Munich - secrets of a city
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| Original title | Munich - secrets of a city |
| Country of production | Germany |
| original language | German |
| Publishing year | 2000 |
| length | 121 minutes |
| Age rating |
Rated 0 JMK m |
| Rod | |
| Director | Dominik Graf |
| script | Dominik Graf, Michael Althen |
| production | Roland Mesmer |
| music | Dominik Graf, Helmut Spanner, Florian von Volxem, Sven Rossenbach, Max Fellmann, |
| camera | Martin Farkas |
| cut | Dominik Graf, Michael Althen |
| occupation | |
| |
Munich - Secrets of a City is a film essay from 2000. For this, director Dominik Graf worked together with film critic Michael Althen .
structure
The two-hour film is divided into five chapters, each preceded by subtitles :
- The warm core
- The dark partner
- The novel of looks
- The golden face
- The pale shadows
The DVD version released at the end of May 2012 also contains these subtitles. In addition, the film is now divided into 31 short, also named chapters via the DVD menu.
action
| Miss Greno and Dr. Riegler |
|---|
| Josef Breitenbach , 1933 |
| classic-photographers.com
[ Miss Greno and Dr. Riegler ( Memento from March 3, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Link to the picture] |
The film is a collage of contemporary documentary recordings , archive material from the Bavarian Radio and fictional scenes. Examples of documentary recordings are the images of the abandoned, overgrown Floriansmühlbad, cut together with historical film material, and the solar eclipse filmed from Stachus . Examples of fictional stories (in the form of a photo novel ) are those of two men who in the past, without knowing each other, had the same girlfriend at the same time and who now go into their house together at night. Another tells of a young man and a young woman at a pop concert in 1975, who were meant for each other, but by chance never saw each other. Josef Breitenbach 's photos of Fräulein Greno and Dr. Riegler . At the time, Breitenbach had pretended to have asked an unknown woman from the street into his apartment and she was ready to be photographed naked. In fact, Miss Greno was Breitenbach's friend and Dr. Riegler is a friend of the Simplicissimus editor. In the other fictional passages shot for the film, the actors do not have any dialogues either, the action is commented on and explained by speakers. Even for the old blind “narrator”, who appears right at the beginning in a street scene and from then on accompanies the film standing at a window, a speaker acts as an “inner voice”. The recordings of the solar eclipse that were shot on the first day only appear at the end of the cut version.
City models play an important role, which are elaborately staged by camera pans: On the one hand, they are naive-looking, colorful replicas with animated figures, but also the model of Johann Baptist Seitz from the 19th century or concepts of the National Socialists for the renovation of Munich. One section is devoted to futuristic city concepts from the 1970s. The short film excerpt with the crowd chanting with a view of the BMW skyscraper comes from the science fiction film Rollerball , which was shot on the Olympic site .
The speakers are Rolf Boysen , Jeanette Hain and Dominik Graf.
One of the subtitles
The city model by Johann Baptist Seitz (detail)
Quotes from the movie
Before the beginning of the first chapter, one of the speakers explains:
- This is Munich, but it could also be any other city that is big enough to show how the life story of each individual is entangled in the history of a place, how the personal and the anonymous there interlock and complement each other and how the thousands of stories also result in something like a biography of this city. Whether you like it or not, everyone has their own inner city and, like a tree, a cut would make age rings visible, which, so to speak, depict how the city grows in all of us, or vice versa: how one grows into the city oneself.
After the images of the solar eclipse, the film closes with:
- It is said that when there is a solar eclipse, all emotions stand still. So maybe this is the moment when the past and the future coincide, where all the longing, but also all the remembering, has peace for a moment, where the whole city is at peace with itself for a moment and we with it. That's how it should be.
Origin and first performance
Shooting started on August 11, 1999, the day of the solar eclipse, and shooting was completed on February 4, 2000. At that time, the working title was Munich - a city and its shadow . Althen and Graf did the editing together, and the finished film was made from almost 100 hours of material. The film was first shown at the Munich Film Festival in 2000.
Prehistory and background
| Graf and Althen with a city model |
|---|
| 1999/2000 |
| Image from cinema.de
[ Graf and Althen with a city model ( Memento from March 1, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Link to the picture] |
In an interview with Tagesspiegel , Althen and Graf say that the first idea dates back to 1990. In an interview at the time, the question was why Munich, and German cities in general, featured so little in German films.
Quotes:
- Althen: In the beginning it was just a feeling. In some films, for example by Antonioni , you see breathtaking cityscapes, where the city is more than just a backdrop - moments that we wanted to extend. It was clear that it was about the idea of a city. About the portrait of a dream city.
- Graf: In literature there is this connection between topography and emotion, for example with Marcel Proust . Or with Patrick Modiano , who investigates lost biographies based on lost places. There are almost no role models in the film.
The film deliberately dispenses with the well-known Munich sights such as the Hofbräuhaus or the Frauenkirche and focuses on the periphery and the suburbs, as these are the places where Munich is reinventing itself.
Reviews
- The Lexicon of International Films writes:
- A collage of memories, fictional stories, biographies, dreams and missed opportunities, which in their entirety represent the idea of Munich, whereby the focus of the film is not the cityscape, but the people who shape it, animate it and leave it. Not a documentary about Munich, but a fictional film - at times heavily wordy - about a fictional city that comes together in the minds of the two filmmakers in Munich.
- A review by Guntram Vogt and Philipp Sanke:
- It is the repeatedly mentioned puzzles and secrets of the big city , its secrets , whose charms keep filmmakers and audiences moving again and again . Exactly at the turn of the millennium in 1999/2000 Michael Althen and Dominik Graf shot an essay film with this suggestive title - MUNICH - SECRETS OF A CITY: (first screening June 2000 Munich Film Festival). It is a particularly interesting example of how, after a century of cinematographic city-inventions, something like a subtotal can be drawn from the almost unmistakable experiences with this material, subject or topic.
- A negative criticism from Thomas Willmann (excerpt):
- ... sometimes dusted off with THE MATRIX or THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH . But never just picked up in Munich. You'd have to really take a look. And don't assume that “everyone” and “everyone” (pretty much the most common words in the film) have to see everything exactly like Mr. Althen, that “nobody” and “nobody” feels different. Somehow it's not at all surprising that in the middle of the film it is said that Nazi architecture is not that bad either - a latent breath of totalization constantly blows through this work.
- Film review by Patrick Wellinski on the occasion of the DVD release (excerpt):
- [...] The abundance of material ranges from photos, archive recordings to movie scenes, animations and artificial backdrops. Graf and Althen always keep an overview. No picture too many, no word too little. Your work thus achieves the quality of a Chris Marker , perhaps the best essay filmmaker ever. MUNICH - SECRETS OF A CITY moves in a spiral through its material. Its chronology is not so much the fictional résumé of the anonymous male protagonist on which the individual episodes are roughly oriented, but rather the topography of the city itself. And in this case that does not only mean present-day Munich, but also includes the city's past like their future. The film was made shortly before the turn of the millennium. Although twelve years have passed, he keeps something very urgent, almost current. This is also due to the hypnotic voiceover that Dominik Graf slowly and emphatically speaks about the pictures and which very soon develops a life of its own. […] Of course, the full wisdom of the text only blossoms in its confrontation with the images, which, in view of the sensitivity of Michael Althen (who did not write the text alone, but must have shaped the text), can be tacitly added and reinterpreted at will. [...]
DVD
- Michael Althen, Dominik Graf: Munich - Secrets of a City , absolut medien GmbH 2012 ISBN 978-3-89848-391-9
Web links
- Munich - secrets of a city in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Film clips and pictures on absolutmedien.de
- Gallery with film images on filmreporter.de
Individual evidence
- ↑ Unless otherwise stated, the information on the film is based on the DVD Munich - Secrets of a City , absolut medien GmbH 2012.
- ↑ DVD, from 1:22:26
- ↑ DVD, from 1:54:38
- ↑ DVD, from 1:53:16
- ↑ DVD, 1: 11.48
- ↑ DVD, from 02:45
- ↑ DVD, from 1:58:26
- ↑ Booklet of the DVD
- ↑ Interview in Tagesspiegel accessed on June 4, 2012
- ^ Munich - Secrets of a City in the Lexicon of International Films , accessed on June 4, 2012
- ↑ Guntram Vogt, Philipp Sanke: Die Stadt im Film: German feature films 1900 - 2000 . Schüren Verlag 2001 ISBN 978-3894723316 p. 11
- ^ Review by Thomas Willman on artechock accessed on June 4, 2012
- ↑ Patrick Wellinski: Munich - Secrets of a City. A film review by Patrick Wellinski. In: kino-zeit.de. 2012, accessed July 21, 2018 .
