Scarabea - how much earth do humans need?
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| Original title | Scarabea - how much earth do humans need? |
| Country of production | Germany |
| original language | German |
| Publishing year | 1969 |
| length | 114 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 18 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Hans Jürgen Syberberg |
| script | Hans Jürgen Syberberg based on the novel How Much Earth Do People Need? (1885) by Leo Tolstoy |
| production | Hans Jürgen Syberberg |
| music | Eugene Thomass |
| camera | Petrus Schloemp |
| cut | Barbara Mondry |
| occupation | |
| |
Scarabea - how much earth do humans need? is a German film made in 1968, the first feature film direction by Hans Jürgen Syberberg . The main roles are occupied by Walter Buschhoff and Nicoletta Machiavelli .
action
The greedy German businessman GW Bach, used to success, is on vacation in Sardinia when he makes a bet with two inhabitants in the high mountains that seems all too tempting to him. He is promised to own as much land as he is able to avoid in a day. Bach believes he can do the deal of his life and runs off. He wanders and wanders, always keeping an eye on the prospect of donated large estates. A local, beautiful girl named Scarabea accompanies and photographs him on his hike. On this tour, the German has fantastic and impressive as well as depressing encounters and experiences, but also strange visions.
Questions of his own existence, his previous life, arise. Towards the end of his physical effort, his ambition diminishes, the greed fades in the face of deeper knowledge. Scarabea's blooming beauty is always the driving force behind his gain in knowledge. And yet Bach is ultimately unable to break off, simply to stop. While he is running for his hoped-for profit, the Sardinians are already preparing the big slaughter festival, which is to be organized on the occasion of the certain defeat of the German. So the businessman wins the bet and still has none of it. Because no sooner have he returned to the starting point than Bach collapses dead. So how much earth does a person need? Exactly as much as has to be dug for a hole in the ground to put someone in it for eternal rest.
Production notes
Scarabea - how much earth do humans need? was created in the spring of 1968 within seven weeks on site in Sardinia and was premiered on January 10, 1969. Due to various "disgusting scenes" (such as slaughtering and gutting animals), the film was only released by the FSK from the age of 18.
The Federal Ministry of the Interior in Bonn contributed a script bonus of 300,000 DM. The 24-year-old Italian Nicoletta Machiavelli , who had recently starred in the star-studded flower power and hippie film Candy , played as the eponymous Scarabea for a profit sharing.
Hans-Jürgen Tögel was Syberberg's assistant director, Bodo Schwope was production manager. For Rudolf Rhomberg this production meant his last film role; he died in early June 1968.
Reviews
“Very loosely based on Tolstoy, Syberberg wanted to present the story of a macabre bet in which farmers from Burgenland entangle a German hotelier: When trying to win all the land that he can circumnavigate on a day's march, he collapses at the finish line, dead from exhaustion . The award-winning material, however, as Syberberg noticed shortly before the start of shooting, was not full-length and Burgenland was not the right setting. So Syberberg relocated his feature film cosmos to Sardinia and enriched the plot with documentary décor: a folkloric slaughter and a television team demanding "Sex, Crime, Violence". "
“The 35-year-old director Syberberg is used to arguments: there was his filmic TV report 'Kortner rehearses Kabale und Liebe', and then came the portrait of Romy Schneider in Kitzbühel. (...) He was then awarded the Federal Film Prize for the production of 'Count Pocci'. (…) Syberberg, who did his doctorate on Dürrenmatt, took a subject from Tolstoy for his first feature film, relocated it to Sardinia, took only four actors and set off for the former bandit territory. People and customs play a role. The film will be macabre, the director suggests. (...) The images capture the connections that drive the main actor to ruin. Criminal threads between photographs and photographers have been a popular film motif since ' Blow Up ' . The face from Rome is pretty new: Nicoletta Machiavelli got the dramatic role because the actress originally intended was canceled. "
The following can be read in Films 1965–70: “Tolstoy's parable of the human being who pays for his greed for possession with death, in an imaginatively designed story of today. Located in the archaic landscape of Sardinia, it mixes reality and dream into expressive values that are sometimes fascinating, sometimes shockingly barbaric. "
In the lexicon of the international film it says: "A parable overloaded with archaic landscapes, mythical dream visions and shocking death metaphors, which experiments with methods of dramatic concentration and associative connections."
The Evangelische Film-Beobachter comes to the following conclusion: “Against the background of naive and gruesome Sardinian customs, the feature film debut of the 33-year-old Hans-Jürgen Syberberg turns out to be an average failure: The gap between claim and execution is difficult to overlook. From 18 possibly. "
Individual evidence
- ↑ Der Spiegel, 45/1968, p. 195
- ^ Films 1965/70. Handbook VIII of the Catholic film criticism. Volume 1. Cologne 1971, p. 268
- ↑ Scarabea - How much earth do humans need? In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed October 15, 2015 .
- ↑ Evangelical Press Association Munich, Review No. 28/1969
Web links
- "Dead on target". Background report on the shooting in Der Spiegel , issue 45/1968, from November 4, 1968
- Scarabea - how much earth do humans need? in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Scarabea - how much earth do humans need? at filmportal.de