Grandison (film)
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| Original title | Grandison |
| Country of production | Germany |
| original language | German |
| Publishing year | 1979 |
| length | 146 (1st version), 122 (2nd version), 100 (3rd version) minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 12 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Achim Kurz |
| script | Michael Krausnick |
| production | Achim Kurz |
| music | Wolfgang Dauner |
| camera | Jürgen Haigis |
| cut | Kirsten Jørgensen |
| occupation | |
| |
Grandison is a German romance drama directed by Achim Kurz in 1978 . Marlène Jobert and Jean Rochefort play the Grandison couple, Helmut Qualtinger the ruthless prosecutor who persecutes the widow.
action
The story is based on real events whose court records from the early 19th century have stood the test of time. The focus is on an extremely ambitious Heidelberg city office director and prosecutor, who tries by all means to elicit an admission of guilt from the widow of a dead robber to her alleged complicity.
Shortly after Germany's liberation from Napoleonic terror, in 1814. Citizen Carl Grandison, a previously recognized member of society, is arrested in Berlin. He, the trained wigmaker who is married to Rose, the daughter of a laundress, is accused of having stolen a considerable fortune through constant imposture and theft. In Heidelberg, the couple and their three children have earned a reputation as a decent, large-scale merchant family, and a neat palace testifies to the outside world that, as they say, they “made it”. You are the celebrated center of social life. But now the sudden crash occurs. The crook is in custody, the magnificent city seat has been requisitioned. Before the trial against Grandison can be opened, the delinquent takes his own life and leaves his wife alone with the enormous worries and children. City Office Director Ludwig Pfister is not ready to leave it at that, he is very keen to have the complicity of the wife, now widow, established in court. And so instead of Carl Rose Grandison is indicted.
Pfister, who personally takes charge of the prosecution, does not inform Rose that her husband has already committed suicide behind bars and henceforth tries to get her to confess with intellectual sharpness and dialectical brilliance. Pfister's interrogations soon take on inquisitorial forms, and the lack of clarity about Carl Grandison's condition behind bars is said to "soften" Rose. Pfister doesn't just want to know the whereabouts of the stolen money, he is particularly interested in Rose's admission of guilt. But Rose Grandison, who knew about her husband's forays, was prepared for this moment, as her husband had once announced: “If you get me, I'll kill myself. You and the children will not be disgraced and disgraced by me. There are no confidants, you just have to be silent! ”Rose sticks to it, even after her husband hanged himself in the prison cell. The duel between widow and prosecutor dragged on for over a year, but the love between the no longer existing Grandison couple ultimately prevailed beyond Carl's death over all the brilliant intellectual sharpness of a persecutor who was both linguistically skilled and merciless.
Production notes
Grandison was shot on 71 days between March 4 and May 23, 1978. The film was shot in Bad Wimpfen , Heidelberg , Wanfried , Michelstadt , Amorbach , Gengenbach , Ladenburg and Jagsthausen . The film premiered on March 29, 1979 in the Planken-Kino-Center in Mannheim.
Director Kurz, whose only film this was, had just founded his own production company in Stuttgart for “Grandison”. Since the film flopped despite the general recognition of its creative accuracy and Qualtinger's acting performance, Kurz was unable to get any further works off the ground. He died in 1985.
useful information
The production swallowed up a total of 4.1 million marks, an extremely high sum for a German production of those years. This could only be generated with the strong participation of banks and by exploiting all the advantages of the tax legislation and was mainly due to the great effort that Kurz took to exactly match the mood of German romanticism at the beginning of the 19th century. Including the preparatory phase, the realization of this project took about three years. The specialist magazine Cinema says: “Shooting dates are calculated in advance according to the incidence of light and sunlight. The whole film was shot with a single lens, the colors and mood completely adapted to the example of the romantic painters. Fabrics were dyed, backdrops were injected, yes, even make-up colors were specially mixed in order to achieve the complete color harmony of the romantics. ”The musical processing also precisely follows the emotions depicted on the screen: while the justice scenes are introduced by synthesizer sounds , jazz sounds were used for the crook scenes, while the moments in which only the lovers and married couple Grandison are at the center of the plot are accompanied by the music of a large symphony orchestra. Wolfgang Dauner himself, who composed the music, can be heard on the piano, the synthesizer and as a percussionist.
Reviews
“She is beautiful, clever, mysterious: Rose Grandison (Marlene Jobert), who in 1814 ran a stately home in Heidelberg. She is proud and courageous: Rose Grandison, who is interrogated for a year by the examining magistrate Pfister (Helmut Qualtinger) in a sometimes downright perfidious manner because her husband's (Jean Rochefort) attacks and rip-offs also fall back on her, the confidante. The story of the Swabian Robin Hood, which the 36-year-old cinema debutant Achim Kurz stages in exquisite light and color compositions and in precisely arranged images, and according to a sophisticated financing model (participation of the banks and exploitation of all the advantages of tax legislation) is entwined around these three characters ) also produced. Not the word - except in the interrogations - but the picture, supported by Wolfgang Dauner's music, impresses the audience. But he also has to get used to the narrative. Above all, the love story between Rose and Carl Grandison, which Achim Kurz was most interested in in this authentic case, comes out almost without words and is cut into the interrogations as a romantically transfigured memory of Rose Grandison. And since the impostures are told in brief flashbacks, it is sometimes difficult to follow the chronology of the story, the character Grandison remains strangely colorless precisely because it only appears in episodes. Colorless in this composition of brown and yellow. "
"First there is Helmut Qualtinger, who with a minimum of facial expressions this Dr. Pfister comes alive, a mixture of sadism, conceit and covetousness. "
“In GRANDISON, Qualtinger designs the City Office Director Pfister as a sinister civil servant and becomes a kind of Scarpia figure in his relationship with the beautiful prisoner. The script by the writer Michail Krausnick was based on the original scripts by Pfister who kept a record of the interrogation. (...) Qualtinger investigates mostly holed up behind his desk, measuring the space with an economically calculated number of steps. His patient smile is seldom interrupted by well-timed outbursts; it is a study of restrained, patient sadism. "
"Grandison - that is the perfect harmony between images, actors, plot: a film that should be tailored directly to the cinema audience in its generosity and unique features."
“The case of the stagecoach robber Carl Grandison, who lived in Heidelberg as a respected businessman and committed suicide in custody in 1814, as the material for an expensive (5.1 million DM) flashback film: The decorations, props and costumes are right, otherwise everything works fake. The characters are lifeless, the dialogues meaningless, the pictures are indeed beautiful, but the whole story remains empty. "
Individual evidence
- ^ German Institute for Film Studies (Ed.): German Films 1979, compiled by Rüdiger Koschnitzki. P. 103 f.
- ↑ Cinema, No. 4 (No. 11) from April 1979, p. 18.
- ↑ Grandison on kino.at
- ↑ Grandison. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed March 2, 2017 .
Web links
- Grandison in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Grandison at filmportal.de