The last from Da Da eR

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Movie
Original title The last from Da Da eR
Country of production GDR
original language German
Publishing year 1990
length 86 minutes
Age rating FSK 12
Rod
Director Jörg Foth
script Steffen Mensching
Hans-Eckardt Wenzel
production DEFA , KAG "DaDaeR"
music Dietmar Staskowiak
camera Thomas Plenert
cut Renate Schäfer
occupation

Last from Da Da eR , alternative spelling Last from DaDaeR , is a German film satire by DEFA by Jörg Foth from 1990. It is based on various clown games by Mensching & Wenzel and is seen by critics as a cinematic swan song for the GDR .

action

  • Breakfast in Sing-Sing: The two clowns Meh and Weh are in prison and, as always, receive two boiled eggs for breakfast from the armed prison guard. Then both leave the prison with their suitcases, a swim ring and a baby doll via a lowered rope ladder and the prison guard shoots several gas masks .
  • It is a special honor for me: Meh und Weh hold various acceptance speeches in front of serious people and give each other different medals and decorations, which they stab each other through their clothes until both collapse. Applause breaks out and both are carried out of the hall. A postman is late. In the belly of a garbage truck they drive through Berlin and sing the song Brothers come up, let's dance . Your journey ends at a garbage dump, both are unloaded and walk away through the garbage.
  • Acheron : Meh and woe are at a lake that a singing ferryman is crossing. He sings Zeitel from Preacher, chap. 1 Everything on earth is vain . Meh und Weh let the ferryman translate and sing the shanty ; both songs mix.
  • Hell: Both clowns end up in a cement plant. Woe wants to free a princess. Both take the left path and sing time and money fleeting good . Both remember old times and talk about a sketch they weren't allowed to perform in the 1980s. They sing ingratitude is the world's reward .
  • A few seconds later: The prison guard is fetching new coal from the yard. Weh und Meh take the train. Later they come into a performance cursing loudly and present the song Dankchoral on a small revue staircase . They then return to prison, where Meh briefly loses his vote, which he probably put in the ballot box as he still had one until then. Aching brings the voice back. They talk about the turmoil of the world, the first and third world and their somehow in-between life.
  • A German Walpurgis Night : Weh and Meh have mixed into a reunification celebration. Here they speak clownish-critical things, sing Through bad nights a march of grief wavers and are hostile and marginalized by those present until they finally leave. A little later they sit in a former border zone and sing half and half until they walk past the tourists out of the zone. The prison guard continues to gather coal and realizes that she doesn't know a more divided people than the Germans.
  • In Paradise: Woe and Meh come to a hill on which people in animal costumes are kept in cages. They crawl into the cage of the monkey who speaks English to them and defends his territory. People come by, gaze into the cages and finally shoot some of the released "animals" with blank cartridges, which then play dead. Sorrows and sorrows rush away. The postman reaches both of them and brings Weh a package. He ordered it for Meh 20 years ago: it contains an electric Piko train . When assembling the track, which turns out to be a music stand, quarrels and chaos ensue and both ultimately fall to the ground. You can hear the song Oh, Germany .
  • Oh my dad: Weh und Meh went into a slaughterhouse and re-enacted a Faust scene with their own dialogues. You realize that the scene wasn't funny as nobody laughed. Both recapitulate that people used to laugh more, but not anymore. They hear that people are nearby and go to the battle rooms. This is followed by scenes of the killing of cows with an electric shock, the hanging of the carcasses and the bleeding. Woe and Meh crawl past a skeleton through a museum and sing Flight booked into no man's land . You finally rush out of the museum room.
  • The new era: The two clowns walk over a bridge and keep shouting “Yes, of course”. Later they sing in a train station Dead Dogs shouldn't be woken up until they come to a television set from which a presenter reports on a historic moment. Woe and Meh see that the demolition of their prison has begun and rush over. While they are looking at things from a slewing crane, the prisoners inside are released. The song The clowns are shot and both clowns are then chased by the prisoners. They manage to escape to Paris .
  • Epilogue: Woe and Meh are in a cemetery with the prison guard. You see a building adjoining the site with numerous German flags hanging on the windows. Dog barking sounds, which after a while join the woes and sorrows. The camera stops on a grave inscription: "Goodbye!"

production

Background and script

The clowns Weh and Meh were developed by Steffen Mensching and Hans-Eckardt Wenzel in the early 1980s. Director Jörg Foth got to know the duo through the author Irina Liebmann in the mid-1980s and worked with Hans-Eckardt Wenzel in 1988 on the film adaptation of his stage work Tuba wa duo . When it became clear in October 1989 that independent films could also be made within DEFA, Foth approached Mensching & Wenzel in December 1989. The idea was to put together pieces from her stage works Neues aus der Da Da eR (1982), old things from Da Da eR (1989) and the clown play last from Da Da eR , "a [em] Dadaist swan song die Heimat ”, which first appeared on stage in February 1989. Mensching and Wenzel wrote the script within a week, which was continuously edited during the shoot. In addition to scenes and songs from the individual stage programs, it also contained new scenes: All parts of the film that do not exclusively show Mensching & Wenzel were written especially for the film or rewritten from existing scenes to the new situation. A special feature is the use of literary quotations in film. All of Irm Hermann's lines of text were written by Friedrich Hölderlin , while Christoph Hein only quotes Gustave Flaubert and Arno Schmidt .

Locations

The last one from Da Da eR was shot within 23 days from March 27th to May 7th 1990 at the following locations:

The scenes of the award ceremony were originally intended to be shot in the ballroom of the State Council building . However, the authorities prohibited this. The hell scene was originally supposed to be shot in the Leuna works, but the shooting permit was withdrawn at short notice, so that only a few exterior shots were taken. The interior photos finally took place in the Rüdersdorf cement works.

Pieces of music

The plot is accompanied by various pieces of music. The music was played by the DEFA Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Manfred Rosenberg . The following titles can be heard in the film:

  • Thanksgiving chorale (text: Wenzel, Mensching / music: Wenzel)
  • Brothers, get up your feet, we dance (Wenzel, Mensching / Wenzel)
  • Time and money perishable good (Wenzel, Mensching / Wenzel)
  • Ingratitude is the world's reward (Wenzel, Mensching / Wenzel)
  • A march of sorrow wavers through bad nights (Wenzel, Mensching / Wenzel)
  • Half and Half (Wenzel, Mensching / Wenzel)
  • Flight booked to no man's land (Wenzel, Mensching / Wenzel)
  • Dead dogs shouldn't be wakened (Wenzel, Mensching / Wenzel)
  • Shanty (Wenzel, Mensching / Wenzel, Staskowiak)
  • Oh Germany (Wenzel, Mensching / Wenzel, Staskowiak)
  • The clowns should be shot (Wenzel, Mensching / Wenzel, Staskowiak)

The songs are sung by Mensching & Wenzel, the song by the ferryman is sung by bass Gerd Wolf. Some of the songs are accompanied by the chamber choir of the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Sebastian Weigle .

reception

The last one from Da Da eR , whose production costs amounted to one million marks, should come to the cinemas shortly before German reunification , which was initially officially scheduled for October 15. The ceremony, however, was brought forward to October 3, 1990 - the last one from Da Da eR premiered on October 7, 1990 in the Babylon cinema in Berlin and thus already in reunified Germany. At that time "the rebelliousness of the clowns was already in the dominant line", so Frank-Burkhard Habel looking back.

Nevertheless, the film was like "shot in a no man's land and remained stateless": It was the first DEFA film that was not taken over and distributed by Progress Film Verleih . While the audience in the east enthusiastically received the film, the critics were irritated or even disapproving. It was rather the other way around in West Germany, even if various film festivals refused to show the film. It had its television premiere on July 2, 1991 at the DFF . The last one from Da Da eR was only released on DVD in the USA in September 2009 and had its festival premiere in November 2009 in Leeds, UK . In Germany, the film was first released on DVD in 2009 by the label Matrosenblau, while DEFA films are usually marketed by Icestorm.

criticism

The contemporary criticism criticized the fact that the texts of the clown games for the filming "were taken away from some current references", but the "cinematic accessories" by Foth and Plenert with garbage dumps, prison and cemetery repeatedly produce scenes worth seeing. For Henryk Goldberg the film was “perhaps the last grim joke that DaDaeR filmmaking made itself. To a certain extent, the DaDa (eR) ism of film politics ”.

In retrospect, the film was rated in relation to other DEFA films of the time: “What can you see in the Last of the DaDaeR , in Banal Days , in The Street or The Land Behind the Rainbow ? Eccentricity at almost any price, quotes, quotes, quotes. Farces and grotesques. [...] Almost all post-turnaround films [of DEFA] show the desire to somehow do justice to the rapidly changing reality. ”For the film service , the last thing from Da Da eR was “ [e] in loose sheets of cabaret acts by artists from the GDR about the dreary everyday life and the state of the GDR society. Since it was conceived for the cabaret stage, the revue often appears unstructured and overloaded on the screen, but still conveys a lot of the lifestyle of the people in the former GDR, the agony and the eschatological mood. ” Cinema remarked shortly:“ Bitterly ironic, nothing for Ostalgiker ".

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ F.-B. Habel : The great lexicon of DEFA feature films . Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf, Berlin 2000, ISBN 3-89602-349-7 , pp. 354 .
  2. ↑ Wenzel 2009 in Berlin. See the booklet for the DVD edition, Sailor Blue 2009.
  3. ↑ Hiltrud Schulz: Interview with Jörg Foth, Director of Latest of the Da-Da-R . July 2009, p. 5.
  4. ↑ Hiltrud Schulz: Interview with Jörg Foth, Director of Latest of the Da-Da-R . July 2009, p. 7.
  5. ↑ Hiltrud Schulz: Interview with Jörg Foth, Director of Latest of the Da-Da-R . July 2009, p. 6.
  6. ↑ Hiltrud Schulz: Interview with Jörg Foth, Director of Latest of the Da-Da-R . July 2009, p. 3.
  7. ↑ Hiltrud Schulz: Interview with Jörg Foth, Director of Latest of the Da-Da-R . July 2009, pp. 8–9.
  8. ↑ F.-B. Habel : The great lexicon of DEFA feature films . Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf, Berlin 2000, ISBN 3-89602-349-7 , pp. 353 .
  9. ↑ Jörg Foth on October 7th, 2009. See booklet for the DVD edition, Sailor Blue 2009.
  10. ↑ Hiltrud Schulz: Interview with Jörg Foth, Director of Latest of the Da-Da-R . July 2009, p. 9.
  11. ↑ fbh in: Filmklub-Kurier , No. 5, 1990.
  12. ^ Henryk Goldberg: The last grim joke . In: Filmspiegel , No. 23, 1990, p. 11.
  13. ↑ Bärbel Dalichow: The last chapter 1989 to 1993 . In: Ralf Schenk (Red.), Filmmuseum Potsdam (Hrsg.): The second life of the film city Babelsberg. DEFA feature films 1946–1992 . Henschel, Berlin 1994, p. 336.
  14. ↑ Last from Da Da eR. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed August 3, 2018 .Template: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used 
  15. ↑ Last from Da Da eR. In: Cinema , Hubert Burda Media , accessed on August 3, 2018.