Summer Guests (1976)
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| Original title | Summer guests |
| Country of production | Germany |
| original language | German |
| Publishing year | 1976 |
| length | 115 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 12 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Peter Stein |
| script |
Botho Strauss Peter Stein (collaboration) |
| production | Regina Ziegler |
| music | Peter Fischer |
| camera | Michael Ballhaus |
| cut | Siegrun hunter |
| occupation | |
| |
Sommergäste is a German feature film by Peter Stein , made in 1975 and released in 1976 , based on a play (1904) by Maxim Gorki . Stein cast this cinematic implementation of one of his productions previously shown at the Schaubühne am Halleschen Ufer with his then ensemble stars Bruno Ganz , Otto Sander , Edith Clever and Jutta Lampe in the leading roles.
action
In tsarist Russia shortly after the turn of the century. Location: A summer dacha in the country in the middle of a forest. Thirteen holidaymakers meet there, all representatives of the middle and upper classes. These include a doctor, a writer, an engineer, a former manufacturer, a widowed doctor and a wife of an unscrupulous lawyer who is suffering from her unfulfilled, childless life. Everyone has worked their way up, has advanced socially, or has married well. In their saturation, these summer guests no longer feel comfortable in their own skin - they are wealthy citizens, but they are deeply dissatisfied. One of them says: “We are summer guests in our country. We don't belong anywhere. We don't do anything. We just talk an awful lot. "
In the course of history one discusses and laments accordingly, debates and laments all the time. Many of the summer guests do not know what to do with their lives, torment themselves with remorse and constantly interrupt each other with accusations, self-accusations and sentimentalities. The mood is becoming more and more irritable, and in their bourgeois complacency it gradually dawns on those present that serious social upheavals are imminent, in which egocentrics like them will no longer have a place. In the end, it is mainly the women who break out of their sluggish life; some leave their husbands to give new meaning to their lives.
Production notes
Sommergäste was created in mid-1975 on Pfaueninsel in Berlin. The world premiere took place on January 29, 1976, the mass start was February 6, 1976. In the GDR, the film was shown for the first time on March 12, 1977 in the Berlin cinema Studio Camera at Oranienburger Strasse 54.
Stein's staging of summer guests at the Schaubühne proved to be an unusual success; it has been shown almost 150 times since its premiere in December 1974.
Reviews
“(...) For this reason alone, Stein's" summer guests "are far removed from the bitter, lazy and tepid efforts that German filmmakers like to offer in the cinema. His film is a powerful little masterpiece of international standing and with incomparable acting qualities. For him, acting means "the greatest possible development of body and psyche", means "chasing foreign experiences and sensations through your own body". This is conveyed in the "summer guests", in which "we", according to the leading actress Edith Clever, "also brought our own lack of freedom and longings", often downright violent, although it is a "pure talk-about film". The highly literary processes often take place in the faces and dialogues with action film intensity. "
“Peter Stein's staging of Maxim Gorki's“ Summer Guests ”at the Berlin Schaubühne on Halleschen Ufer has meanwhile become legendary. Stein, his dramaturge Botho Strauss and the ensemble are enthusiastic about the film, they also work consciously with cinematic means on stage. The actors have become the most important potential actors in the new German film. All of this raised expectations for the group's first film, the "Summer Guests" (originally planned as a film anyway), very high. The result is ambivalent and was rated very differently. "
“A vacation society in Tsarist Russia recognizes in agonizing arguments and self-revelations the signals of a coming upheaval and its own worthlessness for the new era. An artful film adaptation of the Gorki play based on Stein's famous Berlin Schaubühnen "production. A worth seeing description of the preliminary stages of social change with a subliminal reference to current moods."
Web links
- Summer guests in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Summer guests at filmportal.de
- “Zeit” talk with Peter Stein
Individual evidence
- ↑ Neues Deutschland, March 4, 1977, p. 8
- ↑ Der Spiegel of February 2, 1976, p. 138
- ↑ Summer guests in the Lexicon of International Films