Not reconciled
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| Original title | Not reconciled or It only helps where there is violence (long title) |
| Country of production | Germany |
| original language | German |
| Publishing year | 1965 |
| length | 53 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 12 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Jean-Marie Straub |
| script | Danièle Huillet |
| production | Jean-Marie Straub, Danièle Huillet |
| music |
Béla Bartók (Sonata for two pianos and percussion instruments, 1st movement) Johann Sebastian Bach (Suite No. 2 in B flat minor BWV 1067: Overture) |
| camera | Wendelin Sachtler |
| cut | Jean-Marie Straub Danièle Huillet |
| occupation | |
and Johannes Buzalski , Paul Esser , Hartmut Kirchner , Max Willutzki , Rudolf Thome , Joe Hembus , Max Zihlmann | |
A German fiction film from 1965 by Jean-Marie Straub based on the novel Billard um 9:30 (1959) by Heinrich Böll is not reconciled .
action
The focus of the less than an hour-long story is the family of architects from Cologne, Fahmel. Their actions and non-action, their courage, cowardice and their flight from responsibility are sketched on the basis of three generations from 1907 over a period of around half a century.
The starting point is the 80th birthday of the head of the family Heinrich Fähmel. On this occasion, all of the remaining Fahmels meet in Cologne. In flashbacks, their history, their various failures as well as their entanglements are retold. In 1907 Heinrich was commissioned to build an abbey and had to go into the field during the First World War. These events hardly affected Heinrich, but left deep wounds in the soul of his wife. Both of their son Robert, who was involved in an alleged anti-fascist conspiracy as a teenager in the early days of National Socialism , then had to move to the Netherlands in 1934. Due to the close contact between his father and the brown rulers, Robert was able to return to the empire unscathed after only two years, but was drafted during World War II.
His friend and conspiracy buddy Schrella, however, did not get off so lightly. Twenty years later, at the time of the Federal Republic of Germany, the police are still wanted for this action in Nazi Germany. Shortly before the end of the war, Robert, of all people, found himself in the terrible situation of having to blow up the abbey built by father Heinrich for strategic reasons as a demolition expert in the Wehrmacht. In contrast, the informer Nettlinger, who once denounced Robert and Schrella with the brown government, had not suffered any damage in his life or soul. He always floated up like a fat pearl and is now also making a career in the Federal Republic: he became a minister.
Finally, on Heinrich's day of honor, a dramatic incident occurs: Robert's mother Johanna, the matriarch of the house who is now mentally confused due to aggressive attacks and depression, aims a pistol at Dr. Nettlinger to judge for his betrayal of son Robert. But this gets away with the horror ...
Production notes
Not reconciled or Not reconciled or Violence only helps where there is violence was created in 1964 and 1965 and was shown for the first time on July 4, 1965 at the Berlinale . The mass start was on February 11, 1966. It was first broadcast on television on August 25, 1969 on ARD .
prehistory
After the experimentally unusual Böll adaptation of Das Bread of the Early Years (1961) brought in "neither money nor prestige", Heinrich Böll and the publishing house Kiepenheuer & Witsch were more than cautious and skeptical when Straub started his film project in the summer of 1962 the famous writer approached. Jean-Marie Straub appeared with Böll with a rough draft for the “Billard” screenplay and convinced him of the project to make a film. On July 12, 1962, Böll wrote to Straub: “Do the thing” and on August 2, he affirmed: “From Dr. Witsch, I have now received a very friendly, yes, really good letter about you and your project. ”Straub shot sample material and thus met with less and less approval from the publisher and author. The publisher Witsch judged the film fragment as "amateurish and amateurish". Subsequently, the mood between the parties sank rapidly, because Straub had become arrogant and broken his word several times and ultimately threatened suicide several times if one did not submit to his artistic ideas. Still, it was shot, and the result should split the critics.
Controversy
The film was so controversial in its conception, design and presentation when it was first shown at the IFF in Berlin in 1965 that it earned "mockery and ridicule from film critics". The "about 250 people gathered in the cinema apparently did not recognize the film's finest hour: they laughed," as Der Spiegel reported. Heinrich Böll and his publisher Joseph Caspar were apparently so shocked by Straub's cinematic implementation that “there was a legal dispute that ended in a settlement.” Originally, both had requested that all copies of the film be destroyed. In a later view, however, numerous critics changed their minds and turned from sharp rejecters to "hymnal advocates". On the other hand, even after years of doing this Straub work, other opponents were literally unreconciled. For these critics, “the style principle that Straub has consistently implemented is a dead end. [...] Perhaps it would be appropriate to state that an experiment has succeeded in parts, that it could be made fruitful if one tried dispassionately to weigh the advantages and flaws of the film. "
Reviews
"Hair-raising amateurish."
“It starts with the fact that“ Not Reconciled ”is not a film adaptation of Böll's novel that respects the author of the original. Straub did not want to make a film based on Böll, but one about Germany and therefore made one about Böll's novel knowing that such a novel is as typical for a country as the primary reality to which it refers. And so Straub has not reworked the novel into a script that follows it, but broken it up into fragments, which he treats like documents. Straub has also reproduced the chronological order of these fragments, which was destroyed in the original, not to make them easier to understand, but only to show the fragility of such an order all the more clearly. (…) If the novel was a hermetically rounded whole, the film is pieced together from disparate: from narrative fragments that get into each other's enclosure. (...) And in doing this, Straub used a technique that is in a certain way related to Kluge: Like Kluge, he treats ideas and ideas like facts, like this one he identifies fictions as fictions and documents as documents and the fictions as documents on the Indicating the identical reality character of both, like Kluge, he finally succeeded in speaking about his ugly object in a language appropriate to him, of the destruction he describes in a destroyed language. "
“Straub was not interested in a linear film adaptation of the novel, rather he tried to use the means of the film to reproduce the essence of Böll's novel. (...) The film does not only contain an examination of the past, it is also an examination of the way its viewers come to terms with the past. "
“Straub tried to reduce the nested novel, rich in various details, to the essentials in his film, which is only a good 60 minutes long. What remains is the core of the novel, the thesis that there can be no reconciliation as long as guilt is not accepted. Straub has staged his film in such a way that the viewer is forced. To add plot elements, to paint out situations, to finish the film in one's own consciousness. Of course, this makes it difficult to understand, especially since Straub prefers an ascetic style of painting, uses lay people as actors and encourages them to use a thoroughly amateurish, monotonous way of speaking. "
“Idiosyncratic film adaptation of the novel" Billard at half past nine "by Heinrich Böll. (...) The film creates a depressing topic of the German past and present with extraordinary artistic means. The strict aesthetics of the filmmaker couple Straub / Huillet, trained in Brecht's theory of alienation, does not always make things easy for the viewer, but impresses with their consistency and originality. One of the most interesting works of "Young German Films". "
literature
- Frieda Grafe : Review of the film. In: film review . No. 111, March 1966. (Republished in: Schriften, Volume 4. Verlag Brinkmann & Bose, Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-922660-84-3 , pp. 82–87)
- Peter Nau : "analyzing description". In: On the Critique of Political Film. DuMont, Cologne 1978, ISBN 3-7701-1053-6 , pp. 103-140.
Web links
- “Billiards at eleven” on spiegel.de
- “Not reconciled” in: Cologne in Film
- Not reconciled in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Not reconciled at filmportal.de
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c d “Billard at eleven” in: Der Spiegel , 29/1965
- ↑ a b c d Reclams Filmführer, p. 433.
- ↑ Bucher's Encyclopedia of Films, p. 551.
- ^ Not reconciled in the Lexicon of International Films