At the end of the violence

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Movie
German title At the end of the violence
Original title The End of Violence
Country of production France
Germany
USA
original language English
Spanish
Publishing year 1997
length 114 minutes
Age rating FSK 12
Rod
Director Wim Wenders
script Nicholas Klein
production Nicholas Klein
Deepak Nayar
Wim Wenders
music Ry Cooder
DJ Shadow
camera Pascal Rabaud
cut Peter Przygodda
occupation

At the End of the Violence is a German-American feature film from 1997 with Bill Pullman , Andie MacDowell and Gabriel Byrne . The director was Wim Wenders , who wrote the script together with Nicholas Klein .

action

Mike Max, Hollywood producer of spectacular action films, is loved just as much by his fans as he is hated by competitors and partners. At the beginning, stunt woman Cat is injured while filming a Max film, Mike visits her in the hospital and gives her his high opinion of her. Shortly afterwards, he is kidnapped by two gangsters one night. But while they quarrel about which of them should shoot Mike, they in turn are shot, although the exact process remains unclear at first.

It took some time to find out that Mike was able to escape. He initially goes into hiding with a Mexican family. Even when he has recovered physically and mentally, he remains submerged; his wife Paige and the police, who meanwhile see him not only as a victim but also as a fugitive, do not know whether he is still alive. For Mike this incident and the example of a harmonious family life for his hosts is a reason to rearrange the focus of his life. The relationship with his wife is alienated; the marriage was on the verge of separation. His business partners turn out to be devious, and even his significant property does not persuade Mike to return. Only after two months of absence does he visit his wife surprisingly to tell her that he is leaving his house and company.

Through Mike's mediation, Cat gets the chance to act in another movie and turns out to be excellent. Unfortunately the production of this film will be canceled due to cost reasons. Paige saw her and tried to cheer her up. Cat later attends poetry readings and performance art with a friend, which also includes the rapper Six and becomes Paige's new lover. Paige has blossomed in Mike's absence; she always stood in his shadow beforehand and lived the day with a certain lethargy. Now she is taking over the management and is becoming increasingly decisive.

In an initially independent subplot, the everyday life of the former NASA scientist Ray Bering is described. He visits his old father in the evening and works in an observatory during the day , but observes the streets of Los Angeles from there using a new type of automated video surveillance system . The idea of ​​this total surveillance is to prevent acts of violence by discovering their initiation early enough. The client calls this the "end of violence". This is how Bering gets to see what happened around Mike's abduction, but the pictures are initially sketchy and cannot be clearly identified. But what he has seen does not let go of him. When he begins to research more intensively, his superiors are called on the scene and assign him a cleaning lady who is actually supposed to spy on him. However, he later finds out that Mike's kidnappers were shot dead by invisible snipers.

Bering and Mike met at an information technology show prior to action time. Bering then sent the film producer a dossier about a “perfect” surveillance system by email. When Mike, with the help of his new Mexican friends, wants to access this email from an Internet café , it is stormed by the secret service and the police within minutes. This sealed the fate of Bering, who should never have sent these documents. He is declared a traitor by his superiors and also killed by invisible snipers on the way to work.

Throughout the film, the young policeman Doc Block tries, laughed at by his older colleagues, to solve the double murder in Mike's abduction. A clue leads him to Cat, who puts him in contact with Bering, which she in turn had previously received from Mike after he discovered that the email from Bering had disappeared. Just as Doc makes contact with Bering, he is shot.

At the end of the film, Bering's cleaning lady explains to her clients that she is getting out of the business and thus puts herself in mortal danger. She is threatened but not injured. Without anyone noticing, her little daughter befriends Mike, who is in the same place. The film ends with an internal monologue from Mike.

background

Hollywood director Samuel Fuller can be seen in the role of Bering's decrepit father . It is his last appearance as an actor. The police officer Doc visits a film set of a Mike Max production. The director of the film currently being produced there is Udo Kier .

In one episode, the police officer Doc visits the stunt woman Cat on a film set. The set is a replica of the lunchroom from Edward Hopper's most famous painting, Nighthawks . Epd film author Rudolf Worschech wrote in his report Edward Hopper and the cinema : "Many filmmakers are fascinated by Hopper's paintings." Quotes from Nighthawks are also in: Ferris makes blue ( Ferris Bueller's Day Off ), The Clou ( The Sting ) , Nachtfalken , Das Großes Dings bei Brinks ( The Brinks's Job ), Driver ( The Driver ), Tanz In Den Wolken ( Pennies from Heaven ) and Red Rock West .

The international premiere took place at the Cannes International Film Festival in 1997. After the premiere in Cannes, At the End of the Violence was re-cut and mixed again. The originally chosen title The End of Violence has also been replaced. The German premiere took place at the Hof International Film Festival in 1997.

Two soundtracks have been released for the film At the End of Violence . A sampler and a score album. Ry Coeder's instrumentals can be heard on the score .

The observatory, the Griffith Observatory, was the location for "Because They Don't Know What They Do".

The film was listed in the Top 100 of the Filmförderungsanstalt (FFA) until March 1998 and was seen by 80,049 viewers in Germany by then. In the 1998 Heyne Film Yearbook, it was listed in 15th place with 383,289 viewers among the 40 most successful German films. In the United States, it grossed $ 386,673 on a $ 5 million production budget.

Reviews

The German feuilleton judged Wenders directorial work ambivalent. The lack of stringency of the story was particularly criticized.

Andreas Kilb wrote for Die Zeit : “So he gets bogged down in side stories, secondary characters that turn the simple enough basic idea into an all too complicated thing. You can feel that the director is serious about his business, but whenever it matters, the story keeps on wearing its underwear, as it were. Wenders shies away from the consequences of his own imagination. Instead of showing violence, pain and forlornness, he covers them up with script phrases. ”Despite his top-heaviness, Wenders has shown humor in the scene in which Mike's wife Paige (Andie MacDowell) undresses with a gun in her hand and the violent film producer smugly remarks that it is the first time in his career that a woman with a gun shows herself to him. The fact that the scene was inconsequential was again due to Wenders' top-heaviness.

Michael Althen criticized the Süddeutsche Zeitung : “The pictures are exquisite, but not forced; the story is hard, but not arduous. His greatness has always been to find images in which stories just don't come about. Basically, it's like the Edward Hopper paintings . What makes them so attractive is not the stories that are told in them, but the mere opportunity to invent stories about them. "

In the FAZ, Hans Dieter Seidel found parallels in terms of the narrative structure to Lawrence Kasdan's Grand Canyon - In the Heart of the City or Robert Altman's Short Cuts . In his review he reports a cautious response during the international premiere, but finds that the film has cleverly interlocked chains of motifs, at the end of which there is a plausible plot. "It is Wenders' characteristic digression that captivates the film."

Peter Körte criticized in the Frankfurter Rundschau : "A few vague ideas hold the ensemble of characters together, the emptiness that soon spreads fills the film with a hodgepodge of motifs."

The BZ reviewer said: “Despite the gloomy 'Big Brothers Watching You' warning, Wenders film is light and optimistic. And it pays homage to the painter Edward Hopper, whose painting Nighthawks is brought to life. Thought is allowed, enjoyment is a must! "

At the film service it was said: “In addition to the cast, it is Ry Cooders guitar carpet that smooths out or overwrites some inconsistencies.” Reviewer Claus Löser added: “Wenders has returned to the American west coast after 15 years - his personal settlement with the Hollywood mechanisms forms an attractive meta-level of the film. "

In the lexicon of international films : "Wim Wenders is still an authentic visionary of the cinema, who, however, threatens to lose his signature in the imbalance of epic and dramatic moments."

Reiner Gansera noted for epd-Film : “The dialogues are less pretentious, more weightless, even funny.” You have to be prepared for Wenders to tell his story “around the point”. "His film is a narcissistic reflection on the feeling of being cut off from reality."

“There are some beautiful, water-clear images and movements in this film, there are beautiful sets, and there are also some amazingly funny and clever dialogues. But over all that falls like a big shadow of Wenders' missionary moralism ", commented Merten Worthmann in the Berliner Zeitung .

Awards

Wim Wenders received the German Film Award in 1998 for the film . He was also nominated for the Independent Spirit Award . The film was also nominated in 1998 for the ALMA Award in two categories, one of the nominations went to the actor Enrique Castillo.

The film also ran in the competition for the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1997 , but did not receive any awards.

The Filmbewertungsstelle Wiesbaden (FBW) awarded at the end of the violence the "predicate valuable".

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Release certificate for At the end of the violence . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry , May 2012 (PDF; test number: 78 675 V).
  2. ↑ a b Peter Körte in Frankfurter Rundschau , November 26, 1997.
  3. ↑ boxofficemojo.com
  4. ↑ Andreas Kilb: The hermit's view of the city of angels . In: Die Zeit , No. 49/1997.
  5. ^ BZ , December 3, 1997.
  6. ↑ At the end of violence. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed March 2, 2017 .Template: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used 
  7. ↑ Merten Worthmann: You have to change your life! In: Berliner Zeitung , November 27, 1997
  8. ↑ fbw-filmbeval.com