Money and mind

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Movie
German title People of the mountains
Original title Money and mind
Country of production Switzerland
original language Swiss German
Publishing year 1964
length 121 (Switzerland 1964), 103 (different version) minutes
Rod
Director Franz Schnyder
script Richard Schweizer
Franz Schnyder based
on the novel "Money and Spirit or Reconciliation" (1843) by Jeremias Gotthelf
production Franz Schnyder
music Robert Blum
camera Konstantin Irmen-Tschet
cut Anne-Marie Demmer
occupation

Geld und Geist (in Germany: People of the Mountains ) is a Swiss feature film from 1964 by Franz Schnyder based on a template by Jeremias Gotthelf .

action

Farmer Christen, his wife Änneli and sons Resli and Christeli as well as their daughter Annelisi live together in great harmony on the idyllic Liebiwyl farm. This harmony is suddenly disrupted when Christians allow themselves to be persuaded by the crafty village clerk to speculate with ward money. In doing so, he loses all the money invested, and the careless farmer has to pay the community the damage out of his own pocket. Änneli is very angry about Christen's lack of caution, her husband in turn shows no understanding for the fact that his wife is generous towards the needy. He of all people accuses her of throwing the money out with full hands and wasting food. You poison yourself, the accusations pile up, and soon there is an icy silence in this marriage. The three children suffer greatly from this bad mood. When going to church on Pentecost on Sundays, the pastor speaks to the broken married couple's conscience, whereupon Änneli starts and approaches her husband. Christians and Anneli gradually begin to grow closer again, and soon nothing seems to stand in the way of a reconciliation between the two. The first step towards each other is to pray together in bed before going to bed.

On the very night of Pentecost, a nearby courtyard burns down. Resli, who hurries to the scene of the accident, helps with the extinguishing work and gets to know Anne-Mareili, the daughter of the Dorngrüt farmer, better. He noticed her while dancing the previous afternoon, and Resli began to develop an interest in her. When he thinks that the girl is being harassed by guys who run along, he rushes, quite a gentleman in between ... and is properly beaten. Finally the two fall in love. But Resli is not good enough for her father, the Dorngrütbauer desperately wants a wealthy son-in-law and therefore wants his daughter to take the rich and not entirely fresh cellar joggy as a husband.

However, Resli's advertisement for Anne-Mareili is not entirely wrong, because he believes that he will be able to drive up the price of his daughter as a widely coveted bride. As a guest at Liebiwyl, the Dorngrütbauer makes such a high financial demand as a “male dowry” for his daughter, which the indebted Christian and his son Resli cannot meet. The girl does not want to be sold off with the highest bidder and in desperation turns to her mother, the Dorngrüt farmer. At the same time, however, she cannot understand that Resli is not prepared to comply with the demands made by her father and thus jeopardize the happiness of the family. Anne-Mareili is no longer ready to submit to the wishes, and in desperation flees to the barn's hayloft, followed by her angry and greedy father. When the Dorngrütbauer pursues her, he falls from the hay stage and is killed in the process. Meanwhile, Änneli is dying on the Liebiwyl farm. She can now sleep peacefully when she hears that Anne-Mareili is free for Resli and that she can become the new farmer on Liebiwyl.

Production notes

Geld und Geist was the only full-length feature film production in Switzerland in 1964 and at the same time the last film in classic-conventional Swiss (narrative and entertainment) cinema. Almost at the same time, from the mid-1960s, the Swiss film landscape was revolutionized from the ground up by francophone Swiss such as Alain Tanner , Michel Soutter and Claude Goretta .

The film was shot from July to August 1964 at locations in Emmental: Wikartswil, Sumiswald, Würzbrunnen and the area around Burgdorf. The interior shoots took place in the so-called chicory hall in Alchenflüh near Kirchberg (Canton of Bern). The premiere took place on October 8, 1964 in two cinemas in Bern.

With money and spirit , not only the traditional Swiss cinema ended, but at the same time the cinematic activities of a number of film veterans: For the Germans Mathias Wieman and Konstantin Irmen-Tschet , this production meant, as well as for the Swiss set designer Max Röthlisberger , who designed the film structures, the farewell to the cinema. The Dorngrütbauer actor, Max Haufler , also stopped making a Swiss film after that and committed suicide the following year.

The main characters of the Liebiwylbauern couple Margrit Winter and Erwin Kohlund were actually married to each other. In 1966 , Geld und Geist was sold in Germany under the title People of the Mountains .

Geld und Geist was Schnyder's sixth and last Gotthelf film adaptation. For his only Gotthelf film adaptation in color, the director was able to fall back on a million Swiss francs, an enormous sum of money at the time. He received a good 500,000 francs from the Swiss “Rural and Small Town Association of Cinemas”, and another 200,000 francs came from the Federal Office of Culture. Despite bad reviews (see below), the Swiss streamed into the cinemas. With an income of 3.7 million francs , Geld und Geist was a huge box-office success.

Regardless of the reactions from the professional world to money and spirit , director Schnyder returned three years later, despite a dramatically changed cinema landscape, to film with classic narrative structures and shot the family chronicle from May to July 1967 near Burgdorf with a budget of two million francs " The six Kummerbuben ”, a film-television co-production that opened in Swiss cinemas in October 1968. In the face of dramatic social changes - the student protests in France and Germany did not go unheard in Switzerland either - the film triggered "a storm of indignation through its unbearable silliness ..."

On the literary background

Jeremias Gotthelf (1797–1854) had written «Money and Spirit or The Reconciliation» in continuations. The first part only lasted until the couple reconciled on Liebiwyl and ended with the fire on the farm. The rest of the novel did not appear until a year later and ended with the laconic sentence "Thus the story 'Money and Spirit' is complete".

criticism

Due to Schnyder's conventional staging, the Swiss critics mostly saw the film as old-fashioned, conventional and outdated.

«The film adaptation of a novel by Jeremias Gotthelf was unsuccessful in terms of both content and form. While the original skilfully characterizes two families through their relationship to money, the film spreads the message that money destroys all human relationships, both flat and penetrating, and undermines them with its kitschy happy ending. "

- Lexicon of international film

“The extraordinary box office successes in the cinema of the fifties and early sixties have continued with phenomenal ratings on television until today. It didn't matter that the quality of the cinematic implementation - always based on Richard Schweizer's scripts - fluctuated greatly. “Die Käserei in der Vehfreude” (1958) doesn't give a damn about Gotthelf's “business management”, almost national economic discourse on the dairy industry; the brawls among farmers seem much more important. Something similar could be said of “Geld und Geist”, filmed in 1964, lavishly in color. Here, Schnyder's completely ahistorical understanding of Gotthelf was most concise. For him, the “moral content” of the preacher was at the center, but this was mostly reflected in coarseness. "

- Neue Zürcher Zeitung of March 5, 2010 on the occasion of Schnyder's 100th birthday. [1]

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Money and Spirit on cinematographicblog.wordpress.com
  2. ^ Hervé Dumont : History of Swiss Film. Feature films 1896–1965 , Lausanne 1987, film no. 310: Money and Spirit
  3. ↑ Money and Mind. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed December 26, 2017 .Template: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used