Rudolf Thome

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Rudolf Thome (center) with Esther Zimmering and Josef Schnelle at the film talk about Ins Blaue , Festival of German Films , 2013

Rudolf Thome (born November 14, 1939 in Wallau (Lahn) , Hesse) is a German director . Influenced primarily by the Nouvelle Vague and Howard Hawks   , Thome developed his own narrative style. Superficially “simple and radical” at the same time, his films seem “often weightless and light”. At the center of his films are love relationships that are told in a gently humorous way. His later feature films experience an additional liveliness through dialogical improvisations .

Life

Thome is the son of a bookseller and grew up in a rural area. After the early death of his mother, he attended two boarding schools, most recently the Evangelical boarding school in Gaienhofen .

Munich-Schwabing

He studied German , philosophy and history from 1960 at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn and then at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich . While still a student he began a doctoral thesis on the novel Sun and Moon (1962) by Albert Paris Gütersloh , which he no longer completed. The first short films were made in Munich from 1965, the first feature film in 1968. Thome had also worked as a film critic since 1962 , primarily for the Süddeutsche Zeitung , film review and later for the Berliner Tagesspiegel . In 1965, together with Klaus Lemke and Max Zihlmann, he founded the film production company Alexandra-Film , named after the Canadian actress Alexandra Stewart , with whom Zihlmann was in love. In the same year he also became managing director of the Munich Film Critics Club. In 1965, Rudolf Thome, Klaus Lemke, Max Zihlmann, Peter Nestler as well as Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet formed an informal Munich group that signed a “Second Oberhausen Manifesto ”. However, it was not published and therefore primarily served to formulate their self-image. The reason for this was, among other things, the exclusion of their films by the “Oberhausen people” and their “ nepotism ”.

“(W) e made [...] a joint leaflet, a kind of new Oberhausen manifesto. That was of course directed against the established Oberhausen residents, against their demand for a socially relevant film in which we only saw a fashionable infusion of the old German problematic film of the 1950s. We wanted a movie theater that looked like the Hawks and Godard films . A cinema that is fun. A cinema that was simple and radical. "

- Rudolf Thome, 1980.

With his feature film Rote Sonne (1970) he met the lifestyle of the 1968 generation. Rote Sonne is a "homage to the American gangster film" as film noir , which is told with "irony, lightness and wit". Uschi Obermaier , later a member of Kommune 1 , made her second film appearance here after her acting debut in Detektiven (1968). Over the years, the film gained more and more recognition.

Berlin-Kreuzberg

Since his long-time screenwriter Max Zihlmann did not want to move with Thome from Schwabing to West Berlin in 1973 , Thome developed the stylistic device of dialogical improvisation out of this emergency, to which he has remained faithful ever since. In the 1970s, he temporarily worked as a loan officer for a building society and for the Arsenal program cinema . In 1977 he founded his current production company Moana-Film , which often worked with the ARD production company Degeto . Moana (1926) is also the title of a classic documentary about people living in the South Seas on Samoa and Thome's first film production for his new company ( Description of an Island , 1978) also played on a South Sea atoll called Ureparapara , but this time a documentary feature film about ethnologists. He later confessed to the extraordinary importance of this film experiment in this place of longing, which he had realized with his former partner, Cynthia Beatt.

Thome has been writing his scripts on the Internet since 1999, which means he posts his notes on the Internet, for which he sets himself a deadline of 28 days each time. In his feature film Venus im Netz or Venus.de (2000) he turned this public approach into a film plot . From system without shadow he also used one of the first German directors the computer as a film (1983) on sujet . In October 2003, Thome started the Moana Diary , a blog with pictures and video clips, which some readers like Beat Presser describe as a “ total work of art ”.

Movie style

Thome is one of the few German directors of his generation who regularly shoot movies, albeit on the fringes of the film industry. The Parisian film magazine Cahiers du cinéma , of which he used to be a regular reader, described him in 1980 as the most important unknown German director . His favorite actors include Hanns Zischler , Johannes Herrschmann , Adriana Altaras , Sabine Bach and Hannelore Elsner .

Thome has applied since 1980 as an unobtrusive portraitist of love relationships and relationship problems of the educated middle class , mainly on location in and around Berlin play. Women take on sovereign and self-confident roles in his films. "His women are always superior to men because of their sense of reality and their pragmatic behavior", says director Goggo Gensch, who also describes Thome as a "director of women". A frequently recurring subject are science fiction motifs such as time travelers and visits from extraterrestrials as in Supergirl - The Girl from the Stars , The Sun Goddess , The Philosopher and Baby Tiger Stripe Waiting for Tarzan . Thome's style was often compared with that of Éric Rohmer , but Thome refused, because Rohmer had already familiarized his actors with the film material six months before shooting began.

Degeto

In 2011 Degeto stopped funding Thome's films. The film critic Rüdiger Suchsland puts this process in context with the general lack of interest in auteur films among state and private financiers. The “Thome case” proves that “German cinema is in crisis”. The auteur cinema is disappearing and “fewer and fewer German films have been shown at international film festivals in recent years.” The film critic Hanns-Georg Rodek points out that Degeto's Thome boycott could not have any economic reasons, as Thome's films usually earned their costs had. Rodek also indicates that with the new Degeto director Christine Strobl , a daughter of Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble , the funding stop was motivated by cultural policy.

In the spring of 2016 Thome gave many film roles, props, scripts, costumes and posters as premature legacy the German Film Museum in Frankfurt am Main.

Private life

Rudolf Thome was married three times, he has three sons and the daughter Joya, who also works as a director. In 2011 he added that there were “probably seven important women in my life”. He lives in Berlin-Kreuzberg and alternately on an old farm in Niendorf ( Ihlow ) in southern Brandenburg .

Filmography (selection)

Awards

literature

Documentaries
  • Rudolf Thome: The magical realist. (Alternative title: Love at first sight. Rudolf Thome's cinema. ) Conversation, Germany, 1991, 21 min., Script and director: Norbert Grob , production: ARD , first broadcast: January 5, 1992 on ARD, online video by moanafilm , part 2.
  • ... what I may be best at ... Rudolf Thome's cinema. Documentary, Federal Republic of Germany, 1983, 43:30 min., Script and direction: Stefan Dutt and Peter Hornung, production: Saarländischer Rundfunk , online video by moanafilm ( part 2 to part 5 ).

Web links

Commons : Rudolf Thome  - collection of images, videos and audio files

items

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Rudolf Thome at filmportal.de - biography
  2. ↑ a b c d Dinara Maglakelidze: Interview with Rudolf Thome. In: National Identities in West German and Georgian Authors' Films , p. 221.
  3. ↑ a b Ulrich Kriest: Ethnographer of the inland. The mystery of life: passages through Rudolf Thome's films. ( Memento from November 23, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) In: film-dienst , 2004.
  4. ↑ a b c Goggo Gensch: Radically simple - radically good. About the films of the still far too unknown Rudolf Thome. In: Friday , August 5, 2014.
  5. ^ Rudolf Thome: Diary entry October 7, 2015. In: moana.de .
  6. ↑ a b c Biography of Rudolf Thome on moanafilm .
  7. ^ Rudolf Thome in conversation with Karlheinz Oplustil and Gudrun Max in Berlin, January 17, 2009. In: moana.de .
  8. ^ Rudolf Thome at filmportal.de
  9. ^ Rudolf Thome: Sort of Autobiography (1980). In: moana.de , printed as: That's Utopia: The Cinema of My Dreams (1979) , in: Eric Rentschler (ed.), West German Filmmakers on Film: Visions and Voices , Holmes & Meier, New York 1988, ISBN 0 -8419-0984-9 , pp. 52-53.
  10. ↑ Retrospective: Munich Group. In: International Short Film Festival Hamburg 2008 (IKFF).
  11. ^ Rudolf Thome: Survival in defeats. In: Films - New and Old from the Cinema , No. 1, January / February 1980, quoted in: Ulrich Kriest: Ethnograf des Inlands. The mystery of life: passages through Rudolf Thome's films. ( Memento from February 26, 2013 in the web archive archive.today ). In: film-dienst , 2004.
  12. ↑ Revelations of love. Rudolf Thome celebrates his 70th birthday on November 14th, 2009. In: arthaus , November 13, 2009, accessed on October 29, 2016.
  13. ↑ Ariane Heimbach: "I'm not someone who wants to be in power." In: the daily newspaper of January 13, 2011, interview.
  14. ↑ Film reviews of «Description of an Island». ( Memento of February 17, 2008 in the Internet Archive ). In: moana.de .
    Summary: Description of an island. In: filmportal.de , June 14, 2016.
  15. ↑ Rudolf Thome: Diary entry August 2, 2014. In: moana.de : “This film has gotten stuck in my soul more than any other that I've made.”
    Rudolf Thome: Diary entries March 27, 2015ff. In: moana.de , with production     images .
  16. ↑ Moana scripts on moana.de
  17. ^ Rudolf Thome: Moana - Diaries. In: moana.de , May 9, 2016, accessed on September 17, 2016.
  18. ^ Rudolf Thome: Diary entry January 30, 2014. In: moana.de .
  19. ↑ Press release: Rudolf Thome on his 70th birthday: Four television premieres and eight classics by the author filmmaker in November 2009 in the first. In: Das Erste , October 9, 2009.
  20. ↑ a b Silvia Hallensleben: The sun goddess. In: epd Film , 1994, No. 1, review.
  21. ↑ Bodo Morshäuser : Rudolf Thome wrote German film history with Rote Sonne . His new films Tiger Stripe Baby Waiting for Tarzan and Just Married are showing in the cinema. In: tip , 1998, No. 19, interview with Thome.
  22. ^ Rüdiger Suchsland : State of affairs in German film. It lacks international relevance. In: SWR , February 2, 2016.
  23. ↑ Hanns-Georg Rodek : This is the greatest director nobody knows. In: Die Welt , September 18, 2016.
  24. ^ Rudolf Thome: Diary entries April 5-14 , 2016. In: moana.de .
  25. ↑ Moana - Diaries on Thome's Blog
  26. ↑ Reviews: Love at first sight. In: Moana-Film / Prometheus , April 15, 1999.
  27. ↑ Paradiso - Seven days with seven women. In: two thousand and one .
  28. ↑ The nominations for the German Film Critics Prize 2018 have been confirmed . Article dated January 23, 2019, accessed January 23, 2019.
  29. ↑ Ekkehard Knörer : Serpil Turhan's «Flowers Everywhere». In: Cargo , September 15, 2016, review.
personal data
SURNAME Thome, Rudolf
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German director
DATE OF BIRTH November 14, 1939
PLACE OF BIRTH Wallau / Lahn (today Biedenkopf), Hesse