Pelle the Conqueror
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | Pelle the Conqueror |
| Original title | Pelle Conquerors |
| Country of production | Denmark , Sweden |
| original language | Danish , Swedish |
| Publishing year | 1987 |
| length | 157 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 12 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Bille August |
| script | Bille August, Per Olov Enquist , Bjarne Reuter |
| production | Per Holst |
| music | Stefan Nilsson |
| camera | Jörgen Persson |
| cut | Janus Billeskov Jansen |
| occupation | |
| |
Pelle, the Conqueror (Original title: Pelle Erobreren ) is a feature film by the Danish director Bille August from 1987 . The drama is based on the novel cycle of the same name (1906–1910) by Martin Andersen Nexø and was produced by Per Holst Filmproduktion and Svensk Filmindustri (SF). It depicts the life of a Swedish father (played by Max von Sydow ) and his son Pelle ( Pelle Hvenegaard ) who emigrate to Denmark because of economic hardship, where they are degraded and exploited on a manor. The film premiered on December 25, 1987 in Sweden and received numerous awards, including the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival and the Oscar .
action
Around 1900, the fifty-year-old widower Lasse Karlsson and his eight-year-old son Pelle travel from impoverished Sweden to the Danish island of Bornholm , where their father promises a job as a farm worker for the local landowners and a heavenly life. However, he cannot find a job and in the end can only accept a poorly paid job as a groom on the stone yard of the rich landlord Kongstrup. Pelle has to work as a cattle herder, where he befriends the mentally handicapped boy Rud and learns that Kongstrup is his father.
The living conditions of the stingy Kongstrup's servants and maidservants are extremely harsh. Lasse and Pelle, for example, have to live in a shack in the hen house. They are also tormented by the sadistic apprentice Kongstrups, who enjoys humiliating his subordinates. Nevertheless, Lasse tries to offer his son the best possible life. He gives him a pocket knife for his birthday and surprises him with strawberries from a wild strawberry plant that he has brought from Tomelilla in Sweden and that is carefully cherished.
Pelle attends the village school with success, but is ridiculed and humiliated by his classmates as a foreigner. At the same time, Pelle has to realize that his father does not dare to rebel against the degrading working conditions and the authorities. Pelle befriends the servant Erik, who is strong and fearless. Erik tells the boy about his plans to leave Denmark in two years and to emigrate to America, where Pelle wants to join him.
Nils, the son of a supplier, and Anna, a maid on the Steinhof, have a secret relationship that is strictly rejected by Nils' father. When Anna becomes pregnant by Nils, Nils kills the newborn. Anna is arrested, Nils is killed in an emergency rescue operation.
On the occasion of degrading treatment, Erik openly rebels against the slavery-like conditions on the estate and threatens the landlord's brutal manager with his scythe. At that moment, however, a horse goes through, whereupon Erik is hit in the back of the head by the counterweight of the draw well, a heavy stone, and is henceforth mentally handicapped. He ekes out a miserable existence on the farm and is finally removed from the farm with an unclear goal.
Pelle's father befriends a seaman's wife, Madame Olsen, whose husband is lost at sea and who lives in a lonely cottage. Hopes for a marriage and a better life are dashed when boatswain Olsen unexpectedly returns. Then get drunk, is found by his horrified son and vows to get well soon. But since he has spent a night with Madame Olsen, Pelle is exposed to the ridicule of the entire school class.
On the sidelines of a rural festival, Kongstrup raped his own niece, Miss Sine. She is silent, but through a third party Mrs. Kongstrup learns what she castrated Kongstrup with the knife - also out of anger that Kongstrup impregnated several women in the area, but never gave his own the longed-for son.
After Pelle beat up the pastor's son because he mocked Pelle's father about the affair with Madame Olsen, Ms. Kongstrup, who sees the amiable Pelle as a substitute son, offers the Karlssons her help and considers appointing Pelle as an apprentice. But Pelle, who deeply hates the Steinhof, asks his father to leave the farm with him instead and look for a better life. Lasse initially agrees, but then has to admit that he is too old to start over and would rather stay at court despite the undignified circumstances. The two say goodbye, Pelle sets off alone into an uncertain future.
History of origin
The film is an adaptation of Martin Andersen Nexø's four-volume autobiographical novel cycle Pelle the Conqueror , which was published between 1906 and 1910. Nexø, who is considered Denmark's first and most important “working-class poet”, dedicated his work to Henrik Pontoppidan and described it as “a book about the proletarian - that is, about people themselves - who are naked, endowed only with health and appetite, in the wages of life goes ". It is seen as a proletarian alternative to Pontoppidan's work Hans im Glück (Lykke-Per, 1898–1904). The four volumes follow Pelle's development into adulthood. Since it seemed impossible to adapt the entire story, the scriptwriters Bille August, Per Olov Enquist and Bjarne Reuter focused on the protagonist's childhood and youth.
Carl Theodor Dreyer , Roman Polański and Bo Widerberg had tried in vain to film the novel. Until 1983 the film rights were with the relatives of the author and the GDR , to which Nexø had moved, before they were returned to Denmark. As a result, part of the interior shots were filmed in the DEFA studios in Potsdam-Babelsberg . Most of the filming took place on an estate near Copenhagen , where it was shot for about seven months. With production costs of over 30 million crowns, Pelle, the conqueror, is considered. as one of the most expensive films in Scandinavian cinema. A planned 50 million crown co-production with Canada failed because the story should be filmed in English.
August saw the film primarily as an emotional story between a lonely father and his son. “It is also a story about how people survive in an extremely cruel world. But I wanted to keep the political and social elements in the background. ”He deliberately conceived the father's character as the central character of the film and at the beginning of work on the script had already decided to entrust the role to Max von Sydow , to whom he was 25 side draft. Von Sydow described the script as captivating and accepted after he had been offered "fanatical, alienating and neurotic roles" according to his own statements. A year-long casting with 4000 applicants was held for the title role of young Pelle. The 13-year-old Copenhagen student Pelle Hvenegaard , whose mother had named him after the character in the novel, prevailed. Max von Sydow would later praise him for his maturity and described him as very patient during the filming.
Reviews
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The film opened in the Federal Republic of Germany on March 23, 1987. The reviews were mixed.
Karl-Eugen Hagmann ( film-dienst ) perceived an “almost old-fashioned” and, in a certain sense, naive film, which he attributed to the efforts to implement the novel as “an epic of conventional cinematography” and the obvious trust “the emotional worlds of the audience to achieve "related. The various other storylines, characters and motifs would “strive for a broad panorama of rural society in Denmark at the turn of the century”, but prove to be “drawn in a concise manner” and “often superficial and illustrative”. Although the film threatens to “gradually fall into standardized clichés due to superficial imagery”, the film would circumvent such “shallows”. Be borne with Pelle the Conqueror by his two lead actors, "the abgewinnen the father-son constellation human touching facets and their characters accurately outline". According to Hagmann, von Sydow embodies "the tragic and human facets of his character in a brilliant acting performance".
Die Zeit praised the achievements of Pelle Hvenegaard and Max von Sydow as “great”, but directing and camera only as “half-hearted”. The film tries to be children's story and moral image of the 19th century. But Pelle, the conqueror, breaks "because of his excessive exertion, the monumental intentions, the small, clean images". Longings, not realities, would form the basis of the film. The subplots were dismissed as “genre images” that “don't really make the film dark”, but give it “a fluctuating, shimmering brightness”. The theme of the film is "What makes male companionship, what binds them together and what divides them". The wealth of episodes would make the film "rather poorer, more fragmented, more fragmented". He has "no center for long stretches".
Der Spiegel found that the film had “the solid and somewhat old-fashioned virtues of a careful film adaptation”. Subplots would be "drastically dramatized", while Max von Sydow gave a "strong focus" as a father.
Reclam's film guide saw Pelle the Conqueror as "a prime example of powerful and haunting narrative cinema". The film would not portray “social injustice with sociological arguments” but “as a child's painful experience”. However, the film does not sink into resignation, but also depicts "happy children's games and above all the security that arises from the love between father and son". Optical design and excellent performance would be subordinate to the story inconspicuously and appropriately.
Vincent Canby ( The New York Times ) noted that the film would be more suitable for people who are immersed in a movie like "a long hot bath." August's directorial work is a "hauntingly reconstructed, meticulously detailed panorama of an unusual time [...], a place [...] and circumstance [...] in the course of the four seasons". Canby took it as a "scandal" that von Sydow was not honored with the actor's award at the Cannes Film Festival: "Von Sydow's performance is in a league of its own". It is "another high point in an unusual career" and is unlike anything that the American audience would have previously seen von Sydow. He compared Pelle Hvenegaard to the young Dickie Moore .
Roger Ebert ( Chicago Sun-Times ) described the film as "rich in happenings" and named the episode between Lasse and the sailor's wife as one of the most touching scenes in the film. The Oscar nomination that the actor should receive is "very well deserved". There is no such thing as a bad acting performance in film. Newcomer Pelle Hvenegaard would never go wrong and it was the character of Pelle, not that of Lasse, who made the center of the film.
Awards
Pelle the Conqueror has won over 20 international film and festival awards and was nominated for four more. In 1988, the film won the Guldbagge ( Best Film, Best Actor - Max von Sydow ), the Bodil ( Best Film and Actor Awards to von Sydow, Björn Granath and Karen Wegener ) and the Robert (including best film, best screenplay and Actor Awards to von Sydow and Granath) the most important Swedish and Danish film awards. In May of the same year, the film competed with, among others, Krzysztof Kieślowski A Short Film About Killing and Clint Eastwoods Bird in the competition at the 41st Cannes International Film Festival and won the festival's main prize with the Palme d'Or. Von Sydow received an honorable mention from the jury for his performance as a father.
In November 1988 Max von Sydow and Pelle Hvenegaard were awarded the first ever European Film Prize Felix , while the film and supporting actor Björn Granath were nominated. The film was also successfully received in the United States and received a Golden Globe Award and an Oscar for best foreign language film as a Danish contribution . Max von Sydow was the first and so far only Scandinavian actor to be nominated for the Academy Award in the Best Actor category.
continuation
In 2012 the Danish film producers Meta Louise Foldager and Kenneth Plummer announced a sequel based on the other parts of Martin Andersen Nexø's novel series. The director was no longer Bille August, but Per Fly . Max von Sydow's involvement also remained open. To date, this announced sequel has not been completed.
Web links
- Pelle the Conqueror in the Internet Movie Database (English)
Individual evidence
- ^ Company credits in the Internet Movie Database (accessed May 22, 2010).
- ↑ biogram. In: Kindlers Literature Lexicon. (Online database). Metzler, Stuttgart 2009, ISBN 978-3-476-04019-0 .
- ↑ Charlotte Svendstrup-Lund: Pelle Erobreren. In: Kindlers Literature Lexicon. (Online database). Metzler, Stuttgart 2009, ISBN 978-3-476-04019-0 .
- ↑ a b Pelle, the conqueror. In: The large TV feature film lexicon. (CD-ROM). Directmedia Publ., 2006, ISBN 3-89853-036-1 .
- ^ David Robinson: The power and the story: Cinema. In: The Times . June 22, 1989, No. 63427 (accessed via LexisNexis Wirtschaft ).
- ↑ a b c d Steve Lohr: How Three Plum Movie Roles Took Shape. In: The New York Times. December 18, 1988, Section 2, p. 1.
- ↑ a b Once upon a time in Denmark . In: The time . 24 Mar 1989, No. 13.
- ↑ a b rottentomatoes.com at Rotten Tomatoes , accessed December 8, 2014.
- ↑ Pelle, the Conqueror in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- ^ Criticism in film-dienst 06/1989 (accessed via Munzinger Online ).
- ↑ Butter on bread. ( Memento from July 15, 2012 in the web archive archive.today ) In: Der Spiegel . 12/1989, p. 229.
- ^ Dieter Krusche: Reclam's film guide . Reclam, Stuttgart 2008, ISBN 978-3-15-010676-1 , p. 552.
- ^ Vincent Canby : Film Festival: Von Sydow as a Father in "Pelle the Conqueror". In: The New York Times. September 30, 1988, Section C, p. 8.
- ^ Review of March 3, 1989 at rogerebert.suntimes.com (accessed on May 22, 2010).
- ^ Awards in the Internet Movie Database (accessed May 22, 2010).
- ↑ Matthias Born Grebe: matthiasborngrebe.de (accessed on 5 May 2012).