only a few rooms, the two rooms in a hotel. Wollen says that it is “clearly not a Hollywood film and not even an art film in the usual sense. [...] Although it is not an avant-garde film, it is an attempt to deal with political, aesthetic and cinematic issues. ” For him it was “ a kind of claustrophobic continuation ” of Michelangelo Antonioni's film Profession: Reporter (1975) on the he was involved as a co-author.

On the one hand, armed conflicts in the Middle East in 1970, on the other hand, the idea of ​​an extraterrestrial visit to earth, known from science fiction , which, coming from a far advanced civilization, strives for a message of peace, form the framework . The fantastic elements remain limited to the explanations of the leading actress about her origin and her nature. Only at the end of the film is a sequence of images with flowing forms, recordings of pulsating blood vessels and news images that are reminiscent of trick sequences from films such as 2001: A Space Odyssey or The Trip to Hell .

The premiere of Friendship's Death took place on August 17, 1987 in England. In German-speaking countries, the film was shown for the first time on February 14, 1988 during the Berlin International Film Festival , and in Austria only on October 27, 2009 as part of a focus at the Viennale dedicated to Tilda Swinton .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Viennale (2009): Friendship's Death
  2. ^ The New York Times : Movie Review Friendship's Death , March 25, 1988

Web links