Niklashauser Fart

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Movie
Original title Niklashauser Fart
Country of production Federal Republic of Germany
original language German
Publishing year 1970
length 86 minutes
Age rating FSK 12
Rod
Director Rainer Werner Fassbinder , Michael Fengler
script Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Michael Fengler
production Janus Film and Television under the direction of Klaus Hellwig
music Peer Raben , Amon Düül II
camera Dietrich Lohmann
cut Thea Eymèsz , Franz Walsch alias Rainer Werner Fassbinder
occupation

Niklashauser Fart is a film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder from 1970 . The film was Fassbinder's first television production, commissioned by WDR . It was shot in just 20 days in May 1970. The budget was 550,000 German marks. The film was first shown on October 26, 1970 in the television game on Monday series in the ARD program.

The story is based on a historical incident in the Franconian town of Niklashausen , where in 1476 the herdsman Hans Böhm , known as “Pauker von Niklashausen”, preached social equality and is said to have gathered 70,000 followers within three months. At the instigation of the Würzburg bishop he was arrested as a heretic and burned at the stake .

Around 1490, under the title Die nicklas hausser fart (from Middle High German vart : travel, pilgrimage ), the couple rhymed saying by the Baucker zcu nyckelshaussen was published by an author from the environment of the Würzburg bishop.

action

Three friends, the farmer Antonio, a "black monk" in a black leather jacket and Johanna consider what means they can use to get the people to revolt when they only have three or four people available to influence the people. They find that agitation, training and their fighting example are needed, but theatrical effects are also allowed if this makes their agitation more effective. They meet Hans, the herdsman, who beats the drum and preaches against indifference. It is not hidden from them that the preacher has a very special charisma that makes people listen to him.

A wealthy woman named Margaret is fascinated and attracted to the preacher. She lets him and his friends live with her, curls up and finally kills her terminally ill husband to please them.

The preacher says the Virgin Mary gave him a sign that people should no longer come to terms with social injustice. The Church gives the preacher a counter sermon: Every revolutionary uprising brings disturbances of the equilibrium; one should not drive away an evil with an even greater one. Humanism is when the poor choose peacefully from what is offered to them by the rich. The preacher, however, does not allow himself to be dissuaded from his ideas and calls for expropriation, the establishment of action committees and cooperative organization. Some peasants follow him to his song of the “ blood red flag ”; Other farmers also come to Niklashausen when they hear that a land distribution is to take place there. After some time of agitation, the friends noticed that the followers did not understand the message of the popular uprising, so they instructed Johanna to speak to the people as the Virgin Mary. But even that is of no use. Although they find that they are getting lost, the preacher believes the time has come to call for an armed uprising.

A citizen of Niklashaus, however , slandered the preacher at the decadent bishop. He has him arrested by four uniformed men, two of whom are dressed as German police officers and two as American military police. When arrested at a campsite, they cause a massacre . The preacher, Antonio and the black monk are hanging on crosses with pyre piled under them for execution. The crosses are in the middle of a car junkyard, to which the bishop drove in a luxury limousine to give the order to be cremated. A follower of the preacher shoots the policemen guarding from the background.

A new member of the group reads a text in which the world revolution is proclaimed and the title of the song by Ton Steine ​​Scherben is quoted “ Break what breaks you ”. Then you see the group in a loss-making firefight in front of a burning house. The voice of the black monk finally says, apparently based on the story of Fidel Castro : someone wanted to attack the tyranny directly with others. Many died when the police barracks were attacked in the capital. He didn't know yet that there are some ways to fight. When he came back on a boat with over 80 others after three years, almost all of them fell on landing. But he and his comrades had learned from their mistakes. They went to the mountains. Two years later the revolution triumphed.

background

Fassbinder mostly lets the actors appear in static settings, as in the theater. The figures are partly historical, partly dressed in the style of the 70s. The language is also a mixture of ancient choice of words and agitprop of the left movement of the time .

“Someone comes along and wants people to change their lousy circumstances. He wants to call on people to do this. But first of all, he has to get her to even listen to him and believe him. So he is forced to work with means that people are familiar with. Eventually he got her on his side, but with yesterday's resources. And they cannot do anything with what he tells them now about the bright future of tomorrow. It is part of their lousy situation that they can no longer imagine another. Hans Böhm fails because he tries to establish the enlightenment with counter-enlightenment techniques. But how else could he have done his job? We don't want to make a historical film. We want to show how and why the revolution fails. In doing so, we have to consciously destroy any historical limitation that would restrict us. The viewer must not think: Oh yes, that happened in 1476. Such a thought would calm him down, but he should be worried while watching. He should concentrate entirely on what the people are doing in the film, not what they are wearing. "

- Rainer Werner Fassbinder : in television plays on West German radio

When asked in the interview whether he could afford not to meet the expectations placed on him and whether he would feel free to do something completely unexpected, Fassbinder replied in 1980: “I think so, yes. For example, I already got that when I first worked on TV ... and it's lucky that it was there. That was the Niklashauser Fart at the time , which was planned as a historical film and where I simply said to myself four weeks before production started: I have absolutely no desire to make a purely historical film, I want something ... something like that Make collage mixed forms narration. I just did it and convinced the broadcaster that I wanted to do it that way. Since then I have actually stuck to getting things through [...]. "

The then WDR dramaturge Peter Märtesheimer replied to the interview question as to whether there were any unforeseen reactions to the film at the time: “In the film, extremely 'questionable' topics were addressed. Difficult to understand Latin American reflections on the world revolution were cited, and there was a rumor that Niklashauser Fart was the open call to class struggle. That's why I had to be held accountable to the employer representatives. [...] "

Peer Raben replied to the interview question whether his view of 15 years of Fassbinder's film production has changed over the years: “It is still valid, perhaps precisely because it was arrested in its time. I would even say that the only valid document that exists about the attitude towards life in the late sixties is the Niklashauser Fart , even if the film is not set in the sixties, but in some German Middle Ages. "

Reviews

“Fassbinder lets the temporal be temporal. The reason for this is that the film was made in a phase of the so-called ' student movement ', in which, on the one hand, the young filmmakers decided not to make any explicitly political films, and, on the other hand, within the left-wing movement, revolutionary, resolute violence Groups formed, including the first forerunners of the RAF , who wanted to eliminate the existing conditions, albeit in different ways. Fassbinder intervenes in this debate - as he did later in The Third Generation or Mother Küster's Journey to Heaven - with this film, albeit from his own distance to all developments in the field of the extreme left. […] The film is more like a mixture of a play, classic tragedy and - an intellectual walk. In several scenes the revolutionaries talk about their intentions and how these - the expropriation of the rich, the creation of common property etc. - can be realized and how, above all, the common people can be won over. This mostly happens on walks through woods and meadows. In other scenes the revolutionaries proclaim their intentions head-on to the audience (and the people), in rhymes, songs or speeches. On a third level of action, action is taken, so to speak. […] Today, Niklashauser Fart is 'only' a kind of contemporary document, part of the self-portrayal of a part of the left that split up, disappeared in a few years, poured out into terrorism or the march dared through the institutions , from which in the end the Greens emerged . In relation to Fassbinder's work, however, the film stands in a homogeneous continuum and has therefore been more or less forgotten, wrongly. "

- Ulrich Behrens, Follow-me-now.de

"A film collage about the revolution and its necessary failure, a mixture of Godard and Glauber Rocha , current and historical material."

- Michael Töteberg, monograph, 2002

“With its collage-like structure, the film reflects the tendency towards dialectical cinema and represents a further attempt to break with the conventional narrative structures of cinema. RWF itself did not want to transport the viewer into his temporally distant film world without consequences, but rather to create a political parallel to the self-reflection about the student movement . "

- 40 years ago: RWFs Die Niklashauser Fart , Rainer Werner Fassbinder Foundation, 2010.

“Fassbinder's latest work - the color film NIKLASHAUSER FART produced for WDR - is now for the first time about overcoming this hopelessness: that is, about the revolution. In an old chronicle he found the story of a peasant rebel who preached the abolition of property and the fair distribution of property in streets and squares in the 15th century until he was finally burned as a heretic at the behest of the bishop. Of course, Fassbinder is not concerned with historical authenticity . The individual stages of his submission are only an occasion for him to show all the possibilities of revolutionary work in historical non-simultaneity and anachronistic tableaux. The rebelling Hans Böhm of the Chronicle (Michael König) was assigned the representatives of today's liberation movements from the beginning : a Black Panther and believer Rochas Antonio das Mortes. They roam the villages to gather a crowd for the day of retribution prophesied by the Virgin Mary. You agitate in front of Bavarian baroque churches or in contemporary stone quarries and ask the question: "Why does one work that another can have the pleasure?" They explain the basic concepts of Marxist economic theory in Karl Valentin's diction . You will learn to read using a method used by the revolutionary priests of Latin America . Between old German chants and socialist battle songs , in the church of yesterday and on the garbage dumps of today, a total topography of the revolution emerges. A revolution, of course, which manifests itself above all in its culture - or rather subculture -: the myths and martyrs, the Bible sayings and red flags, the Internationale and the Beatrhythms - and especially the quotations from revolutionary films from Godard to Glauber Rocha give the revolutionaries Fassbinder's an aura of unreality. The side of the rulers is identified by the same means: the agony of the bourgeoisie with a sultry psychodrama in which a frustrated woman stabs her silent and paralyzed husband to death on the stairs in front of her house (also a quote from ANTONIO DAS MORTES), and the Impotence of the clerical nobility with flavourful images that show the decadent bishop in a rococo castle, how he, surrounded by his boyfriends and mistresses , enjoys the exotic exhalation of a peasant. The confrontation between these two cultures reached its climax with the execution of Hans Böhm: Golgotha , the place of the skull, is a monstrous car cemetery, where the revolutionaries are crucified and burned, where the bishop in regalia gets out of the Mercedes . Fassbinder has united the symbols of oppression in a bombastic tableau: brutal violence as well as rape through religion and consumption. Only the armed insurrection, the world social revolution, can destroy this firmly established system of rule. While the chronicle of the revolutionary Hans Böhm comes to an end, it begins with the words "Break what breaks you!" on the streets and in the backyards of the " world civil war ". Despite all the organization, there is also something anarchistic about it: the revolutionaries fighting now resemble the rebels in the woods around Paris in Godard's Weekend . In Fassbinder's attempt to contribute to the aesthetics of revolutionary cinema, a successful, between the poetry is probably subculture of all time and the buzzwords of the revolution is moved agitprop -Chronik emerged. But the alarm that he reached with his earlier films may no longer materialize. Dealing with the medium of film and its revolutionary representatives is all too perfect, the arbitrariness of the juxtaposition of reality and cinema experience gives the film something of the smoothness of easily digestible artifacts. "

- Wolfgang Ruf, TV + Film, 1970

“The Niklashauser Fart [...] has the function of a thesis film. It is precisely because of its immense contradictions and breaks that it still seems very lively and at the same time appears like a missing link within Fassbinder's work biography. [...]

The Niklashauser Fart has become a highly eclectic film, a patchwork of costumes and backdrops from different centuries, a collage of slogans and psalms , rock rhythms and chorales . Hans Böhm usually appears enraptured, completely inspired by his supposed mission. In his immediate personal environment, the sense of mission splits up into many individual interests, experiences interpretations and reversals. Böhm's companion Johanna tries to bring him back to earthly life, wants a "normal" partnership, but then accepts her role. For the wealthy citizen Margarethe, who opens her house to the leadership of the rebels, moments of strong sexual ecstasy mix with social engagement. The strangest thing is the role that Fassbinder wrote himself. He gives the "Black Monk", a brooder who moves in his modern everyday clothing, out of place between the historical furnishing elements, who partly inspires the event, partly comments on it or even disturbs it. In this figure the design principle of the film, which was trained on Bertolt Brecht, is formulated. By taking over the function of the choir from the Attic drama, repeating and questioning theses, Fassbinder repeatedly refers to the laboratory within which the action takes place. Because of course it is not about the authentic evocation of a lost epoch or the identification with the characters acting in it, but about the here and now. To speak with Walter Benjamin in relation to Brecht, Fassbinder gives "not states again, rather he discovers them. The discovery of the states takes place by means of the interruption of processes" ( experiments on Brecht ).

So the interruption remains the most conspicuous of the stylistic devices used in Niklashauser Fart . The extremely precise, floating camera work by Dietrich Lohmann and the consistently pretentious artificial language creates a basis that ensures that the film retains a certain formal unity. Fassbinder interrupts the interruption himself, suddenly adding inserts from other levels of reality. For example, a relatively long improvisation scene with the Munich avant-garde band Amon Düül II , assembled out of nowhere, is very nice ; or the sequence in which Fassbinder is suddenly no longer the "Black Monk", but only Fassbinder, the filmmaker, who practices a monologue with Hanna Schygulla that can be seen and heard a few minutes later in a highly stylized form on the screen gets. Here the film exposes its elementary means, revealing a glimpse of the Schnürboden and backstage. This is also a purpose-related deception within the deception, because as a viewer (trained through the process) one has long known about the staging character of this scene as well. Another means of shifting and multiplying perspective is the massive use of visual and textual quotations. A mostly silent companion in the immediate vicinity of the Prophet bears the name Antonio, which was taken from the filmic revolutionary parable "Antonio das Mortes" (1968) by the Brazilian Glauber Rocha , who was admired by Fassbinder . Not only passages from the Bible are read out, but also sentences by the liberation theologian Camillo Torres or the Black Panther theorist Eldridge Cleaver . Here there is a reference to Jean-Luc Godard's One plus One ( 1968 ), in which texts by Cleaver had already been proclaimed. One plus One also quotes the crucifixion of Hans Böhm in a car cemetery . It is no coincidence that Lohmann's slow horizontal sequences are reminiscent of those of Raoul Coutard in Week End ( 1967 ) or later of Armand Marcos in Tout va bien ( 1972 ). Never again was Fassbinder so close to Godard in his work as in Niklashauser Fart , both thematically and methodically. Anything but an epigone, he needed this temporary closeness to work his way through to his own artistic identity. "

- Claus Löser, film service, 2005

music

The then popular group Amon Düül II appeared in the film and presented one of their songs.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. a b Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werkschau Programm, pp. 20/21, Ed. Rainer Werner Fassbinder Foundation , Berlin, 1992
  2. ^ H. Strobach: The Niklashaus drive. In: Journal of History. Volume 23, 1975, pp. 191-197.
  3. ^ KA Barack: Hans Böhm and the pilgrimage to Niklashausen in 1476. In: Archives of the Historical Association of Lower Franconia and Aschaffenburg. Volume 14, Issue 3, 1858, pp. 1–108.
  4. ^ Klaus Arnold , in: author's lexicon . Volume VI, Col. 1037.
  5. ^ Imagination and Money , Interview by Peter W. Jansen for Südwestfunk Baden-Baden, broadcast protocol, January 5, 1980; Pp. 459–468 in: Fassbinder on Fassbinder , Robert Fischer [Hrsg.], Verlag der Autor, Frankfurt, 2004
  6. Interview with Peter Märthesheimer, p. 126 in: The whole normal chaos , conversations about Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Henschel Verlag, Berlin, 1995, ISBN 3-89487-227-6
  7. Interview with Peer Raben, p. 77 in: The whole normal chaos , conversations about Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Henschel Verlag, Berlin, 1995, ISBN 3-89487-227-6
  8. a b quoted from Filmzentrale.de , first published on Follow-me-now.de
  9. ^ Michael Töteberg: Rainer Werner Fassbinder, monograph, Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, Reinbek near Hamburg, 2002, ISBN 3-499-50458-8
  10. 40 years ago: RWFs Die Niklashauser Fart - historical film and contemporary political criticism , Rainer Werner Fassbinder Foundation (ed.), October 26, 2010, Berlin
  11. Wolfgang Ruf, Fernsehen + Film, October 1970, quoted from Basisfilm.de
  12. Claus Löser, film-dienst, No. 12/2005, quoted from CinOmat.kim-info.de