Love is colder than death

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Movie
Original title Love is colder than death
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
with the participation of
Katrin Schaake
production antiteater -X-Film
under the direction of
Peer Raben and
Thomas Schamoni
music Peer Raben,
Holger Münzer
camera Dietrich Lohmann
cut Franz Walsch alias
Rainer Werner Fassbinder
occupation
chronology

Successor  →
gods of the plague

Love is colder than death is the first full-length feature film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder . The story, which is stylistically based on the gangster film , was shot in April 1969 in Munich in just 24 days. The production costs of the black and white film were approx. 95,000 DM . It premiered on June 26, 1969 at the Berlinale , and was released on January 16, 1970; the ARD showed the film on January 18, 1971 for the first time on television. Hanna Schygulla played the female lead, her first of many other roles in Fassbinder's films.

action

The Munich pimp Franz doesn't want to work for the syndicate . He is very fond of the elegant, attractive Bruno who secretly does jobs for the gangsters. Franz has no idea that Bruno has been assigned to him by the syndicate. He is supposed to drag him into crimes, which then serve the syndicate as a handle to get Franz to participate. One day Bruno drives to Munich, but he does not find Franz at the address given, which he finds out on the street when he asks about Franz's girlfriend Joanna, who works for him. Franz hides from a Turk who accuses him of killing his brother. Bruno offers Franz to solve the problem. The three, Franz, Joanna and Bruno, set off. They get sunglasses and weapons; Bruno shoots the arms dealer as he leaves. Bruno shoots the Turk in a cafe and then the waitress, as well as a policeman outside the city who demands the papers. Franz even wants to share Joanna with Bruno. When Joanna laughs at the gangster on his first attempt to get close to her, Franz slaps her. When she asks him why he did that, Franz only replies that Bruno is his friend, whom she laughed at. When she asks him “And me?” He replies categorically: “You? You love me anyway! "

The police suspect Franz of having committed the murders and interrogate him; however, once you have no evidence, you have to let him go.

Joanna, who is scary about the unscrupulous killer Bruno - he also killed a suitor who unexpectedly turned up at Joanna's house after Franz had beaten the man - reveals to the police the last coup of the two out of fear for Franz and also out of a certain jealousy , a robbery on a bank . Bruno, in turn, has planned that Joanna should be shot dead by a Syndicate killer during the hustle and bustle of the robbery. When Bruno aims a submachine gun at the police officers, they open fire and Bruno is shot. Franz and Joanna escape the police with the dead Bruno in the car, whose body Joanna pushes out of the car while driving.

background

Production notes

Fassbinder shot the film on original locations. The Munich suburb was used for outdoor shots. The nocturnal drive through the street line on Landsberger Strasse was made available by Jean-Marie Straub ; it is an unused scene from the production of his short film, The Bridegroom, the Comedian and the Pimp, shot with Fassbinder as the actor .

The equipment of the locations is extremely sparse. White walls, a table, a chair, as good as unfurnished rooms and almost excruciatingly long camera positions are typical for this gangster film.

Ulli Lommel and Rainer Werner Fassbinder were responsible for setting the film. Katrin Schaake also worked on the script and took over the editing assistant. Other actors also had multiple functions. So Peer Raben is mentioned in the opening credits with his mostly used name as the person responsible for music and as an actor with the abbreviation of his actual name (Wilhelm Rabenbauer).

On August 19, 1969, Liebe is colder than death initially received an FSK approval from the age of 18 (today: from 16 years).

music

“When Love Is Colder Than Death , we talked about music before the script was written. Fassbinder was able to say exactly how the film should be stylistically and the music should support that. It was then already possible to come up with ideas for the music. Fassbinder gave keywords such as: The rooms in which the film is set should appear very cold, too bright, overly bright. The light should outshine everything else, so that all people who act in the rooms disappear because they are displaced by the light coming through the windows. I could do something with that right away (...) Did Fassbinder make suggestions himself (...)? I often worked with examples so that he could imagine something. Fortunately, he knew a lot of music. "

- Peer Raben in an interview with Juliane Lorenz

The band Element of Crime released a song in September 2014 with the title "Love is colder than death" and explains the relationship to the film during the following appearances.

camera

“Of course we talked a lot about film aesthetics. At that time the Nouvelle Vague was very popular, the so-called film noir , black and white and very atmospheric. We tried to imitate that very often, especially at the beginning, when love is colder than death , gods of the plague , the American soldier . In some cases it worked very well. "

- Dietrich Lohmann in an interview with Juliane Lorenz

Contributors

Fassbinder shot with actors with whom he had been working for a year in the 'Action Theater' or, after its dissolution, recently in the antiteater . While Irm Hermann was already involved in his previous short films Der Stadtstreicher and Das kleine Chaos , many actors can be seen for the first time who can be seen in numerous other Fassbinder films, in particular Hanna Schygulla , Ingrid Caven , Ulli Lommel , Kurt Raab , Hans Hirschmüller , Katrin Schaake , Hannes Gromball and Rudolf Waldemar Brem . The long-term collaboration with Peer Raben (music) and Dietrich Lohmann (camera) also begins with this film.

Title, dedication and references

When it premiered in Berlin, the film was initially called Colder Than Death, when the theatrical version started it was Love - Colder Than Death.

The film begins with a dedication to the directors Claude Chabrol , Eric Rohmer , Jean-Marie Straub and to “Lino et Cuncho”.

Lino and Cuncho refers to the main characters in the western Kill Amigo (Quién sabe / A Bullet for the General 1966) by Damiano Damiani , played by Lou Castel and Gian Maria Volonté ; Spelled correctly they are called “Niño” and “Chuncho”. “When I saw Töte Amigo with Ulli Lommel in winter , we decided to make a film together: Colder than death .” (Fassbinder in an interview, 1969) Franz's reason for slapping Joanna “Because you Bruno laughed and Bruno is my friend ”is a reference to Chuncho's sentence“ He tried to kill Niño, and Niño is my friend ”.

Fassbinder gave the reasons for dedicating the director in 1969: “ Chabrol , like me, strives for social change by starting at the bottom by analyzing feelings. From Straub I learned how a film can be stylistically developed, from Straub I adopted theories. Rohmer's film Under the Sign of the Lion particularly impressed me. "

In 1968 Fassbinder starred in Jean-Marie Straub's short film The Groom, the Comedian and the Pimp , as well as Hanna Schygulla, Irm Hermann, Peer Raben and Rudolf Waldemar Brem. Straub had only made three films that Fassbinder knew, the short film Machorka-Muff (1962) based on Heinrich Böll , Not Reconciled or It Only Helps Violence Where Violence Reigns (1965) based on Heinrich Böll's “ Billiards at sixteen ” and Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (1968). When the syndicate called Bruno in Love is Colder than Death , they learn that his surname is Straub .

The first work by Rohmers In the Sign of the Lion , quoted by Fassbinder, is one of the most important works of the French Nouvelle Vague . The drama of a two-month clochard life, narrated like a diary, does not convey any cheerful optimism about life, despite the happy ending, but rather provides the cool analytical record of social decline. By April 1969, Fassbinder was also able to know three of Rohmer's moral stories : the short film The Monceau Baker (1962), Suzanne's Career (1963) and The Collector (1967). The waitress killed by Bruno in love is colder than death bears the name Erika Rohmer.

In love is colder than death Franz (Fassbinder) mentions the Hitchcock film Psycho (1960) while stealing glasses in the department store : “I'm looking for round glasses like the ones the policeman wore in Psycho , yes? So the one who got to Janet Leigh's car . ”“ Because if you were to make crazy films like Hitchcock one day, you really had to be able to master your craft. After everything I've learned so far, I primarily need technical perfection. ”(Fassbinder in an interview, 1973)

Ulli Lommel According to Cooper sent him shortly before filming began once the purchase of hat, coat and sunglasses, as Alain Delon in Le Samouraï by Jean-Pierre Melville was wearing. The film was released in German cinemas on June 13, 1968. Fassbinder also often spoke to Lommel about the fact that his love is colder than death was inspired by Melville's film.

The name Franz Walsch

Fassbinder uses the pseudonym "Franz Walsch" for love is colder than death for himself as a film editor ; the figure he plays is also called "Franz"; when the syndicate arrests him, they briefly learn his last name: Walsch . He also used the pseudonym in his previous two short films Der Stadtstreicher 1966 and Das kleine Chaos 1967 (“Direction and screenplay: Franz Walsch”) as well as for his editing work in other films. In his next film but one ( Gods of the Plague , 1969) he again names the main character Franz Walsch . The first name comes from the character Franz Biberkopf from Döblin's novel Berlin Alexanderplatz , and the name Walsch refers to the director Raoul Walsh .

Fassbinder on the film

“They are people who, in order to be able to live what appears to them to be worth living in, simply take on roles that are actually not theirs. That is of course something sad or something beautiful. "

- Rainer Werner Fassbinder

“Without love there would be no violence. The violence arises from the abuse of love; Love, which always makes claims of ownership, love, which is colder than death. Are there no, as the saying goes, real feelings? My film is a film against feelings. Because I believe that all feelings can be and are actually abused. (...) Someone like Bruno who takes action, who makes politics for the syndicate, inevitably fails because of the feelings of others. Would you also generalize this hypothesis? Yes. Anyone who tries to do politics the way they have done up to now will fail. If you want to change things, it is not enough to develop awareness. First and foremost, one must prevent the exploitation of feelings in the personal sphere. "

- Rainer Werner Fassbinder in an interview with Ingeborg Weber, Stuttgarter Zeitung, June 25, 1969

“With my film, it shouldn't be that feelings that people already have are eaten up or absorbed, but rather the film should create new ones (...). That's why I made the crime scenes, the blackjack scenes, as conventional as possible, so that they just pass by. The aim is to find out that the criminal is not in robberies and murders, but in the fact that people are brought up in such a way that they have relationships with one another like these people, that they are just incapable of realizing their relationships. "

- Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1969.

“I want the audience who sees this film to check their own private feelings. Yes, that's what it's about to me, nothing else for the first time in this film. I find that more politically or politically more aggressive and active than when I show the police as the great oppressors. "

- Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1969.

“What is left after you've seen this film isn't that someone murdered six people here, that there were a few dead, but that there were poor people here who couldn't do anything with themselves, who just like that were seated as they are and were given no opportunity - we don't want to go that far - who simply don't have any, who simply have no option. "

- Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1969.

"The film was shown at the Berlinale , the reaction - it was just booed and insulted as amateurism and trash and so on. (...) There was such aggression from the people, it was really incredible. (. ..) Because he is so completely different (...) that annoys you. "

- Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1973.

Reviews

“Thematically based on the American genre film, stylistically based on Straub, yet extremely idiosyncratic debut feature film by Fassbinder. The pictures are clinically bright, the backgrounds demonstratively bare, the shots take a provocatively long time. Munich's underworld environment resembles an artificial experimental field in which the figures are bleakly isolated. Worth seeing as a cinematic document. "

- Lexicon of international films , no year

“The director set out to make a melancholy film; another time he would probably want to make a funny movie. That was it: the melancholy was wanted. And the means of illustrating melancholy were also unsuitable: both citing characters from other films (Lommel Alain Delon from the highly overrated “ Ice Cold Angel ”) and the arrangement of the images in themselves and in relation to one another: Figures that slowly, with the profile of the viewer, coming into the picture, walking through the picture along a bare wall and disappearing again, staring into the camera in front of the same bare walls, mannered geometry of the people - this gives the film a false no-man's-land character; the bare walls, the indolence and dream wandering of the characters, who seemed to be influenced by the camera, resembled the arrangements in existentialist science fiction films. "

- Peter Handke in Die Zeit on July 11, 1969.

“Of the five feature films by Rainer Werner Fassbinder so far, his first film, made almost a year ago, is love - colder than death , the most radical and most indomitable to the usages of the cinema industry. And at the same time, as if filled with a secret longing for its possibilities, it is related to this cinema industry, even fixated on it.

It comes along like an esoteric work of art that has forgotten everything about itself, its origins, its ties to the cinema, and yet it is inextricably attached to the genre of the gangster film , whose laws it already meticulously complies with. Seemingly unconcerned about the story, he strings together unemotional, cool pictures in which figures reduced to schemes move slowly, seemingly lifeless, driven by enigmatic, opaque motifs, and yet, above all, has them, the story, in mind, even if they are also hidden rather than communicated in a few brief gestures and sentences, a story that, like stories, otherwise clarifies the motifs and gives the characters individuality. (...) But the fact that the story doesn't just fall into your lap like it does in the cinema, that you have to lie in wait for it, paying attention to every word, to every movement, no matter how subtle, the effort increases sensitivity and with it the mind. And under the sharpened gaze, these cool, esoteric images lose their shine and these figures, stylized into shapes, lose their strange artificiality. The sheer misery as the determining factor becomes evident. (...)

A lot of evil or at least incomprehensible things were said and written about love - colder than death when it was screened at last year's Berlin Film Festival. And that's not surprising. Because this film, made with a budget that would be sufficient in the calculations of other films for the category “tips and other”, makes no secret of its poor production conditions, nevertheless competes with the excess films, lays claim to their market by it joins the well-selling genre of gangster films without even remotely meeting the standards that the industry has set for films of this kind and that have long been accepted as binding by the public. Love - colder than death - delivers all the ingredients that are characteristic of the film type, such as sex, murder, brutal fights and the big coup, but not presented as it should be, sensationally perfect, provocative, emotional, she represents rather not particularly big; some of the brutalities are not visible at all, happen outside of the picture, others that can be seen seem a bit puny, certainly not dramatic.

(...) Love - colder than death is, if you will, more of a craft product, unconsciously well aligned with the norms of industry, but almost forced to truthfulness by its miserable production conditions, which correspond to the conditions under which living its protagonists fail to be anything other than "poor people". "

- Joachim von Mengershausen, Süddeutsche Zeitung, April 7, 1970

Awards

According to Daniel Schmid , love is colder than death at the Berlinale in the summer of 1969 when the student movement collapsed "completely through (...), according to the motto: The completely wrong film in the completely wrong place, in short, the total was next to it. "

Only after the production of two other Fassbinder films in the same year was Love Is Colder Than Death awarded the German Film Prize ("Federal Film Prize") at the 1970 Berlinale in two categories:

The women of the antiteater ensemble received the award for the best performance for their overall performance in the 1969 Fassbinder films: Love is colder than death, Katzelmacher and gods of the plague . The award to Dietrich Lohmann for the best camera work was an award for four films, the three Fassbinder films from 1969 and Thomas Schamoni's A Great Gray-Blue Bird , which premiered at the Berlinale in 1970.

Adapted title takeovers

DVD

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b c d Ernst-Christian Neisel (editor), Rainer Werner Fassbinder Foundation (publisher): Rainer Werner Fassbinder work show - program. Argon Verlag, Berlin 1992, ISBN 3-87024-212-4 .
  2. ↑ Film notes on: Love is colder than death , ARD for arte broadcast on June 25, 2012, accessed on January 28, 2013.
  3. ↑ Description of the film at Internet Movie Database
  4. ↑ Love is colder than death at Filmportal.de
  5. ↑ Work without end point , Peer Raben in an interview with Juliane Lorenz , p. 68 in: The whole normal chaos , conversations about Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Juliane Lorenz (ed.), Henschel Verlag, Berlin, 1995, ISBN 3-89487-227- 6 .
  6. ↑ Let's see what comes out , Dietrich Lohmann in an interview with Juliane Lorenz . In: The normal chaos. Conversations about Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Juliane Lorenz (ed.), Henschel Verlag, Berlin, 1995, ISBN 3-89487-227-6 , p. 151.
  7. ^ Film review Kill Amigo , Sam Spade, Film-Rezensions.de, January 26, 2009.
  8. ↑ Kill Amigo at Internet Movie Database
  9. ↑ a b c Love is colder than death , Rainer Werner Fassbinder in an interview with Ingeborg Weber. In: Stuttgarter Zeitung . June 25, 1969, quoted from FassbinderFoundation.de
  10. ↑ a b Love is colder than death in Internet Movie Database
  11. ^ Jean-Marie Straub at Filmportal.de
  12. ↑ The Aesthetics of Hope. Interview with Christian Braad Thomsen, 1973, In: Robert Fischer (Ed.): Fassbinder about Fassbinder. Verlag der Autor, Frankfurt 2004, ISBN 3-88661-268-6 , p. 263.
  13. ↑ Ulli Lommel in the documentary You love me anyway - Hanna Schygulla and Ulli Lommel on 'Love is colder than death' , minutes 7:30 and 10:00, Robert Fischer, as an extra on DVD Love is colder than death. emd, 2002.
  14. ↑ Hell? The immortality. Die Zeit , June 12, 1992
  15. ↑ a b Rainer Werner Fassbinder in an interview with Joachim von Mengershausen In: Film. No. 8 (1969), quoted from: Ernst-Christian Neisel (editor), Rainer Werner Fassbinder Foundation (publisher): Rainer Werner Fassbinder Werkschau - Programm. Argon Verlag, Berlin 1992, ISBN 3-87024-212-4 .
  16. ^ Rainer Werner Fassbinder In: Film 8. (1969), p. 20, quoted from Wilhelm Roth in Rainer Werner Fassbinder. (Film 2; Hanser 175). 3. Edition. Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich 1979, ISBN 3-446-12946-4 , p. 94.
  17. ↑ The group that wasn't one anyway. Interview with Corinna Brocher, 1973, In: Robert Fischer (Ed.): Fassbinder about Fassbinder. Verlag der Autor, Frankfurt 2004, ISBN 3-88661-268-6 , p. 123
  18. ↑ Love is colder than death. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed March 2, 2017 .Template: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used 
  19. ↑ Peter Handke : Ah, Gibraltar! In: The time . No. 28/1969.
  20. ↑ Joachim von Mengershausen: Meager ballad from the poor people. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung . April 7, 1970, quoted from FassbinderFoundation.de
  21. ↑ Something distant, Mongolian. Daniel Schmid in an interview with Juliane Lorenz In: Juliane Lorenz (Ed.): The completely normal chaos. Conversations about Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Henschel Verlag, Berlin 1995, ISBN 3-89487-227-6 , pp. 20f.
  22. ↑ German film awards from 1951 to today: 1970 ( Memento of the original from July 9, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Archive of the German Film Academy, accessed on January 27, 2013. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.deutsche-filmakademie.de
  23. ↑ German Film Awards 1970 , Internet Movie Database (English)
  24. ↑ Ulrike Kahle-Steinweh: I think of Stammheim. Stage of Terror: The Stuttgart Theater starts its RAF theater project with three world premieres . In: Tagesspiegel . September 26, 2007.
  25. ↑ Exhibition information on Kunsthaus-Bregenz.at, accessed on January 29, 2013.
  26. ↑ http://www.laut.de/Element-Of-Crime/Interviews/Ich-will-keine-SMS-von-Neil-Young-bekommen-19-09-2014-1187