Black gravel

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Movie
Original title Black gravel
Black gravel logo 001.svg
Country of production Germany
original language German
Publishing year 1961
length 117 minutes
Age rating FSK 16 or 12
Rod
Director Helmut Käutner
script Helmut Käutner,
Walter Ulbrich
production Universum-Film AG
music Bernhard Eichhorn
camera Heinz Pehlke
cut Klaus Dudenhöfer
occupation

Schwarzer Kies is a German film drama directed by Helmut Käutner . The black and white film premiered on April 13, 1961 at the EM Theater in Stuttgart .

action

A military air base for several thousand American soldiers is being set up near the small village of Sohnen in the Hunsrück . The locals look at them suspiciously, but recognize their economic potential. Many people earn money from the Americans: as operators of bars that were formerly barns, as prostitutes, as contractors for the air base. Robert Neidhardt, a haulage company, also wants to make money. That's why he doesn't shy away from the lucrative black market. At the airfield construction site, the supervisor Otto Krahne confirmed that he had delivered gravel even though he had sold the cargo elsewhere.

When Robert tries to help an American officer whose car has stopped on the road, he discovers that he is married to his former lover Inge. At first she doesn't want anything to do with him, but Robert remains persistent. He also knows that Inge's dog was killed on the construction site and pretends that the unsuspecting person has information about his disappearance. They meet on Robert's private property outside the village that no one else knows about.

The police are planning a raid on the street workers. Inge warns Robert and gets into the dump truck with him. Robert wants to dump the compromising load of gravel in the forest, causing a traffic accident. The couple he was friends with, Bill Rodgers, and his (recently) fiancée Anni, an East German visiting, were killed. Robert hides the two bodies on the construction site and dumps the load of gravel over them. Inge advises him to face the police, but they don't want to cause embarrassment that is difficult to explain.

The CIA , primarily in the person of the German-born investigator Moeller, is investigating the incident, but comes to the conclusion that the missing couple had fled to the GDR. Inge admits to her husband that she met her former lover, that he ran over Bill and Anni and brought the bodies to the airport construction site. Her husband doesn't care, because his construction site has just been examined by US Air Force inspectors and he doesn't want to get into any further, delaying trouble.

The police arrested Krahne, who was sold for sale. Robert wants to flee across the border to Luxembourg and Inge pleads with him to take her with him. He doesn't want to do this for her sake and drives off with his dump truck. Inge tries to jump on the vehicle and dies in the process. Robert lays his beloved on the construction site and - as before - tipped gravel over it. As the gravel begins to trickle down the slope, Robert jumps down to Inge and is buried with her.

History of origin

Pre-production and script

After the musical costume film Das Glas Wasser (1960), director Helmut Käutner planned to present “a slice of life” to the German present with his new film project. According to his own statements, he had resolved to “break through all German taboos”, “hard and direct, with erotic and brutal realities”. Accordingly, the script , written together with production manager Walter Ulbrich , initially bore the sensational title Skin on Skin. It was only later that the decision was made to use the title Kies, which was then changed to the final film title Schwarzer Kies .

production

The shooting took place from October 3 to December 20, 1960. Lautzenhausen served as the backdrop for the fictional village of Sohnen . The airfield recordings were made on the site of what was then Hahn Air Base . The interior shots were taken in the Ufa studio in Berlin-Tempelhof . The film architect Gabriel Pellon was responsible for the production design . The assistant took over Helmut Käutner wife Erica Balqué .

Schwarzer Kies was the last of several in-house productions made between 1958 and 1961 by the now privatized Universum-Film AG based in West Berlin .

music

Label of the single Fräulein Schmidt , 1961

The soundtrack was penned by Bernhard Eichhorn , who also composed the Dixieland hit Miss Schmidt (text: Helmut Käutner) , which can be heard in the film . The title, interpreted by Billy Sanders and the Roy Etzel sextet, appeared on a single on the Telefunken label in 1961 and was re-released on CD in 2001.

The location ("Bar Atlantic") today (2018)

Trivia

  • The main character's truck shown in the film is a Unic Verdon ( tipper ) with a payload of 11.8 tons.
  • The establishment shown in the film was actually called "Atlantic".
  • After a tangible argument with the farmer who was unable to work and who owned the location, the conversation in the car shown at the beginning had to be broken off for that day of shooting.

reception

publication

The Voluntary Self-Regulation of the Film Industry was black gravel on February 28, 1961 without a holiday release over 18 years.

After the premiere, which took place on April 13, 1961 in the EM Theater in Stuttgart , the Central Council of Jews in Germany filed for custody against the film and filed a criminal complaint against director Käutner, production manager Ulbrich and Ufa boss Theo Osterwind. Due to a scene in which a former concentration camp inmate is portrayed as a brothel keeper and insulted as " Saujud ", the then General Secretary of the Central Council, Hendrik van Dam , accused the film of anti-Semitic content. Käutner described the allegations as a misunderstanding, as he wanted to use the scene to warn of the flare-up of anti-Semitism. Although other Jewish organizations criticized van Dam for his actions and the public prosecutor's office in Düsseldorf announced that it would not investigate the matter of black gravel , the objectionable passage was removed from the film.

After the fourth test in 1990, the FSK approved the film from the age of 16. The unabridged premiere version was shown again for the first time in 2009 in the Zeughauskino of the German Historical Museum .

Reviews

Both at the box office and among contemporary film critics, Schwarzer Kies was unable to follow up on the renowned director's earlier successes.

Die Zeit described the film as “an average crime film with a boring police force.” Helmut Käutner's master hand was “only noticeable in a few places”. The direction is "effective, lush, thickly applied". The characters are "no people - except for two: Wolfgang Büttner as the cowardly accomplice of the gravel driver, and Anita Höfer as the little slut." "Very talented, but pressed into the template by the director" are Helmut Wildt and Ingmar Zeisberg . However, the cameraman Heinz Pehlke managed to take “some excellent milieu shots in the first quarter of the film”.

Der Spiegel criticized the film for the “all too action-packed story”. Director Käutner was "obviously trying" to "bring his film closer to the pessimistic severity and the gloomy cutting of certain American and French thrillers."

The “Prize for the worst performance by a well-known director”, awarded on the occasion of the 8th West German Short Film Festival in early 1962, went in equal parts to the Käutner films Black Gravel and Lieschen Müller's Dream . The jury “Prize of the Young Film Critics”, it was announced, could not have decided which of the two films was the worse.

The lexicon of international films judged: "Käutner's gloomy morality offers blatant clichés instead of critical approaches."

While the contemporary reviews were quite mixed, new perspectives on the qualities of this film can be found with time lag:

“Helmut Käutner's Schwarzer Kies (1961) is a unique mix of milieu study, romance film, worker drama, period piece and film noir - and casts a glimpse into a deeply divided country. (...) With Schwarzer Kies, Käutner has achieved the rare feat of making a film that knows how to captivate a perfectly constructed story and dramaturgy, as well as to provide an insight into a small world of its own, full of life and secrets, full charming characters and stories, own rules of living together and a grown history. German reality from 1961 and poetry shake hands in the common mission of finding the truth. "

- Oliver Nöding : Critic.de

digitalization

The Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Foundation digitized the film and presented this version in 4K DCP screening format as part of the Berlin International Film Festival 2017 ( Berlinale Classics series ).

literature

  • Jeanpaul Goergen: "Clinical time image in documentary form" The rediscovered premiere version of Helmut Käutner's SCHWARZER KIES from 1961. In: Filmblatt, 16th year, no. 45 summer 2011, ISSN  1433-2051 , pp. 91-105.
  • Ronny Loewy: BLACK GRAVEL (1960/61). In: Christoph Fuchs, Michael Töteberg (Hrsg.): Fredy Bockbein meets Mister Dynamit. Films at second glance, edition text + kritik, Munich 2007, pp. 171–175.

Web links

Footnotes

  1. Original version: 117 minutes for cinema projection (24 images / second), 112 minutes for television reproduction (25 images / second), length of film: 3193; Meters
    Abridged version: 112 minutes for cinema projection (24 images / second), 108 minutes for television playback (25 images / second), film length: 3069 meters
  2. Release certificate for black gravel . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry (PDF). Template: FSK / maintenance / type not set and Par. 1 longer than 4 characters
  3. Release certificate for black gravel . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry (PDF). Template: FSK / maintenance / type not set and Par. 1 longer than 4 characters
  4. a b c Käutner: A slice of life . In: Der Spiegel . No. 18 , 1961, p. 90-92 ( online ).
  5. Billy Sanders: I am not a handsome man. Bear Family Records . 2001. Order no. BCD 16495 AH
  6. Data image of the truck
  7. A conversation held personally by me, Alberich21, Chris Teuber , on September 8, 2018 with the farmer's son, who was born in 1953. The farmer is said to have been prevented from doing his important harvesting work because of the filming, and he was also prohibited from feeding his animals in the barn. The then seven-year-old son was also slapped in the face by a security guard from the film crew. All of this led to the temporary cancellation of filming for that autumn day. According to a further statement, the farmer is said to have harassed the security guard later on because of the mistreatment of his son.
  8. a b Käutner's "Slice of Life" . In: The time . No. 17 , 1961.
  9. ^ German Historical Museum: Zeughauskino: Rediscovered . September / October 2009
  10. Newer: Papas Kies . In: Der Spiegel . No. 10 , 1962, pp. 89-90 ( online ).
  11. ^ Film prices with a little malice . In: The time . No. 10 , 1962.
  12. Black gravel. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed March 2, 2017 .Template: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used 
  13. Review , Critic.de on December 19, 2017
  14. Press release at berlinale.de, (accessed on September 8, 2018).