Gold (2013)
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| Original title | gold |
| Country of production | Germany |
| original language | German |
| Publishing year | 2013 |
| length | 101 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 12 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Thomas Arslan |
| script | Thomas Arslan |
| production |
Florian Koerner by Gustorf Michael Weber |
| music | Dylan Carlson |
| camera | Patrick Orth |
| cut | Bettina Boehler |
| occupation | |
| |
Gold is a German fiction film by director Thomas Arslan from 2013. The western is about gold prospectors of German origin who profit from the Klondike gold rush in 1898 and want to achieve a better life for themselves or their families. Your journey through vast, scarcely explored landscapes turns out to be more privation and more dangerous than expected. The film premiered at the 2013 Berlinale .
action
Emily Meyer, a German immigrant to America, joined a group of gold seekers in the summer of 1898 who wanted to travel more than 2500 kilometers from southern Canada to the gold fields near the Klondike. The trip is organized and praised as safe and easy-going by Wilhelm Laser, who collects money from the participants. Also there are the employed packer and groom Carl Böhmer (from Austria-Hungary), the journalist and photographer Müller, the family man Rossmann and the Dietz couple as cooks.
The trip is supposed to lead via Ashcroft , Quesnel , Hazelton and Telegraph Creek to Teslin Lake . From there it will go by boat down the Yukon River to Dawson , the destination of the trip.
After a while it becomes apparent that laser doesn't even know the way. When he is caught that night trying to get away with the group's money, the majority decides to hang him the next morning. Meyer unties him and lets him escape; Böhmer, who is fond of her, observes this without revealing it to the others. The trek loses a wagon due to a broken spoke; a horse falls and the cook injures his arm. During the stopover in Hazelton, the Dietz couple stayed behind at the instigation of the woman. For others, the prospect of gold finds is still enough of an incentive to ignore the warnings of local settlers and move on. In the wilderness, Müller steps into a bear trap, but the leg amputation carried out by his travel companions cannot save him. Rossmann goes mad and walks naked into the woods without reappearing.
Meyer and Böhmer are now alone. Meyer is only hesitant about Boehmer's advances, who admits to her that he once killed someone while he was herding cattle. She talks about her work as a maid in Chicago and her hapless, divorced marriage. In Telegraph Creek, which they can only reach with the help of an Indian, they take a longer break to gather strength. But two bounty hunters arrive who have chased Böhmer and kill him. One dies beforehand from Boehmer's bullet, the other Meyer shoots. She says goodbye to her love affair at Boehmer's grave and moves on alone.
Production and publication
Thomas Arslan studied numerous reports and diaries from participants in the gold rush in Canadian and American libraries. The diaries are usually very detailed at the beginning until the writer's energy waned and they only made minimal entries. He came across mentions of a group of German prospectors. The numerically significant German emigration in the 19th century hardly plays a role in today's German historiography. Filming took place in Canada from August 14th to September 29th, 2012. After premiering as the only German entry in the competition at the Berlin International Film Festival in February 2013, the film was released in French cinemas on July 24th, before it was released in Germany on August 15th, 2013. The cinema version is 13 minutes shorter than the version shown at the Berlinale.
music
The music of Dylan Carlson, the front man of the doom metal band Earth , is very reminiscent of that of Neil Young in the soundtrack to Jim Jarmusch's grotesque Western Dead Man .
Reviews
In epd Film , Anke Sterneborg praised the fact that Hoss played the pioneer credibly, calmly like the loners of the American Western, and yet “completely German”. For this film it is crucial "that it does not have to chase after American myths because it tells its American story from the outset from a historically documented German perspective". He shows “breathtaking images” and communicates a lot about the characters and the country through movements, gestures and details.
The Cinema -Rezensent Ralf Blue was convinced Arslan did not except it to the predictable course of action on voltage, but it was the plan, visualizing the feeling hardly move forward in the endless landscape, "succeeded with impressive consistency."
For the time , Carolin Ströbele judged: "It is good when someone sets off to dare something new." For the first time, Arslan's characters are not in a waiting state, but are moving towards a goal. His narrative strength of making emotions tangible without visualizing them and thus creating tension does not work in gold . The genre, which has already been told a thousand times over, is too predictable, and the characters lack psychological development. "Arslan has not succeeded with this film."
False expectations were directed towards Arslans Films, explained Birgit Glombitza from the taz , he "had to endure a lot of criticism, malice and even more misunderstandings". He goes through the genre-typical elements, and the camera “most of the time acts as if the cinema eye is seeing all of this for the first time”. It is based on contemporary landscape photography, which makes the pictures “so naturalistic and physical”. Arslan take the western genre seriously. “In doing so, he not only learns the rules of the cowboy film, but also invents and understands them anew. As a genre greenhorn, he is perhaps all the more convincing in telling something of the primordial nature of this film genre. Namely of migration, adaptation and isolation. ”Overall, Arslan“ gave German film a global perspective with gold ”.
“With a little good will, one could praise the film for dealing with classic Western motifs and thus bowing to the genre. But you can also get upset that every cliché that has made it into a John Wayne film is processed here. "
Web links
- Gold in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Hoehnepresse Media: Interview with Thomas Arslan and Nina Hoss (PDF; 1.3 MB)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Certificate of Release for Gold . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry , June 2013 (PDF; test number: 139 473 K).
- ↑ Thomas Arslan in the DVD booklet, p.
- ↑ Gold at crew united
- ↑ Details about the KinoFestival in the First: Gold , ARD March 21, 2016
- ↑ Krischan Koch: "Gold" - Nobody knows what to expect. NDR, August 14, 2013, archived from the original on August 26, 2013 ; accessed on March 16, 2017 .
- ↑ a b Ralf Blau: Gold . In: Cinema No. 8/2013, p. 59
- ↑ Thomas Groh: Post-Berlin School Western: Thomas Arslan's 'Gold'. Perlentaucher, February 9, 2013, accessed November 17, 2017 .
- ↑ Anke Sterneborg: Gold. In: epd film . Evangelical Press Service , August 1, 2013, accessed on February 16, 2019 .
- ↑ Carolin Ströbele: There is a trek to nowhere. Die Zeit, February 10, 2013, accessed on August 4, 2013 : "Unfortunately, director Thomas Arslan didn't get very far with his western 'Gold' about a group of German emigrants on the way to the Klondike."
- ↑ Birgit Glombitza: Go on, go on, that is the goal. die tageszeitung, August 15, 2013, accessed on August 15, 2013 : "No matter how you want to evaluate the action, which has been stripped down to the skeleton, the only hatched figure development and the literally moving stoic narrative rhythm (also in the recut version, which is now coming to the cinemas) - even the most annoyed reviewer will not be able to avoid one thing: With "Gold", Arslan has given German films a global perspective. "
- ^ Daniel Sander: German Berlinale Hope 'Gold'. A film like a torture stake. Spiegel Online, February 9, 2013, accessed on November 12, 2017 : “The viewers were bent over laughing. The film with Nina Hoss wants to be a serious western. "