In the embers of the south

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Movie
German title In the embers of the south
Original title Days of Heaven
Country of production United States
original language English
Publishing year 1978
length 95 minutes
Age rating FSK 12
Rod
Director Terrence Malick
script Terrence Malick
production Jakob Brackman
Bert Schneider
Harold Schneider
music Ennio Morricone
Leo Kottke
Doug Kershaw
camera Néstor Almendros
Haskell Wexler
cut Billy Weber
occupation
synchronization

In der Glut des Südens (alternative German title Tage des Himmels , original title Days of Heaven ) is an American film drama from 1978. The film, which takes place in the fields of Texas at the time of industrialization from around 1916 , was published under the Directed by Terrence Malick . The film won important awards, such as the Director's Prize in Cannes and the Oscar for Best Cinematography , and was included in the National Film Registry in 2007.

action

In the glow of the south is set in the times of industrialization and shortly before the USA entered the First World War , around 1916 and 1917. Bill, who works in a Chicago steel factory, takes on his foreman and kills him in a fight . Together with his lover Abby, who pretends to be his sister, and his little sister Linda - who acts as the narrator of the film - they flee to Texas . There they line up among the flocks of harvest workers in the huge wheat fields of a wealthy but lonely farmer. Bill overhears a conversation and learns that the farmer apparently only has one year to live. It has not escaped Bill that the farmer has his eye on Abby, so he encourages her to marry him.

After a short time, the farmer, who has fallen seriously in love, marries Abby - against the advice of his long-time foreman, who recognizes her and Bill as cheaters. So the newlywed finally moves into the farmer's house with her fake brother and Linda. The harvest is over, and together with vagabond circus people, the four of them experience an unselfconscious autumn on the remote farm. At night, however, Bill and Abby meet behind the farmer's back until Abby confesses to having fallen in love with the farmer. Bill clears the field, especially since the farmer first suspects the two of them, since he notices the intimacy of their touch.

However, for the next harvest season the following year, Bill shows up again to visit his supposed sister. Since the farmer, contrary to his expectations, is still in the best of health, he wants to leave quickly. The farmer watches how the two exchange tender farewell gestures. When his farm is also hit by swarms of locusts , he goes nuts and sets his fields on fire. When he approaches Bill with a pistol in hand, he rams a screwdriver into his chest. The farmer dies, Bill goes on the run again with Abby and Linda. But the farmer's old foreman is stubbornly on their heels, and so Bill is finally shot by the police while trying to escape.

Linda's and Abby's separate ways: Abby ties up soldiers who are going to war and gets on a train with them. In the last few pictures, Linda manages to escape from an orphanage together with a friend she met during the harvest.

background

Terrence Malick on the set

After the surprising success of his debut film Badlands - Shattered Dreams , which was shot on a small budget of 350,000 US dollars, all doors were open to director Terrence Malick . In der Glut des Süds is so amazed less by the elaborate or extraordinarily “new” story than by the power of the opulent images, which Martin Scorsese is said to have said that every single image in this film could be enlarged and exhibited as a painting in a museum. Malick drafted the storyline himself and wrote a screenplay which, in addition to elaborate language, accommodated many biblical and philosophical allusions. In a comparison between the script draft and the finished film, it is noticeable that Malick rejected many of the dialogues and storylines during and after the shooting and improvised with the actors. Instead of the originally planned long dialogues, comparatively little is spoken in the film and cinematic, non-verbal motifs such as natural phenomena and the change of the seasons convey moods and feelings instead.

The shooting took place in 1976 in the Canadian province of Alberta , about 3000 kilometers north of the actual location of the scene, Texas. Malick and cameraman Néstor Almendros (similar to Stanley Kubrick in Barry Lyndon ) largely avoided artificial light and shot the exterior shots mainly at dawn or dusk (the so-called magic hour ) or at night. A time-consuming process, as the actual shooting time was limited to a maximum of one hour a day. Almendros later recalled that many of the crew members were experienced, very experienced Hollywood professionals who were irritated by the unusual way of shooting and who complained more often. Almendros, who was replaced by Haskell Wexler for the last 19 of 72 days of shooting , because he had already accepted Truffaut's The Man Who Loved Women , was awarded an Oscar for the 1979 film . Haskell Wexler later stated, however, that he had seen the film once with a stopwatch and measured that he had shot more scenes in the finished film than Almendros. Nevertheless, Wexler is only mentioned as an "additional cameraman" in the credits.

The Italian film composer Ennio Morricone was commissioned to write the film music for Days of Heaven and later received his first Oscar nomination for it. Morricone integrated the famous piece "Aquarium" from the Carnival of the Animals by Camille Saint-Saëns into his own composition, which can be heard in the opening credits as the theme of the film.

Malick spent two more years over the editing of the film after filming. He won the Best Director Award at the 1979 Cannes International Film Festival . After receiving the award, Malick said goodbye to the public. It wasn't until 20 years later that he would return to the film business with Der schmale Grat . At the box office at the time, the film grossed around 3.66 million US dollars, which, given the budget of around three million US dollars, was not a significant success.

synchronization

The German dubbed version of Days of Heaven was created by Berliner Synchron in 1978 based on a dialogue book by Marianne Groß and directed by Joachim Kunzendorf . Richard Gere as Bill is voiced by Lutz Riedel , Brooke Adams as Abby by Evamaria Miner . In the other roles, Dorette Hugo speaks as the narrator Linda (Linda Manz), Hans-Georg Panczak as the farmer (Sam Shepard) and Reinhard Kolldehoff as the foreman of the farm (Robert J. Wilke).

Reviews

In 1997 Roger Ebert spoke of one of the most beautiful films that has ever been made.

"In epic pictures of incomparable beauty, the film ballad develops an idiosyncratic mixture of socially critical milieu drawing and jealous melodrama with a criminalistic conclusion, which does not seem to be consistently thought out, but impresses with its meditative tranquility and the resulting contemplative visual poetry."

“Terrence Malick's work is a real feast for the eyes, on the one hand filled with the most wonderful landscape shots, on the other hand also provided with realistic pictures of the hard life of American farm workers at the beginning of the 20th century. […] Nestor Almendros captured the poetry of the swaying Texan cornfields with the lonely farmhouse in their midst […] in long, almost meditative shots in an incomparable way. A visually captivating, simply narrated melodrama [...] "

- Jens Golombek : The great film lexicon. All top films from A – Z

“Malick's destructive, distant style of staging may give the impression of aesthetic sterility: characters are reduced to ciphers, vehement passions seem to freeze to death into visual vignettes. But melodramas don't always have to glow. 'Days of Heaven' is an ice-cold melo. A melo poem. "

- The time , 1979

"Tracking shots that end without a clear goal in the course, together with Ennio Morricone's melancholy, fairytale-like music, underline the dream-like note of the film, which, however, is firmly anchored in a social and historical context. [...] If you look at the final apocalypse on the Farm understands the war allegory, then you could read the Second World War drama The Narrow Ridge, which the director was only supposed to shoot twenty years after In der Embers des Südens, as a late sequel. "

- Critic.de

Topics and Analysis

The well-known philosopher Stanley Cavell , who had also taught Malick as a student at Harvard University , tried to interpret Days of Heaven philosophically. Malick discovered “how one can confirm a fundamental fact of the photographic basis of film: that objects participate in the photographic presence of themselves on the canvas, they participate in the creation of themselves on film tape”. With this, Malick draws on the central themes of Martin Heidegger such as being and being . The self-referential nature of cinematic representation also makes the nature of our representation of the world present to us, which leads the thinking viewer to central questions from Heidegger. The film's view of nature was also seen by some critics as following on from Heidegger, in which nature is a force that is both present and absent in people's lives. In Days of Heaven , animals and landscapes are staged in long shots and are like an echo for the emotional state of the characters , whereby the film characters and the photographed nature are related to one another.

Many critics highlighted Days of Heaven 's numerous references to biblical stories and Judeo-Christian symbolism. Even in the title Days of Heaven one could recognize a longing for a Garden of Eden and the attempt to recapture a lost innocence of being.

Days of Heaven contains the most important elements of the western genre , but they do not play a standardized role as in most other Hollywood films. Both the antihero Bill and the farmer, who could be seen as a classic Hollywood hero with his noble demeanor, failed and died at the end of the film. A final image of male camaraderie, as is otherwise common in many westerns, is missing. The foreman's act of revenge at the end of the film, in which he brings Bill down with the help of the police, would be cathartic in most westerns , here it seems pointless for the foreman and the audience. Malick thus pointed out the illusions of western myths and history myths in general. The narrator voice of the young Linda differs from the narrator voices of the vast majority of films due to her naive narrative attitude and her absence at important film points, so that she does not have a classifying and summarizing function like other narrator voices in films.

Awards and nominations

In 2007 it was accepted into the National Film Registry . Days of Heaven was ranked 49th in a global BBC poll for the best American films of all time in 2015. In the Sight & Sound poll for the “best film of all time”, which takes place every ten years , Days of Heaven 2012 received the votes of 14 interviewed critics and five directors, which meant a place just outside the top 100 in the poll.

Academy Awards 1979
British Academy Film Award 1980
  • Anthony Asquith Award for Film Music for Ennio Morricone
British Society of Cinematographers 1979
  • Nomination in the category Best Cinematography Award for Néstor Almendros
International Cannes Film Festival 1979
  • Award in the Best Director category for Terrence Malick
  • Nomination Golden Palm for Terrence Malick
David di Donatello Awards 1979
  • David in the Best Foreign Actor category for Richard Gere (partly)
  • David in the Best Screenplay - Foreign Film category for Terrence Malick
Golden Globe Award 1979
Los Angeles Film Critics Awards 1978
National Board of Review 1978
National Society of Film Critics Awards 1979
New York Film Critics Circle Awards 1978
Writers Guild of America 1979
  • Nomination WGA Award (Screen) in the category Best Drama Written Directly for the Screen for Terrence Malick

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. a b Days of Heaven - Original Soundtrack . Allmusic.com. Retrieved July 25, 2014.
  2. a b In der Glut des Südens in the Lexicon of International FilmsTemplate: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used
  3. ^ Adrian Martin: Days of Heaven: On Earth as It Is in Heaven. Retrieved October 19, 2019 .
  4. ^ Adrian Martin: Days of Heaven: On Earth as It Is in Heaven. Retrieved October 24, 2019 .
  5. ^ Adrian Martin: Days of Heaven: On Earth as It Is in Heaven. Retrieved October 19, 2019 .
  6. Steven Rybin: Terrence Malick and the Thought of Film . Rowman & Littlefield, 2012, ISBN 978-0-7391-6675-8 ( google.de [accessed October 19, 2019]).
  7. ^ Roger Ebert: Days of Heaven movie review & film summary (1978) | Roger Ebert. Retrieved November 19, 2019 .
  8. ^ Adrian Martin: Days of Heaven: On Earth as It Is in Heaven. Retrieved October 24, 2019 .
  9. ^ The Runaway Genius | Classic | Vanity Fair. November 28, 2010, accessed October 19, 2019 .
  10. ^ Days of Heaven (1978) - Financial Information. Retrieved October 19, 2019 .
  11. German synchronous index | Movies | In the embers of the south. Retrieved October 17, 2019 .
  12. ^ Roger Ebert : Days of Heaven (1978). rogerebert.suntimes.com, December 7, 1997, accessed on April 21, 2008 : "Days of Heaven 'is above all one of the most beautiful films ever made."
  13. Jens Golombek in: Dirk Manthey, Jörg Altendorf, Willy Loderhose (Hrsg.): Das große Film-Lexikon. All top films from A-Z . Second edition, revised and expanded new edition. Verlagsgruppe Milchstraße, Hamburg 1995, ISBN 3-89324-126-4 , p. 1427 f .
  14. Film tips: Worth seeing . In: Die Zeit , No. 23 of June 1, 1979
  15. Review on Critic.de
  16. David Davies: Terence Malick. In: Plantinga, Carl; Livingston, Paisley: The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film. P. 573
  17. David Davies: Terence Malick. In: Plantinga, Carl; Livingston, Paisley: The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film. P. 570
  18. David Davies: Terence Malick. In: Plantinga, Carl; Livingston, Paisley: The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film. P. 571
  19. David Davies: Terence Malick. In: Plantinga, Carl; Livingston, Paisley: The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film. P. 575
  20. David Davies: Terence Malick. In: Plantinga, Carl; Livingston, Paisley: The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film. P. 577
  21. July 20, 2015: The 100 greatest American films. Retrieved October 19, 2019 .
  22. ^ Days of Heaven (British Film Institute). Retrieved October 19, 2019 .