The Boss of It All

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Movie
German title The Boss of It All
Original title Directors for the hele
Country of production Denmark
original language Danish
Publishing year 2006
length 99 minutes
Age rating FSK 12
Rod
Director Lars from Trier
script Lars from Trier
production Meta Louise Foldager ,
Peter Aalbæk Jensen ,
Vibeke Windeløv
camera Claus Rosenløv Jensen
cut Molly Marlene Stensgård
occupation

The Boss of It All is the distribution title of the German dubbed version of the Danish feature film Direktøren for det hele from 2006. Lars von Trier was responsible for the direction and screenplay of the comedy. She addresses power structures in the business world, makes fun of radical theater theories and national peculiarities of the Danes as well as their relations with Iceland . In addition, self-referential thoughts about the relationship of a film director to his works are reflected in the plot. Von Trier had developed a system especially for this film in which the camera settings and cuts were partially determined by a computer. The result is a visual style that seems rough and imperfect compared to conventional film aesthetics. The film was perceived by the critics as a side work of Triers; The camera and editing concept, which just repeats the shaky camera of the Dogma 95 films, was mostly displeasing . The film was only moderately successful commercially.

action

Ravn is the owner of a small Danish IT company. To his employees he pretends to be the deputy of the "Direktøren for det hele" he invented, the head of it all, who lives in the USA. So the conflict-averse Ravn, who is popular with the workforce as a cuddly bear, can shift unpopular decisions on to his "boss". This includes the planned sale of the company soon, including the termination of most employees. Because the buyer, the Icelandic and Danish hater Finnur, wants to close the deal with the “right” owner and not with the deputy Ravn, Ravn hires the unemployed actor Kristoffer for the performance and gives him power of attorney . But due to a mishap, the employees also get to see the "boss" after the first negotiation.

Ravn cannot avoid expanding Kristoffer's role: He is supposed to be present at the company for a week. The actor sees his assignment as an artistic one and plays the role according to the theater theory of the (fictional) Antonio Stavros Gambini he admires, the author of absurd dramas such as “City without Chimneys” and “The Hanged Cat”, who coined the phrase “The theater begins where the theater ends. ”Kristoffer is taciturn at meetings with the employees, because he has no idea about the business. Soon the HR manager Lise sees through him and urges him to have traffic on the desk because she doubts the "boss" 's earlier allusions to being gay. As it turns out, Ravn has long been influencing individual employees with personal emails from the "boss". He even made a marriage proposal to Heidi A., which Kristoffer now affirms. Kristoffer's behavior endangers Ravn's plans, who have to bring his straw man back on track at meetings on "neutral ground". Kristoffer's ex-wife Kisser, who represents Finnur as a lawyer, also knows about the game. After Kristoffer has informed the workforce about his plans for the company, he does not endure their anger for long and invents a “boss of the whole thing”. Immediately he is as popular as Ravn. He invites you to a company outing, where you eat in an expensive restaurant until Ravn rebukes people for squandering the money of the "chief of the chief of the whole".

At the last meeting with the Icelandic investor Finnur, who is interested in buying, Kristoffer gives a pathetic speech that moves Ravn so much that he reveals his identity in front of the employees and renounces the sale. He asks Kristoffer to sign the resignation of the power of attorney. But the actor is reluctant to come to an end that does not do justice to his character. He builds dramatic tension and suspends the potential sale of the company. His character barely decides not to sell. Finnur curses angrily and finds the event as absurd as a Gambini drama: apart from Kristoffer, he is the only one who has ever heard of Gambini, which Kristoffer is so impressed with that he signs the sale to the Icelander with his power of attorney. The employees have to vacate the offices.

Production and distribution

From Dancer in the Dark (2000) to Dogville and Manderlay to Antichrist and Melancholia (2011), Lars von Trier has made feature films with international cast in which the leading role was assigned to a woman. During this period, The Boss of It All occupies a special position, because the two main protagonists are male and the actors Danish, apart from two supporting actors, the French and von-Trier-Habitué Jean-Marc Barr and the Icelandic Friðrik Þór Friðriksson . He is a director himself and as such is the central figure of Icelandic film and was involved as a co-producer on Dancer in the Dark . Five weeks were available for the recordings. According to von Trier, the film was “made quickly” and working with a small team was relaxing for him. The employees of his production company Zentropa found their own employer well met in the film. It is the first Triers film to have its world premiere in Denmark on September 21, 2006 at the Copenhagen Film Festival . It started in Swiss cinemas in March 2007, in Germany on January 15, 2009. In Denmark the film had almost 19,000 admissions, in Switzerland 7,000 and in Germany 11,000. He found a larger audience in Italy with 218,000, and across Europe there were a total of half a million admissions. in North America, it made 4 copies in revenue of $ 50,000. The film premiered on 3sat on October 5, 2011 on German television.

subjects

The Boss of It All differs from the other Triers films he made in that decade in that it belongs to the comedy genre. Topics are the peculiarities of everyday office life and Danish-Icelandic relations. He depicts office life as a “neurotic microcosm” and pursues the “idea that masks are no longer worn in today's office world, but authenticity performances take place like in the old avant-garde theater.” The Icelandic investor in the film backs up his decisions with quotations from the collection of sagas Edda . He attacks the Danes in outbursts of anger and in wild words. Von Trier said the Danes have a sense of the kind of humor that is used to portray them as stupid. In Denmark everyone wants to be nice and avoid hard arguments. The relationship between Icelanders and Danes is strained by Denmark's rule over Iceland for over half a millennium , which the Icelander refers to several times.

Lars von Trier can be heard several times during the film as a commentary. At the beginning it can even be seen as a reflection in the window glass of the office building and announces that the film is not worth reflecting on , just a comedy and therefore harmless. Outside of the film, he stated that of course good comedies are not harmless. By addressing the audience directly at the beginning, middle, and end of the film, he draws viewers' attention to the self-reflective aspects of the work and the power he exercises over them as a filmmaker. The film title also evokes his role as director and co-owner of the production company and raises the question of the extent to which the director, as an author, is a god-like figure in his film world. Ravn's trick with the fictional "boss" is similar to the behavior of film directors who like to refer to the absent screenwriter during the shoot.

Camera and cut aesthetics

In The Boss of It All , Lars von Trier used his newly developed recording process called Automavision . As in other film productions, the camera and light are initially set optimally, after which a program moves the image section, the inclination, the focal length and other parameters again according to a random generator. However, von Trier took the liberty of rejecting the computer's suggestion if it didn't appeal to him and initiating a new one. With Automavision , he leaves the actors in the dark about how they are in the picture. He would have liked to hide the camera behind a mirror in front of the actors, but he had to drop this idea due to insufficient light. The process enables a style that is not human and free of intention. It also causes an intentional destruction of visual perfection, catchiness, and habit. There are constant jumps in the image , exposure and color temperature can change between settings without changing location , and the heads of people in the image are often cut off.

In many cases, von Trier did not believe that he had refrained from interfering with the process, because with earlier works he had earned the reputation of being an ingenious manipulator who could master everything and leave nothing to chance. Accordingly, the computer made just as little decision as the “boss of the whole” decides. The concept of Automavision is clearly ironic, said Bainbridge (2007), because the rulership is in the hands of the filmmaker, who decides when editing which setting to use and which not.

German language criticism

Several critics were of the opinion that the camera gimmick was nothing really new; Although some of the shots and the jump in the picture were surprising, the overall impression of the film looks like the usual Danish hand-held camera works of the Dogma 95 movement. “Once again the camera is shaken and not guided.” The result appears “monotonous” , “takes getting used to” or “strange” . Diedrich Diederichsen was able to make sense of this aesthetic in the taz : The Automavision process serves to distance oneself from the "picture-stupid, ugly television film" shot indoors . Von Trier deliberately pushes this to extremes through the unsuccessful frames and cuts that he has brought about.

Some of the critics missed a satire on the business world and “greed for profit”. In the Süddeutsche Zeitung , Tobias Kniebe accused the comedy of not taking material and characters seriously. Von Trier lived out hatred of actors in malicious scenes, of the "eternal questioning, the search for meaning, the vanity and stupidity" of this profession. Kniebe said about the plot: “It's not very original, not really funny either.” On the other hand, Manfred Riepe from epd Film found the story original, it had its moments. But in the pose of the critic of capitalism, von Trier is not interested enough in the characters he instrumentalizes for a self-referential discourse on acting.

Martin Schwickert from Tagesspiegel described the harmless pleasure promised by the director as a joke. “The radicalism with which Trier usually pursues his goal is missing from his foray into comedy. The humor is always mixed with a good portion of bitter substances. ”In contrast, Bert Rebhandl from the Berliner Zeitung made the plot and its twists fun. By means of Kristoffer's figure, von Trier undermined “the pathos of the drama. He removes any substance from immersion in a role by letting the role arise entirely from the moment. ” Overall, the work is a little finger exercise. World author Hanns-Georg Rodek used the same expression and added that there was “no major Von Trier film” here . With a series of surprising volts, the director gives the film an initially not suspected depth and at the same time creates a recognizable image of real working environments.

The most favorable judgments about the work came from critics who, in addition to the plot, paid attention to the self-referential level of the film. According to Diedrich Diederichsen, the humor “is not limited to the predictable (and in the end not so predictable) comedy, which he laconically tells with dialogues between dubious Danes caricatured as sensitive and phlegmatic.” His demonstration of the Danish “life lie of an unconditional harmlessness dictate with compulsory harmony ”he doubled on the formal level. "So the self-distancing that von Trier constantly inserts initially appeared as part of the problem he presented, if he did not drive them to a double negation of the gloomy theater logic and thus to a tightening of the representation." For Rüdiger Suchsland came in the FAZ the feel-good film "funny, fast and crazy" therefore. Von Trier once again developed new rules to challenge himself. He cleverly comments on the role of religion: "Because God, too, is perhaps just an imaginary upper boss, an invention made by people to better rule over others."

literature

Review mirror

positive

Rather positive

Rather negative

negative

Other sources

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Release certificate for The Boss of It All . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry , September 2009 (PDF; test number: 119 621 V).
  2. a b Lars von Trier in: Interview with Lars von Trier ( Memento of the original from April 6, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.direktorenfordethele.dk archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , P. 1
  3. a b Lars von Trier in: Interview with Lars von Trier ( Memento of the original from April 6, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.direktorenfordethele.dk archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , on the official website of the film, p. 2
  4. a b c Antje Flemming: Lars von Trier. Golden hearts, battered bodies . Bertz + Fischer, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86505-310-7 , p. 37
  5. Entry in the LUMIERE database. There is no information for Austria. Retrieved October 4, 2011
  6. Entry at Boxofficemojo.com , accessed October 4, 2011
  7. a b Christoph Egger: Does he want to have a joke? In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung , March 29, 2007, p. 45
  8. a b Caroline Bainbridge: The cinema of Lars von Trier. Authencity and artifice . Wallflower Press, London 2007. ISBN 978-1-905674-44-2 , p. 163
  9. ^ A b c d Martin Schwickert: Post from the boss. In: Der Tagesspiegel , January 15, 2009, p. 27
  10. a b c d e Diedrich Diederichsen: In the end, the computer decides. In: taz , January 14, 2009, p. 16
  11. Bainbridge 2007, p. 164
  12. Lars von Trier in: Interview with Lars von Trier ( Memento of the original from April 6, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.direktorenfordethele.dk archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , P. 3
  13. a b c Rüdiger Suchsland: Control freak with a new formula. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , October 6, 2006
  14. a b c d Tobias Kniebe: The great hater. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , January 15, 2009
  15. a b Bert Rebhandl: It works without a boss. In: Berliner Zeitung , January 15, 2009, Kulturkalender, p. 3
  16. a b c Manfred Riepe: The Boss of it All , in: epd Film , No. 1/2009, p. 51
  17. Hanns-Georg Rodek: Von Trier's evil company satire "The Boss of it all". In: Die Welt , January 15, 2009, p. 25
This version was added to the list of articles worth reading on October 20, 2011 .