Stone (film)
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| Original title | stone |
| Country of production | Germany |
| original language | German |
| Publishing year | 1991 |
| length | 109 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 16 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Egon Günther |
| script |
Helga Schütz Egon Günther |
| production | DEFA , KAG "Red Circle" |
| music |
Johannes Brahms Henry Purcell Karl-Ernst Sasse |
| camera | Erich Gusko |
| cut | Monika Schindler |
| occupation | |
| |
Stein is a German DEFA film drama directed by Egon Günther in 1991.
action
In 1968, the theater actor Ernst Stein left the stage during a rehearsal for William Shakespeare's King Lear in protest against the German invasion of the Czechoslovakia and retired to his villa in Wilhelmsruh , where he has lived isolated between madness and reality for 20 years. His house has become a retreat for young people and children from the neighborhood who look after him and thus prevent the old man from being admitted to a nursing home or a psychiatric hospital. Stein lets her go, makes hours of phone calls to a nonexistent friend in Italy and has not opened any letters since 1968. Over time, he grows particularly fond of the 20-year-old Sara, who keeps protecting Ernst Stein. It is she who calms down the troubled Ernst after he had refused entry to his house for two deserted Red Army soldiers .
The late summer of 1989 begins and with it slowly the upheaval in the country. Sara takes part in protest actions in Berlin-Mitte and thus leaves Ernst Stein in his villa in the dark again and again. Both make a pact: if they haven't seen each other for ten hours, they start looking for the other. However, Stein has lost his understanding of time, he does not understand the changes, because after 20 years he has even forgotten that Berlin is divided by a wall . He tries to write his memoirs with the help of the neighbor girl Laura, but cannot put a meaningful sentence on paper.
Sara comes by irregularly, is mostly on the run from the People's Police , only asks briefly about Ernst's condition and leaves again. Others take care of him, including the girls Laura, Josi and Änne and the teenagers Maik, Sven and Adrian. They also visit him in the hospital when he collapses on a trip to see an acquaintance - in his mind a trip to Italy. Stein will soon be back in his villa and the youngsters are shoving the coal into his cellar for the winter. Sara, on the other hand, changes her friends regularly and plays with her feelings for the seriousness she believes she loves. When there is a jealous argument between Sara and Laura, Sara Ernst leaves her Berlin address and leaves. Ernst wants to go downtown and look for her, but Adrian finds him on the street and brings him back to the villa. Stein collapses and is taken care of by Laura and the others. Sven and Maik also discover two canisters of gasoline in the attic, which they fill with water as a precaution. Ernst Stein's second attempt to get to the city center succeeds. However, he tries in vain to find Sara and is eventually placed against the wall in a police station. He sees young protesters harassed and threatened with death by the police.
Later he is back in his villa. He tries to pour the gasoline over himself and light himself, but the canisters only contain water. The young people bring him back, but Ernst Stein continues to long for death. He learns from the girl Josi that the wall has fallen and a little later has a seizure. Sara calls and accuses him of not looking for her. If he had, she would have come to him forever. He can't answer. In the evening, ideas of Rome mix with his current life. The next morning, Ernst Stein died of heart failure, as Laura announced to the other young people. Ernst Stein meanwhile begins his journey into the afterlife - in Rome, with the two rejected Red Army soldiers as embodied guilty conscience at his side.
production
Stein was shot from August 28 to November 1, 1990 in Potsdam , Berlin and Rome . The film premiered on September 19, 1991 at the Berlin Filmbühne on Steinplatz . It was Egon Günther's first film at DEFA after Ursula from 1978. Günther had wanted to write the script back in 1986, which DEFA rejected at the time. After the fall of the Wall, current references were added to the script: "The script was rewritten, made more fitting, and some things no longer needed to be kept secret," said Rolf Ludwig during the filming.
The following can be heard in the film:
- Johannes Brahms: Alto Rhapsody; sung by Annelies Burmeister
- Henry Purcell: King Arthur; sung by Rosemary Hardy , Maurice Bevan and Paul Elliott
- Karl-Ernst Sasse: Serenade for Karla
criticism
The criticism saw Egon Günther's "perhaps the most personal film in Stein , in which he settles accounts with the German past in a poetically exciting way." Film, but could also be timeless “simply a film about the aging of a man.” Frank-Burkhard Habel particularly praised the portrayal of Rolf Ludwig, who wore the film: He “holds the stone between irony and age wisdom, profound drudgery and deeper Despair. Fears and longings of an era are bundled in it ”.
For the lexicon of international films , Stein was “a tough piece of coming to terms with the past , marked by pain and anger, and sometimes lewd and intrusive. At most interesting as a document of a troubled emotional state, but not appropriately processed artistically. "
Bärbel Dalichow (* 1953) wrote that Egon Günther created “a symbol for the rare refuges of self-preservation in a society of controlled communities” with stone . "He tells the true fairy tale of defensive and fragile niches in which people treated each other more cautiously, precisely because the environment was not friendly to individualists." Although the film also contains some platitudes, it captures “the mixture of feelings of melancholy, longing for life and shards of hope that accompanied the disintegration and implosion of the GDR. With this, Stein stands out far above the languor of many post-turnaround films. "
Awards
At the International Film Festival in Viareggio, Rolf Ludwig was awarded the Federico Fellini Prize for best actor in 1991.
The German Film and Media Assessment (FBW) awarded the film the rating “particularly valuable”.
literature
- Stone . In: F.-B. Habel: The great lexicon of DEFA feature films . Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf, Berlin 2000, ISBN 3-89602-349-7 , pp. 582-583.
Web links
- Stone in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Stein at filmportal.de
- Stein at the DEFA Foundation
Individual evidence
- ↑ Quoted from Axel Geiss: Stein . In: Filmspiegel , No. 3, 1991.
- ↑ Stone . In: F.-B. Habel: The great lexicon of DEFA feature films . Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf, Berlin 2000, p. 582.
- ↑ Stone . In: film-dienst , No. 19, 1991.
- ^ Heinz Kersten: A post-GDR film . In: Friday , September 27, 1991.
- ^ Frank-Burkhard Habel: A film for Ludwig . In: Märkische Allgemeine , October 4, 1991.
- ↑ Stone. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed August 7, 2018 .
- ^ Ralf Schenk (Red.), Filmmuseum Potsdam (Hrsg.): The second life of the film city Babelsberg. DEFA feature films 1946–1992. Henschel, Berlin 1994, p. 335.