Those who go through hell
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | Those who go through hell |
| Original title | The Deer Hunter |
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| Country of production | United States |
| original language | English |
| Publishing year | 1978 |
| length | 182 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 16 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Michael Cimino |
| script | Michael Cimino Deric Washburn |
| production | Michael Cimino Michael Deeley John Peverall Barry Spikings |
| music | Stanley Myers |
| camera | Vilmos Zsigmond |
| cut | Peter Zinner |
| occupation | |
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Who go through hell (Original title: The Deer Hunter) is an American film directed by Michael Cimino from 1978 . The three-hour long epic is generally assigned to the anti-war film genre . In the plot, three men from the US province go into the Vietnam War and are physically injured and mentally impaired as a result. The film is divided into three acts of about the same length: the time before, during and after the war . Cimino, who, according to him, did not want to make a film about Vietnam but rather one about the United States , is concerned with the influence of the war on his homeland and its society.
At the 1979 Academy Awards , the film was nominated in nine categories; He won five awards, including Best Film and Best Director. At the 1979 Berlinale , the film caused a scandal ; the Soviet delegation described him as an "insult to the people of Vietnam" and left demonstratively. The main musical theme of the film by British composer Stanley Myers , " Cavatina " ( The Theme from the Deer Hunter ), has also become famous off the screen; it was awarded the Ivor Novello Award .
action
Michael, Nick and Steven, three steel workers of Russian descent from the US provincial town of Clairton, Allegheny County , Pennsylvania, are patriots and voluntarily went to the Vietnam War in 1968. Before their departure, the Russian Orthodox wedding of Steven and Angela is celebrated (according to "The Andy Warhol Diaries" it is a Russian wedding). Michael is miserably in love with Linda, who is not interested in him. She catches the bridal bouquet and becomes engaged to Nick that same evening. Steven and Angela drink from a bandaged goblet. According to tradition, only those lucky who do not spill anything are lucky. Angela spills something unnoticed. During the celebration Michael tries to have a conversation with a soldier who is currently on home leave. However, this has no interest in the expressions of sympathy and is closed. The following day Michael and Nick, together with other friends , pursued their hobby one last time as deer hunters , the hunt for the white deer that is common in North America .
The second part in Vietnam begins when Michael, Nick and Steven are captured by the Viet Cong ; fighting is hardly shown. The prisoners are kept in cages in the river in which they are constantly up to their mouths in water; they are forced by their Vietnamese guards to play " Russian Roulette ". With a trick in which they risk their lives, Michael succeeds in killing the guards and escaping with his friends. On the run, the three friends parted ways; only Nick can be rescued by helicopter. Michael risks his life to save Steven and get him to safety. Steven is seriously wounded while trying to escape and his legs are amputated so that he can return home in a wheelchair. Michael found out about this when he returned to the States. Steven regularly receives money from Nick, who was left behind in Saigon, the capital of embattled South Vietnam. Angela is traumatized by the events and can hardly be approached.
Michael, who survived the war physically unharmed, is also marked. He can no longer find his way around his homeland, and dealing with his old friends and acquaintances has become difficult for him. On another hunting trip with his friends, he deliberately shoots past a deer. He starts a complicated relationship with Linda.
Michael returns to Vietnam to find his friend Nick. Nick was so traumatized by the war that instead of returning home, he ends up playing Russian roulette in a mafia-run casino in Saigon , on whom money is wagered and who seems to have become addicted to heroin. Michael tries to persuade him to return home during a game of Russian roulette. Since Nick apparently does not recognize him, Michael plays a round with him out of desperation. But Nick has had bad luck with the revolver for the first time in many months and shoots himself the moment he remembers Michael. Nick's funeral takes place in the US in the steel workers' settlement. After the funeral, the friends drink coffee in their local pub and sing God Bless America .
Locations
The backdrop for the wedding celebration was the St. Theodosius Russian Orthodox Cathedral in Cleveland , which is on the National Register of Historic Places . This is also where the US Steel (now Republic Steel ) steel mill is located, which can be seen at the beginning of the film. The hometown of the three main characters was recorded in seven other locations, including McKeesport , Mingo Junction , Pittsburgh and Steubenville , in addition to the real Clairton, Pennsylvania . The hunting trip was filmed in the Mount Baker area. The scenes set in Vietnam were produced in Thailand , with Bangkok serving as the backdrop for Saigon . The prison camp with the cages was built on the Mae Nam Khwae Yai (Khwae Yai River) .
interpretation
Many films about the Vietnam War are largely set in Vietnam - this one not. The nearly three-hour film is divided into three acts of roughly equal length in the manner of a trilogy : the carefree time before the war, the cruel and degrading events in the prison camp during the war and finally the futile attempts to regain a foothold in "normal" life . Much more important than the authentic portrayal of the war was for the director to show the effects on the people and families in the USA. While the men and their families live in an intact environment before the deployment, whose only direct experience of death is the hunt, the life of the once fortunate becomes a torture after the deployment.
The sequence in which the prisoners Michael and Nick are forced by their guards to play "Russian Roulette" caused a particular stir. It is a particularly haunting metaphor for the futility and randomness of dying in war. The pointlessness is also condensed in the portrayal of these Americans of Russian descent who are playing "Russian Roulette" in a proxy war against the Soviet Union (Russia). On the one hand, this passage wrote film history, but at the same time it sparked the strongest criticism of the film.
Stevens' young marriage is particularly tragically destroyed. Steven, who is severely handicapped by the mission, doesn't want to go home anymore. His wife is seriously mentally ill. When Michael is the only one of the group to come to her after the war to find out where Steven is, she is sick in bed. She does not want to and probably cannot speak either and with great difficulty writes the telephone number of the sanatorium for the disabled in which Steven is housed on a small piece of paper.
Michael Cimino vividly shows how the lives of men and their relatives are destroyed by the senseless war. So it's a film about the American victims of the war, including those who have never been to Vietnam.
The Vietnam War ended with the capture of Saigon (today Ho Chi Minh City) on April 30, 1975 by troops of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (FNL); So The Deer Hunter came out only three years later. The intention of the film is similar to the film Coming Home by Hal Ashby , which was made at the same time, but which focuses more on the effects of trauma in everyday life. Oliver Stone prepared a similar story again in 1989 with Born on July 4th .
synchronization
The German dubbed version was created for the cinema premiere under the direction of Niels Clausnitzer .
| role | actor | German Dubbing voice |
|---|---|---|
| Michael Vronsky | Robert De Niro | Christian Brückner |
| Nikanor "Nick" Chevotarevich | Christopher Walken | Heiner Lauterbach |
| Steven Pushkov | John Savage | Ivar Combrinck |
| Linda | Meryl Streep | Dagmar Heller |
| Stanley | John Cazale | Horst Raspe |
| John Wels, barman | George Dzundza | Michael Gahr |
| Peter "Axel" Axelrod | Chuck Aspegren | Gernot Duda |
| Angela Pushkov | Rutanya Alda | Marion Hartmann |
| Steven's mother | Shirley Stoler | Alice Franz |
| Julien Grinda | Pierre Segui | Holger Hagen |
Reviews
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" Epic , relentlessly tough film about the inhumanity of war, which, through its precise description of the milieu, reveals the causes for the behavior of its characters."
"How the war mutilates physically and mentally is shown in this rousing war film, which courageously faces the American trauma to Vietnam , but demonizes the political opposite side in favor of speculative action effects."
“... what follows is one of the most explosive, depressing and hardest scenes with which the war was ever shown in the cinema. The Viet Cong tortures its captured aggressors by forcing them, in the face of the image of Ho Chi Minh , to play Russian roulette against one another and to be gnawed by rats in tiger cages underwater. This passage, in which the Vietnamese take up the cruel inheritance of the Japanese enemy in World War II , is a slap in the face for those who believed that a just defensive war was an unwaveringly heroic one. The present has an ugly face here, which, in view of the anonymous machinery of extermination of the Americans in that war, we have not yet perceived or perhaps did not want to perceive ... "
"And at the end of the film, widows, mothers who have seen their sons, men who have lost their friends, sit together after the funeral of a soldier who has gone mad during the Vietnam War and sing, timidly at first, then more and more defiantly ' God bless America '. A scene that is so oppressive, exciting and courageous precisely because these people do not correspond to the Wasp cliché of Americans. […] Cimino's surviving heroes are free and brave, but they have become homeless. Michael Cimino has a fascinating mix of intellect and cinematic instinct. "
"... when the captivity of the leading actors in the Viet Cong was described, I [...] almost [...] left the hall in protest. The Viet Cong partisans had not handled their prisoners delicately, and they must have been tortured. But the soldiers of Ho Chi Minh certainly hadn't forced anyone to play Russian roulette, and they certainly hadn't played for money. Whatever one might think of the Vietnamese communists, this crude disparagement was unworthy and outrageous. "
“There is an unwritten law in film criticism that certain films should not be criticized. Citizen Kane , Some like it hot , 2001: A Space Odyssey , The Godfather II ... all of these are traded as universal classics [...]. At the risk of being thrown from the group of 'respectable film critics', I take the opportunity to officially state my opinion that The Deer Hunter is one of the worst films ever made. The film is largely complacent, arrogant, steeped in manipulative racist emotion, melodramatic and located somewhere between screeching hysteria and sleepwalking gloom. "
Miloš Forman and Mickey Rourke considered the film to be one of the best of all time. The Wiesbaden film evaluation agency awarded the “ rating valuable”.
The American Film Institute sees The Deer Hunter since 1998 among the 100 best American films (No. 53). In 1996 he was accepted into the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress .
He is also among the top 250 at IMDb and ranks 153rd (as of February 14, 2016).
Awards
- The film was at the Oscars in 1979 with five Oscars awarded in the categories Best Film, Best Supporting Actor (Christopher Walken), Best Director, Best Editing and Best Sound. He received four other nominations: De Niro for Best Actor, Meryl Streep for Best Supporting Actress, Best Screenplay ( Quinn K. Redeker , Louis Garfinkle , Deric Washburn and Michael Cimino) and Best Cinematography.
- 1979 Golden Globe for best director and five nominations, including best film and best leading actor (De Niro).
- At the National Society of Film Critics Awards , the film came in 1978 in the category of Best Picture, Christopher Walken in the category of Best Supporting Actor third place; Meryl Streep won the Best Supporting Actress award
- At the New York Film Critics Circle Awards , the film won the 1978 Best Picture category; Robert De Niro came third in the Best Actor category, Christopher Walken won the Best Supporting Actor category, and Meryl Streep came third in the Best Supporting Actress category.
Adaptations in other works
Presented in the three film comedies Meet the Feebles (1989), High School High (1996) and American Pie: The college clique satirized the representation of the Russian roulette scene. In the film True Romance , the fictional film Coming Home in a Body Bag by the main character “Clarence” is described as the first Oscar-winning film “With Eggs” since Going Through Hell .
In the film drama 187 - One Eight Seven (1997) youth gangster sees Cesar Sanchez ( Clifton Collins Jr. ) the film and the Russian roulette scene and calls his transition at the end of his teacher Trevor Garfield ( Samuel L. Jackson ) to such Play on ( those who go through hell are mentioned by name); both of them shoot themselves.
In the computer game Call of Duty: Black Ops is The Deer Hunter quotes; the player in Vietnamese captivity also has to play Russian roulette, takes advantage of his situation and kills the guards with the revolver.
The Virginia-based artist David (Dave) MacDowell adapted Nick's death scene in a special way by playing down another key theme of the film, deer hunting, by playing down the scene with Bambi .
literature
- Alfons Maria Arns : American Illusions - A Film Analysis of Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter. In: Cinema and War. About the fascination of a deadly genre. GEP u. Evangelical Academy Arnoldshain (ed.). Frankfurt am Main 1989 (Arnoldshainer Film Discussions, Vol. 6).
- EM Corder: Going through hell. Novel with photos based on the film script . Goldmann, Munich 1979, ISBN 3-442-03844-8 (OT: The Deer Hunter ).
- Norbert Grob: They go through hell. In: Thomas Klein, Marcus Stiglegger, Bodo Traber (eds.): Film genres. War Movie. Reclam, Stuttgart 2006, ISBN 978-3-15-018411-0 , pp. 249-256 [with literature].
Web links
- The Deer Hunter in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- The Deer Hunter at Rotten Tomatoes (English)
- The Deer Hunter at Metacritic (English)
- Those Who Go Through Hell in the online movie database
- Those who go through hell in the German dubbing file
- The-Fan.net who go through hell
- 'The Deer Hunter' by Dave MacDowell 'The Deer Hunter' by Dave MacDowell
Individual evidence
- ↑ Release certificate for those who go through hell . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry , May 2014 (PDF; test number: 50 473-a K).
- ↑ Tony Reeves: The Deer Hunter film locations. In: web presence movie-locations.com. The Worldwide Guide to Movie Locations, accessed November 10, 2013 .
- ↑ The go through hell with the German dubbing index
- ↑ a b Those Going Through Hell from Rotten Tomatoes , accessed April 26, 2015
- ↑ a b Those Going Through Hell at Metacritic , accessed April 26, 2015
- ↑ The Deer Hunter in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- ↑ Those who go through hell. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film Service , accessed October 18, 2010 .
- ↑ Rating: very good - Lexicon "Films on TV" (extended new edition). Rasch and Röhring, Hamburg 1990, ISBN 3-89136-392-3 , p. 151.
- ↑ Frankfurter Rundschau of March 19, 1979.
- ↑ Wolfgang Limmer: Vietnamese roulette . In: Der Spiegel . No. 8 , 1979, pp. 190 f . ( online ).
- ↑ Death in the rice field. Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt GmbH, Stuttgart 1982, ISBN 3-548-33022-3 .
- ↑ Mark Kermode: Oh deer, oh deer, oh deer. In: Film4. Channel 4 Online Services, archived from the original on May 28, 2011 ; accessed on June 20, 2015 .
- ^ "Top Ten Poll 2002 - Milos Forman" . Sight & Sound . "5. The Deer Hunter (Cimino) ”, accessed October 6, 2010
- ↑ Presentation of the film by Mickey Rourke. Video located on The Deer Hunter Blu-ray.