Palermo shoot
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | Palermo shoot |
| Original title | Palermo shoot |
| Country of production | Germany , Italy |
| original language |
English German Italian |
| Publishing year | 2008 |
| length | 108 minutes |
| Age rating |
FSK 12 JMK 12 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Wim Wenders |
| script |
Norman Ohler Wim Wenders |
| production | Gian-Piero Ringel |
| music | Irmin Schmidt |
| camera | Franz Lustig |
| cut |
Peter Przygodda Oli Weiss Mirko Scheel |
| occupation | |
| |
Palermo Shooting is a feature film by German director Wim Wenders from 2008. The film, which was shot mainly in Düsseldorf , Palermo and Gangi , deals with the transience of being . The world premiere was on May 24, 2008 at the 61st Cannes Film Festival , where the production ran in the competition for the Palme d'Or, but received no awards. The cinema release in Germany was on November 20, 2008.
In the psychodrama, Wenders tells the story of a photographer who is professionally at the height of success, but has lost access to reality because of sheer fear of life and restlessness. In search of the meaning of life, he goes to Palermo, where, through the encounter with death, as a personified figure, he receives a new perspective on life. The music, which the main character constantly accompanies through earphones, is elementary for the film.
The film is dedicated to Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni , whom Wenders sees as role models.
action
Dusseldorf
Finn is an internationally successful photographer. He has rented a spacious studio in a building in Düsseldorf's Medienhafen . Several employees work for him, organize his exhibitions and follow his instructions in the digital processing of his photographs. A manager and a consultant coordinate his appointments. His pictures are soon to be exhibited in São Paulo in a museum that has an entire floor available for it.
Prof. Finn Gilbert also lectures at the art academy. He argues violently with a student because she does not share his opinion that photographs only get a statement through digital processing.
Finn carries his PDA - mobile phone , digital camera and MP3 player in one - around with him all the time and listens to music whenever he can. In addition, he always carries a camera with him and “shoots” everything around him.
His ex-wife does not stick to the agreements after the separation and continues to live in his house. That's why Finn spends most of the nights in the studio, at parties or in the manager's office. Finn doesn't calm down. He considers sleep a lost time. He gets lost in thought, dreams a lot about dwindling time and death, especially because his mother, to whom he was very attached, passed away only recently. The fear of water that his mother passed on to him as a child has also become a problem for Finn.
Against the advice of his manager, Finn also devotes himself to commercial fashion photography. After a hectic fashion shoot in Düsseldorf harbor, he examines the recordings with Milla . They show the heavily pregnant star model in utopian scenes on a hovercraft and in the midst of steelworkers. However, Milla wants realistic, authentic photos and suggests another shoot.
After an evening at “Club 3001”, Finn drives his Austin Healey over a bridge over the Rhine back to the studio. He listens to music through earphones and holds the camera for a panorama shot from the roof of the convertible when, at the last second, he manages to avoid a wrong-way driver. He spontaneously shoots a photo of the man's face looking at him from the back seat of the passing vehicle. Shocked by this, he parks his car on the side of the road shortly afterwards, takes his bag and goes to the nearest bar. With the images of a tragically ending accident in mind, Finn chooses the title Some Kinda Love from The Velvet Underground in the jukebox . He then sees Lou Reed standing in front of him, who is reading the text to him and asking him what he is most afraid of, whether that is death?
Finn continues walking through the night streets and parks of Düsseldorf. In a dream he walks through the catacombs of Palermo , carrying his mother on her back, who covers his eyes. With the thought “How do you know that you are dead when you no longer dream or only dream?” He wakes up in a tree in the floodplain of the Rhine at dawn. A flock of sheep grazes below him, tended by a banker in a dark suit, hat and gaiters who has “hired” the shepherd job to pass the time while he watches the stock market on his cell phone. Finn engages in a conversation with the banker about the speed of time. A cargo ship named “Palermo” passes by on the Rhine . The name comes from the Greek "Panormos" and means "all port", as the banker explains to him.
Palermo
The next day, Finn looks at pictures of Palermo , where he has never been before, orders a friend's private jet at short notice and flies to the Sicilian city with a handful of employees and Milla . In an apartment in an old building he takes artistic nudes of the pregnant woman. Then he says goodbye to Milla and orders his team to dismantle everything and fly home. He himself stays in Palermo and first walks through the old town, listening to music and barely noticing the actual noises. Also at the Quattro Canti , where his nightmares caught up with him again at the fountain in front of the Castellamare - an arrow just missed him, but it vanished into thin air.
In the evening at the hotel, Finn gets drunk and sinks crying in self-pity. The next day he just missed an arrow at the Cortile della Morte when he followed a figure in a loden coat with his camera. Shortly afterwards he meets the Palermo-based photographer Letizia Battaglia , who tells him that there are many dead people in Palermo that she photographs in order to “honor them, to remember them so that they are not forgotten”. A little later, when Finn on the roof of a house above the city points the camera at a bird of prey circling above him, he is shot again. This time the arrow hits his camera, which flies in a high arc through the air, lands on the ground and is now defective.
In the old town, Finn meets the attractive Flavia, who works as a restorer in the museum of the Palazzo Abatellis on the fresco Il Trionfo della Morte (The Triumph of Death) . When he tells her the story of the “madman in the gray coat” at the port, he thinks he sees the archer on a construction crane and at the same time falls backwards into the port basin, hit on the shoulder. Finn goes down and with him his camera. This almost seems to be the end for Finn, because he cannot swim. However, Flavia provides first aid and brings him back to life. The PDA that Finn lost before falling into the water can also save Flavia.
Flavia offers Finn a room in her apartment and listens to him. She too had an encounter with death when her partner fell from the roof while working as a restorer and died. After a romantic evening in Flavia's apartment, Finn gets up early and explores the old town again. Without headphones he perceives life, apparently liberated. When the market stalls open, he buys fruit, talks to traders in a relaxed manner and plays football with children in the alleys.
When, after returning to Flavia's apartment, he enlarges a photo from his PDA on the computer, on which the archer's face can be clearly seen in an open window on the top floor of one of the palaces on the Quattro Canti, Finn leaves the apartment in a hurry. From one of the fountains he looks at the Monte di Pietà palace . In his mind he follows himself on his way through the building, sees himself as the shooter whose arrow hits Finn, who is sitting at the well, directly in the larynx. As he rushes into the building, Flavia appears and persuades him to leave the city to show him a very special place.
Gangi
The two take the Vespa to Gangi, where Flavia spent a happy childhood with her grandmother. At dusk she leads Finn into the unoccupied house where her grandmother worked as a doctor until shortly before her death. The electricity is switched off, there is only a gas lamp. Soon the two of them are sitting holding hands in the bed, which a little later is outside. Flavia shyly speaks of her "fear of Eros and his arrows" and a kiss ensues.
After Flavia fell asleep, Finn climbs down the basement stairs with the lantern in hand, opens a door and is on the gallery of a huge archive. Opposite him is the mysterious man in the gray coat, who introduces himself as death, friend, companion and guardian of time. "Death is an arrow from the future that flies towards you," he says and also accuses Finn of having "shot" at him first. There should be no photo of him, he says.
Finn tries to escape using the endless spiral staircase. His cry for help echoes through the gigantic room supported by infinitely high pillars. But the figure of death keeps catching up with him. Death laments the increasing work he has and complains about the bad image that people have of him. He is the connecting door and not a dead end. Nobody is happy until they are dead. From Finn's sympathetic question “Can I do something for you?” Death is impressed and gives him a fatherly hug. Death then gives Finn his camera back, asking him to portray him in such a way that they can recognize him. Death smiles brightly into the camera and Finn pulls the trigger. The bald old man's face turns into the face of Finn's mother during the shot.
With the thought "For the first time in a long time it's just now" Finn wakes up next to Flavia in the final scene and smiles happily.
Emergence
In response to a request from the city of Palermo in 2000, Wim Wenders considered making a film about the Sicilian metropolis. He wanted to emphasize the character of the city, which he describes as "grotesque and noisy on the one hand, great and unstable on the other, deeply injured but impossible to kill". It was definitely not supposed to be a movie about the mafia. The fresco “Il Trionfo della Morte” (The Triumph of Death) from the 15th century in the Palazzo Abatellis was the basis for the framework story . The wall painting shows death as an apocalyptic horseman who kills his victims with arrows.
Wenders created a biography for the role of the main character and wrote a letter to his staff about how he envisioned the film's framework. However, he did not set the script, it was to emerge in the course of the shooting. The spoken texts were created in collaboration with the actors.
music
One of the main themes of the film should be rock music , which, in Wenders' opinion, deals with the search for meaning much more courageously and deeply than the feature film has done in recent decades. According to Wim Wenders
“[…] The music was the basis of all considerations from the start, it was there before there was even a script. It was ultimately the reason why I wanted to invent this figure of the photographer Finn and this story in general. "
Track list
- Dream (Song for Finn) , Grinderman
- Busy Hope , Get Well Soon
- The Rip , Portishead
- Flavia's subject , Irmin Schmidt
- Freedom Hangs Like Heaven , Iron & Wine
- It's a departure , John Roderick
- The Black Light , Calexico
- Some Kinda Love , The Velvet Underground
- Beds in the East , Thom
- Trumpet 2 Fresco , Irmin Schmidt
- Postcards From Italy , Beirut
- Quello Che Non Ho , Fabrizio De André
- We all Lose one Another , Jason Collet
- Torn and Brayed , Bonnie "Prince" Billy & Matt Sweeney
- My Impropriety , Monta
- Let us know , Sibylle Baier
- Cello 1, with Flavia , Irmin Schmidt
- Quannu Moru , Rosa Balistreri
- Song for Frank , Grinderman
- Mysteries , Beth Gibbons
- Good Friday , Get Well Soon
Locations
Wim Wenders grew up in Düsseldorf and went to school. Nevertheless, Palermo Shooting is the first feature film that he filmed largely on original locations in Düsseldorf.
The location for the recordings of Finn's workshop and his argument with the student was the Zollverein cube in Essen , which is now being used by the “Design Zentrum Nordrhein-Westfalen e. V. "is used. The “fashion shoot” with Milla Jovovich was recorded in the industrial pool of the Zollverein colliery . The pub scene originated in Neuss "Em Schwatte Päd", the oldest inn on the Lower Rhine. Lou Reed, however, never set foot in the corner bar in Neuss. His appearance was shot in front of a green screen in the studio.
In Sicily, apart from in the old town of Palermo, the film was shot in the 1,000 meter high village of Gangi. The dialogue with death at the end of the film was filmed in the large auditorium of the Archivio Storico Comunale di Palermo , the city archive of Palermo. A room in which files from almost 2000 years of history are stored.
actor
For the role of Finn, Wenders had intended Campino , the front man of the band Die Toten Hosen , from the start. Wenders had filmed the music video for the song Why I'm not fed up with the album Immortal for her . The text of the song, which comes from Campino's pen, shows parallels to the character Finn.
Flavia should look like the Madonna Annunziata (Mary of the Annunciation) in the oil painting by Antonello da Messina , which also hangs in the Abatellis Museum. After a casting , the choice fell on Giovanna Mezzogiorno .
Hollywood star Dennis Hopper , who embodies death, worked with Wenders in 1977 in The American Friend .
Sebastian Blomberg plays Finn's manager, Inga Busch his swimming instructor, Jana Pallaske a film student and Udo Samel the sheep-tending banker.
Lou Reed , Milla Jovovich and Letizia Battaglia can be seen in guest roles . The members of the band Die Toten Hosen also appear as extras : Andreas von Holst , Andreas Meurer , Michael Breitkopf and Vom Ritchie as well as their manager Jochen Hülder and the photographer Peter Lindbergh .
Cut scenes
The first version of Palermo Shooting was finished shortly before the premiere in Cannes and was 126 minutes long. A few weeks later, Wenders' team screened the film again in Cologne in front of 250 people as a test. Then Wenders cut the film by 18 minutes. The conversation with a homeless person, played by Wolfgang Michael , who had appropriated the Düsseldorfer Platt especially for this , contained too many redundancies about the subsequent pub scene with Lou Reed. Most of the cut, however, was in the middle of the film, when Finn met former mayor Leoluca Orlando in the old town of Palermo , who anticipated the message of the film with his philosophical words about the soul of his city. Furthermore, recordings of a cello concerto by Giovanni Sollima in the Palazzo Butera , a party scene and the presentation of the song Ghost Dance at a live concert by Patti Smith were canceled.
Reviews
Constantin Magnis from Cicero sees an allegorical Saul-Paulus fable in Palermo Shooting , which deals with the delicate seriousness of Goethe's time with the last questions and answers them in a very orthodox way.
The film combines “great music with enchanting images - and a penchant for the roughly crafted mystery play” , says Wolfgang Höbel in the mirror and praises “the filmmaker's art, that he has a rigid face like that of the filmmaker, which is always shown a thousand times with the same Blaff expression Toten Hosen singer Campino can seem interesting and mysterious and alive again, like watching it practically for the first time. " Lars-Olav Beier , however, complained that " Wenders' reflection on appearance and reality, "come very pretentious about life and death was , and the "stilted dialogue and lanky movements of the main actor" don't really want to go together.
Rüdiger Suchsland describes Palermo Shooting as a “ morbid meditation on death” in which a German artist is also at the center, “who is tormented by life weariness and the premonition of death, travels to Italy and there first finds love and then meets death” in his review at Telepolis , referring to the film Death in Venice based on a novella by Thomas Mann . He describes Wenders 'work as a “senior cinema” , which shows “old cars, old cameras, old houses, old men” , “and Wenders' pictures all look at least 30 years old” and as a “babble film” with a poorly formulated esoteric “ Swelling ” .
The lexicon of international film recognizes Palermo Shooting as a “metaphysical drop-out fairy tale with an exquisite soundtrack and excellent camera work, which, however, involuntarily caricatures the existential pathos of the main character. The pseudophilosophical dialogues about the sense of life and death seem just as strenuous as the reflections on the existence and appearance of photography. "
The music press also found words of praise for the film music. In the Musikexpress, for example, it is said that this is “a torrent to the mill of all those who have been chalking Wim Wenders for years, that he cannot tell any stories and can only fill his canted and meaningful pictures with life if he has a proper song on the soundtrack, which sets the rhythm. "
Awards
The film editors Peter Przygodda , Mirko Scheel and Oli Weiss received a nomination for the German Film Prize in 2009 .
Web links
- Palermo Shooting in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Film profile on the official website of the Cannes Film Festival (English)
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b Certificate of Release for Palermo Shooting . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry, September 2008 (PDF; test number: 115 218 K).
- ↑ Age rating for Palermo Shooting . Youth Media Commission .
- ^ A b Wolfgang Höbel: Montée Hovercraft in the new Wim Wenders film 'Palermo Shooting'. (No longer available online.) Montée Teambuilding, April 8, 2010, archived from the original on November 2, 2013 ; accessed on October 31, 2013 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ a b c d Double DVD Palermo Shooting with accompanying information about the shooting, a PDF file and the documentary Shooting Palermo by Hella Wenders . 88697 38267 9.
- ↑ Palermo Shooting (soundtrack) , City Slang (Universal), 2008.
- ↑ Holger Lodahl, Dagmar Haas-Pilwat: Wim Wenders celebrates with his 500 friends . Article from April 18, 2015 in the portal rp-online.de , accessed on September 3, 2015
- ↑ Ralf Krämer: Wim Wenders: As a photographer, I am not at all convinced of digital technology. Planet Interview, November 25, 2008, accessed October 31, 2013 .
- ↑ Von Beier, Lars-Olav: The Sicilian Friend. Der Spiegel, December 31, 2007, accessed October 31, 2013 .
- ↑ Constantin Magnis: The creed of Wim Wenders. (No longer available online.) Cicero , December 19, 2008, archived from the original on June 5, 2014 ; accessed on October 31, 2013 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Wim Wenders' 'Palermo Shooting' ( Memento from December 24, 2008 in the Internet Archive )
- ^ Lars-Olav Beier : Cannes diary: A ship will come. Spiegel Online, May 24, 2008, accessed October 31, 2013 .
- ^ Rüdiger Suchsland: Boos and laughter for Wim Wenders. Telepolis , May 24, 2008, accessed October 31, 2013 .
- ↑ Palermo Shooting. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed March 2, 2017 .
- ↑ Tomasso Schultze: Wim Wenders remains true to himself. Everyone else is amazed. In: Musikexpress . No. 12 , 2008, p. 94 .
- ↑ German Film Prize: An overview of the nominations. Die Welt , March 13, 2009, accessed October 31, 2013 .
