Traveling warrior

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Movie
Original title Traveling warrior
Country of production Switzerland
original language Swiss German
Publishing year 1981
length 195 minutes
Rod
Director Christian Schocher
script Christian Schocher
production Christian Schocher
music Charlatan quintet
camera Clemens Klopfenstein
cut Christian Schocher,
Franz Rickenbach
occupation

Traveling Warrior is a Swiss film directed by Christian Schocher . That with amateur actors twisted road movie was first broadcast on television in 1981, the theater premiere took place early 1982. The film shows a week in the life of a representative for cosmetic products while drawing on Homer's Odyssey and Ulysses by James Joyce leans.

action

"Wohninsel Webermühle", Kriegers home (photo from 2009)

The following representation of the plot follows the Director's Cut from 2008.

On a gray autumn morning, Krieger, a middle-aged man, leaves the “Webermühle residential island” housing estate in his Citroën CX . He goes to cosmetics and hairdressing salons to sell the products of the Blue Eye company, in particular an Eau de Cologne called Blue Dream , which comes with the slogan “This is how it smells this winter in Switzerland” (in the Swiss German original: “Eso tastes dä winter i dr Schwyz ») is touted. However, it does not meet with much approval. His route initially takes him via Olten to Basel . After calling his wife from the hotel room, he attends the Basel autumn fair , drinks in a pub and a dance hall, observing the night life that surrounds him more than attending it.

The next day, Krieger goes to the Alps. He lets another representative ride along, whose ticket has been taken away. In an interview with him, Krieger mentions that he was with the French Foreign Legion . After visiting a hairdressing salon in a tourist town in Graubünden (the boss says that Blue Eye's eyeshadow sells badly), they attend a local evening event by Spaniards with dance music. There was a scramble, almost a brawl, among some of those present; Krieger keeps out.

Warrior's morning shower and shave are shown extensively. He then travels on without the other representative, but now takes a hippie with a beard and a felt hat with him. He is initially silent, but Krieger soon makes homosexual advances, which Krieger rejects, pointing out that he is satisfied with his wife. Finally, Krieger throws him out of the car. After a trip through Lucerne , Krieger had a conversation with the operator of a hairdressing salon. The Basel-German speaking, smoking hairdresser asks him about his life and his relationship with his wife while they are drinking champagne . She criticizes Krieger for spending his time in bars and driving. He is always tired and always looks as if he needs a head wash when he comes to her - "you would like to sell me something, I would have something much better for you". Worried about his job, he stresses that he has to take care of someone - which his acquaintance answers by asking if he thinks he can take care of his wife by always leaving her to sit around alone in the skyscraper. In general, you stink "the asshole of this world". After Krieger has left them, he wanders around on foot for a while on the city streets at night.

A new day - Krieger sleeps in his car that he parked on the edge of a mountain road. A young woman passes by, he notices her and offers to take her to Tenna . After all, Krieger can spend the night on her parents' farm. The four of them eat Gschwellti and have a halting conversation at the table. Krieger seems to be suspicious of the father, who asks his daughter in Krieger's presence where she “picked him up”. Warrior gives her a bottle of perfume.

Krieger travels to Zurich , where he visits the Blue Eye headquarters . There he seems to be looking for someone or something, opening one office door after the other. While he is arguing with an employee in the corridor, a large blue-eye logo on a pane of glass is carried to another room, followed by a photographer and models. - Krieger goes out to the Zurich nightlife in Niederdorf . At a bar he starts talking to a middle-aged woman who is offering him sex; Whether he will accept it remains unclear, at least in the next scene he is sitting alone, smoking and drinking in front of a stage on which an Asian singer is performing Strangers in the Night . - Another bar. Krieger smokes and drinks. A young man in a leather jacket comes in, sits down at a table and begins to drum fast rhythms with his hands and feet. Krieger pays and leaves, but finds out in another bar that the young guy is back. - A disco. Warrior is dancing. The drummer is already back and accompanies the rhythm on a pipe. Krieger and the drummer named Jürgen begin to roam the city together and become friends. In a scene in the early morning Shopville , they are drunk and talk about their biographical background. Jürgen talks about his deaf stepfather, who had absolutely no understanding of music.

At the Blue Eye seat , Krieger throws an empty bottle against the facade. He puts the car keys in Jürgen's hand and says, "Take me home, boy". On the drive they sing Somebody Loves Me . The car disappears in the underground car park of the "Webermühle residential island".

background

The film was made in the autumn of 1979, was broadcast on ZDF on August 6, 1981 and first screened in the cinema on March 12, 1982. Shot in black and white on 16 mm film , the original version is 195 minutes long. Schocher's Director's Cut from 2008 is significantly shorter at 142 minutes. There are amateur actors ; The director noticed the lead actor Willy Ziegler at a regulars' table in Lucerne and "just played himself," says Schocher.

Christian Schocher describes the film in his exposé from 1978 as a “staged documentary film or a documentary feature film”. While the Odyssey forms the “red thread” for the film, in that its “stations and motifs are reinterpreted and reinterpreted for our country and our civilization”, a large part of the film also consists of documentary recordings showing places and landscapes in German-speaking Switzerland . The film was shot without written dialogue, without artificial light and only with a hand-held camera. The Manifesto Dogma 95 , in which Danish film directors made similar guidelines in 1995, triggered laughter at Schocher: " Klopfenstein and I have already developed this, we just didn't ring the bell".

Various unplanned scenes emerged, for example towards the end of the film, when Krieger and Jürgen were talking about music in the underground Shopville Passage. Suddenly a bearded man throws a large radio recorder out of a telephone booth with a swing. The device shatters on the floor, the man laboriously collects the remains and disappears again into the telephone booth. According to Klopfenstein, it was a coincidence: "We almost collapsed, nobody believes us that it was coincidence". Unused recordings show that the man had put the device down beforehand and played music to the people, "that was at five in the morning, they will have reacted angrily."

In 2015 the Director's Cut was released on DVD with German, French and English subtitles .

Motifs

In Schocher's exposé, correspondences from the Odyssey are named for various characters in the film . So Krieger's wife, who waits for him at home, is Penelope , the peasant girl in Graubünden represents Nausicaa , her father Alcinous , and the drummer Jürgen represents Telemachos , “who thinks that Krieger sees the warrior on a drinking tour as his own, freer reflection and declared to his son for one night ».

reception

Traveling warrior was already judged positively when he appeared. In 1982 Karsten Witte wrote in Die Zeit that the film was “of a creeping fascination”; at first one wonders where the journey should lead, but soon one is seduced and cannot "look enough at the richness of these images". Christian Schocher is "a pioneer who is reinventing the cinema, who mixes the magic with the myth". Harun Farocki concluded his review in the magazine Filmkritik by stating that the film was "entirely with this warrior"; «For all the previous disappointment, this is a lust for life and, once again, a cosmopolitan film».

In retrospect and on the occasion of the release of the Director's Cut, the film was also positively discussed. In a Weltwoche article on the 66th Locarno Film Festival (2013), Wolfram Knorr described the traveler warrior as a “masterpiece of form and fantasy about Switzerland” and as by far the best Swiss film, which, however, did not “encourage colleagues to make similar observations”.

In the lexicon of international film , Reisender Krieger is attested to be “superbly photographed”. The film tries to use the example of Krieger's life to raise awareness of the “alienation and inability to communicate in modern society”. The Lexicon Films on TV by Adolf Heinzlmeier and Berndt Schulz writes that it is a film "that precisely implements the ambiguity of the title".

The Basel pop duo Lexs and the director and producer Christoph Soltmannowski created a video clip for the song “30 Days and 30 Nights” in 2017, a homage to the film inspired by the character of the traveler warrior, which was filmed at a disused service station near Salleren on Lake Walen , not far away a real location.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ It is a development in Neuenhof AG , see: Fabian Furter: "Göhner comes". The large "Webermühle" estate of the general construction company Göhner AG . In: Baden New Years Papers . tape 85 , 2010, p. 108-122 , doi : 10.5169 / seals-324999 .
  2. ↑ Christian Schocher: Traveling Warrior - Director's Cut . In: Swiss Films . Retrieved September 23, 2015.
  3. ↑ a b c Traveling warrior . In: Lexicon of International Films . Retrieved October 16, 2015.
  4. ↑ Traveling warrior . In: Swiss Films . Retrieved September 23, 2015.
  5. ↑ Marc Krebs: From the «traveling warrior» and the dying cinema . In: day week . January 3, 2013. Retrieved October 6, 2015.
  6. ↑ a b c Christian Schocher: Traveling warrior. Exposé, supplement to the DVD release, Andromeda film 2015.
  7. ↑ Marcel Elsener: From someone who drew far in the tightness . In: WOZ . January 22, 2015. Retrieved October 5, 2015.
  8. ↑ a b Harun Farocki: Conversation with Clemens Klopfenstein . In: film review . Vol. 26, issue 5, no. 305 , May 1982, pp. 232 .
  9. ↑ Traveling warrior . Andromeda Film AG. Retrieved October 18, 2015.
  10. ↑ a b Karsten Witte: Being devious in desperation . In: The time . July 23, 1982. Retrieved October 5, 2015.
  11. ↑ Harun Farocki: Traveling Warrior . In: film review . Vol. 26, issue 5, no. 305 , May 1982, pp. 228 .
  12. ↑ Wolfram Knorr: It greets the cuckoo . In: Die Weltwoche . January 22, 2015. Retrieved October 5, 2015.
  13. ^ Adolf Heinzlmeier, Berndt Schulz: Lexicon Films on TV . 2., ext. Edition. Rasch and Röhring, Hamburg 1990, ISBN 3-89136-392-3 , p. 675 .
  14. ↑ The abandoned Walensee rest stop became the location for the film . In: Southeastern Switzerland . December 4, 2017. Retrieved December 27, 2017.