After midnight (film)
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| Original title | After midnight |
| Country of production | Germany |
| original language | German |
| Publishing year | 1981 |
| length | 110 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 12 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Wolf Gremm |
| script |
Annette Regnier , Wolf Gremm |
| production |
Regina Ziegler , Willi Benninger |
| music | Charles Kalman |
| camera | Michael Steinke |
| cut | Clarissa Ambach |
| occupation | |
| |
After midnight , a German feature film from 1981 by Wolf Gremm starring 16-year-old Désirée Nosbusch , who made her debut here as a film actress. The story is based on the novel of the same name (1937) by Irmgard Keun .
action
Germany in 1935, year three of National Socialism . The 16-year-old Susanne Moder, always called Sanne by everyone, is brought to Frankfurt am Main from a small town on the Moselle by her stepbrother Algin, a writer, after her mother's death. There she is supposed to work in her aunt Adelheid's stationery shop, where she also finds accommodation. The dominant aunt is an ardent supporter of Hitler and his brown ideology. For Sanne, politics is actually not an issue - she says: “I don't understand anything about politics!”. Rather, she is interested in her cousin Franz, the son of the house. When his mother found out that the two wanted to get married, she sabotaged these plans by denouncing and reporting Sanne to the Gestapo for allegedly insubordinate statements concerning Hermann Göring . Sanne is now getting to know this new Germany from a side that was previously unknown to her: Like various others arrested by the Gestapo, she is being subjected to tough interrogations. Sanne is lucky, she gets away with the matter with a black eye. Once again at large, Sanne leaves the Nazi aunt's house and moves into the Villa Algins. He works quite successfully as a writer and tries to come to terms with the rulers through literary harmlessness, but since the party has increasingly determined the line and what falls under "German literature", the ground threatens to slip from under his feet.
The fanaticism that is spreading more and more hits Sanne quite unprepared. One day Hitler visits the city, and Sanne gets caught in the ideologically whipped up masses. Everything is in motion, and Sanne has to watch a six-year-old girl pushed by her parents die in jubilation for the Führer, people and fatherland. At the same time, the love of Gerti, Sanne's best friend, for the "half-Jew" Dieter Aaron is destroyed by the circumstances of the time. Sanne begins to reflect on these circumstances and develops a downright disgust for the system. This reluctance reaches its climax after a dissolute party in Algin's domicile. There, like a microcosm, all the pariahs who once represented Germany are gathered again and of which Hitler’s Reich and the looming Second World War will no longer leave anything. The Jewish doctor Dr. Breslauer has already made preparations to flee, Algin's best friend, a journalist who cannot imagine emigration, shoots himself in front of the guests. Franz, who also appears at the festival, is now being searched for - he killed the man who denounced him and his friend Paul to the police. While Franz was able to escape, Paul fell into the hands of the Gestapo henchmen, at the mercy of death. Sanne now decides to accompany Franz on his escape. Both get on the night train to Rotterdam - it is a departure into a completely uncertain future.
Production notes
After midnight , from February to April 1981, Artur Brauner's CCC studios in Berlin-Spandau were created in collaboration with ZDF . The premiere took place on September 24, 1981. From July 15, 1983, the film could also be seen in GDR cinemas.
Michael Boehme was the production manager, Horst Burkhard the production manager. Jan Schlubach designed the film structures, Ursula Welter the costumes.
With the novel After Midnight , Irmgard Keun (1905–1982), who made a guest appearance here, processed her own experiences in the first years of the Third Reich. Keun herself, who died the following year, was very impressed with the filming of Désirée Nosbusch.
Reviews
“When a film begins with long shots, taken from a moving train, when the train is shown in full length and when it approaches the viewer threateningly (several times), that - mostly - has a meaning. This is not the case in Wolf Gremm's latest literary film adaptation, 'After Midnight'. This extended sequence can only have been shot out of the artistic will, that the end should point to the beginning: at the end of the film (and the novel) there is also a train ride [...] This novel, from the first-person perspective of the young Susanne Moder tells about how people react to the increasingly oppressive atmosphere in Germany in the thirties - how they give up. Wolf Gremm's film is also about this. But while the novel, in its laconic and mostly unaffected language, makes this anxiety understandable, reactions and actions of the film characters often remain opaque. And while the novel Susanne is an independent, but sometimes very helpless and self-doubting young girl, the film Susanne (Désirée Nosbusch) seems emphatically cheeky, rather superficial and in many scenes implausible. "
"Based on Sanne's story, the film shows an individual fate in the form of a melodrama during the National Socialist era - the confrontation between youthful innocence and an irrepressible urge for life with a rigid, inhuman system."
“A young woman gets caught up in the mills of the Nazi state and slowly learns to recognize the injustice of the system before finally fleeing abroad with her lover. A largely impersonal and superficial film located somewhere between the political grotesque and melodrama, which only partially succeeds in drawing the characters and illuminating the political situation. "
Web links
- After midnight in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- After midnight at filmportal.de
Individual evidence
- ↑ Der Spiegel, 14/1981, of March 30, 1981, p. 230
- ^ After midnight in the Lexicon of International Films