Katzelmacher (film)

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Movie
Original title Katzelmacher
Country of production Federal Republic of Germany
original language German
Publishing year 1969
length 88 minutes
Age rating FSK 16
Rod
Director Rainer Werner Fassbinder
script Rainer Werner Fassbinder
production Peer Raben (as Wilhelm Rabenbauer)
music Peer Raben and
Franz Schubert
camera Dietrich Lohmann
cut Rainer Werner Fassbinder (as Franz Walsch)
occupation

Katzelmacher is the second feature film by the German director, writer and actor Rainer Werner Fassbinder . The drama is based on Fassbinder's play Katzelmacher from 1968. The film was produced by Antiteater -X-Film in August 1969 on 9 days of shooting for approx. 80,000 DM . The premiere took place on October 8, 1969 at the Film Week in Mannheim ; the cinema release was on November 22, 1969. The film thematizes the curiosity, jealousy and aggression of a group of young adults towards a newcomer who breaks up the boredom and the well-established behavior of the group, based on the relationship of a group member to a Greek guest worker .

action

The film is set in Munich at the time it was made. A group of young adults hang out in their suburbs on the streets, in apartments and in the pub. Each member of the group has a relationship with the other. Marie is initially in a relationship with Erich, Paul with Helga, and Peter with Elisabeth. Then there is Rosy, who sleeps with Franz for a fee (20 DM ) and sometimes also with Peter in order to be able to finance her dream of becoming an actress; Gunda, who is teased because she “can't get any”, but tells the others that hers is “on Monday”; plus the gay Klaus, who occasionally receives a visit from Paul and has a relationship with him. The members of this loose group meet, sometimes all together, sometimes only individually, they drink together, get bored, become verbally and physically aggressive. The women try to fool one another into living in happy relationships, "feeling something" (Marie). Although they are often treated brutally, they are attached to their friends. The men, on the other hand, talk about crooked deals with which one could finally get rich, their friends about getting married. Overall, there is a certain order of subtle and overt violence. The facades are exhibited by Fassbinder, what is said and what is visible clash mercilessly, the gap cannot be bridged.

When Jorgos, a guest worker from Greece, shows up and rents a room from Elisabeth - at first he has to share one with Peter - hostility, xenophobia and envy arise among the male members of the group. The stranger becomes a general projection surface for desire, inferiority complexes, boredom, aggression, machism etc. Gunda, who is despised by everyone, including Jorgos, also spreads the rumor that he had raped her. Above all, Erich feels hurt in his honor when Marie shows an open interest in Jorgos. Elisabeth, on the other hand, has to face rumors that she has a relationship with her Greek lodger. He is insulted as a “communist” and “Greek dog”. The prejudices culminate in the fact that Erich, Peter and Franz beat up the Greek Jorgos on the street. The last scene shows Marie and Helga. Marie raves about the fact that Jorgos wants to take her to Greece, even though his wife lives there, because in Greece "[...] everything is different". The end remains open.

background

title

The title refers to the curse word Katzelmacher , used mainly in Austria , but also in Switzerland and Bavaria , with which the disparaging southern European musicians , traveling traders and in the 1960s also guest workers were referred to.

Classification and style elements

Katzelmacher is one of Fassbinder's first film productions. After three short films and the less successful first feature film Love is colder than death gives Katzelmacher his breakthrough.

The film is shot in black and white . It contains some elements of the French Nouvelle Vague , which stood for a kind of break in style with the conventional conventions for and in commercial films. In Katzelmacher , Fassbinder almost exclusively uses the static camera and interrupts this style with a few built-in tracking shots . During these tracking shots, Peer Raven's piano piece “Sehnsuchtswalzer” based on Franz Schubert can be heard - the only music that can be heard in the film. The actors speak their dialogues and monologues in a hybrid of high German and art Bavarian , which was developed by Fassbinder and used in many of his films. The noticeable elements of this artificial language include, in addition to the double negative (“never not”), which is quite common in Bavarian, grammatically incorrect sentence order and the wrong genitive . The long pauses between the sentences, which are usually reduced to just a few words and performed monotonously, give the film a remote artificiality and slowness.

With this radical refusal of basic cinematic rules, Fassbinder's Katzelmacher belongs to the second generation of New German Film from the 1970s and contributed to the international success of West German film until the 1980s.

Dedication and motto

Like many works by Fassbinder, the film contains a dedication and a motto. Katzelmacher is dedicated to Marieluise Fleißer . The motto is a quote from Yaak Karsunke : “ It is better to make new mistakes than to constitute the old ones to the point of general unconsciousness. "

actor

Katzelmacher was performed in 1968 as a play by the Munich “Action Theater”. When the action theater dissolved, the antiteater was created on the initiative of Fassbinder and Peer Raben in 1969 , and its actors were involved in the filming of Katzelmacher . Fassbinder himself plays a major role in this.

Name "Franz Walsch"

Fassbinder uses the pseudonym "Franz Walsch" (editing) for himself in Katzelmacher , as in his short film Der Stadtstreicher (direction and screenplay). In his previous film ( Love is colder than death ) and his next film ( Gods of the Plague ), both shot in 1969, he also names the main character by this name. Fassbinder took the inspiration for this pseudonym from the figure of Franz Biberkopf from Alfred Döblin's novel “ Berlin Alexanderplatz ”, which he filmed in 1980 .

Reviews

"Fassbinder has made a remarkable film out of nothing in terms of plot, dispensing with traditional cinematic means ... Inner emptiness has seldom been portrayed more convincingly."

- Dieter Krusche

"Fassbinder's milieu drama is committed to the traditions of socially critical folk theater - Horvath, Fleißer, Kroetz: a model-like, stylized, formally extraordinarily concentrated study of lack of communication, peer pressure and outsider hatred."

- Lexicon of international film

"In a style that is consciously theater-oriented but realistic in detail, Fassbinder describes the latent brutality that determines the tone of voice between the people and is particularly expressed in the relationships between the main characters and the guest worker who appears later, the 'Greek' from Greece" . Fassbinder does not turn his characters into monsters, but rather shows the stagnation in their consciousness; this is conveyed through extremely rudimentary language and an equally reduced repertoire of gestures, movements and reactions. Fassbinder gives his film an extremely precise, artistic structure. "

- Ulrich Gregor

“A consistently stylized film adaptation of the piece by Fassbinder, which renounces technical perfection. In its second anti-cinema piece, the collective of the antiteater presents clichés, typical behaviors, attitudes and reactions of young petty bourgeoisie that refer to acquired intolerance, ruthless self-righteousness, 'healthy public sentiment' and permanent aggressiveness. A socially critical contribution that is not formally but interesting in terms of content and that challenges the debate. "

- Protestant film observer , review No. 484/1969

Awards

Katzelmacher received the Interfilm Prize at its premiere in 1969 at the Mannheim Film Week . Also in 1969, Katzelmacher was recognized by the Academy of Performing Arts as the best television game .

In 1970 Katzelmacher received the German Film Prize ("Federal Film Prize") in five categories:

Katzelmacher had to share the trophy for the best film with Peter Lilienthal's Malatesta . Dietrich Lohmann received the award for the camera work in Fassbinder's films Love is colder than death , Katzelmacher , gods of the plague and in Thomas Schamoni's A large gray-blue bird . The award for the best performance went to the women of the antiteater ensemble for the three films Love is Colder than Death , Katzelmacher and Gods of the Plague .

In 1989, Katzelmacher was nominated for a special award for the fortieth anniversary of the Federal Republic of Germany at the presentation of the German Film Prize. The prize then went to Fassbinder's film Die Ehe der Maria Braun (1979) as well as Alexander Kluge's Farewell to Yesterday (1966), Margarethe von Trotta's Die Bleierne Zeit (1981) and Bernhard Wicki's Die Brücke (1959).

Dubbing

Kurt Schwertsik wrote an opera after this film.

Web links

swell

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Release certificate for Katzelmacher . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry , May 2009 (PDF; test number: 41 383 V / DVD / UMD).
  2. ^ Rainer Werner Fassbinder retrospective program, Ernst-Christian Neisel (editor), Rainer Werner Fassbinder Foundation (publisher), Argon Verlag, Berlin, 1992
  3. ↑ The shooting location was around Fassbinder's regular pub in Hildegardstraße ( Lehel district )
  4. ↑ Dieter Krusche: Reclam's film guide / collaborators: Jürgen Labenski and Josef Nagel. - 13., rework. Edition - Philipp Reclam, Stuttgart 2008, ISBN 978-3-15-010676-1 , p. 375
  5. ↑ Katzelmacher. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed March 2, 2017 .Template: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used 
  6. ^ Ulrich Gregor, Geschichte des Films from 1960. Bertelsmann, Munich 1978, ISBN 3-570-00816-9 , p. 148
  7. ↑ German Film Awards from 1951 to today: 1970 ( Memento from July 9, 2015 in the Internet Archive ), archive of the German Film Academy, accessed on October 16, 2019.
  8. ^ German Film Awards 1970 , Internet Movie Database (English)