Our short life

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Movie
Original title Our short life
Country of production GDR
original language German
Publishing year 1981
length 113 minutes
Rod
Director Lothar Warneke
script Lothar Warneke
production DEFA , KAG "Red Circle"
music Gerhard Rosenfeld
camera Claus Neumann
cut Erika Lehmphul
occupation

Our short life is a German literary film adaptation of DEFA by Lothar Warneke from 1981 based on motifs from the partly autobiographical novel Franziska Linkerhand by the writer Brigitte Reimann .

action

Wolfgang cannot cope with being married to a graduate architect, an intellectual, while he has remained a simple worker. The man takes refuge in drunkenness. Franziska Linkerhand's marriage, which was entered into too early, breaks. There was no longer a common spiritual level of possible understanding. After her divorce, the architect decides to leave her job in Dresden, because she no longer wants to be the sheltered and supported favorite student of a prominent professor, but instead wants to prove her skills on her own in tough everyday practice. She asks for a year off and is granted this. She doesn't need a large moving van to move to her new area of ​​activity, as her ex-husband's family is clearing out almost all of the apartment.

Once in the central district town, she is assigned to the existing city architecture office. The way from the train station leads Franziska through the cemetery. What symbolism: She meets a collective that has long since capitulated to the constraints of practice. Industrial housing construction on the edge of the historic old town and without any connection to it, under the motto: As much, as quickly, as cheaply as possible. And here she tries to bring her ideals of livable living into harmony with reality. She very quickly realizes that the head of the office, Schafheutlin, no longer sees any of this reality, so that arguments are inevitable. But Franziska does not give up. Life and living, her Professor Reger wrote in the register, are significant enough only in German to be two terms. Franziska wants to abolish the functional separation between living, working and leisure, which is currently being poured in concrete in the new satellite building project on the outskirts of the city, and is encouraging a competition to reconstruct the old town. Which initially falls on deaf ears at Schafheutlin. But she is gaining allies, such as her experienced colleague Kowalski, who encouraged her from the start, and even the ossified-looking architect Grabbe, who brings in his own ideas for designing a pedestrian zone. Finally the city architect is ready to go to the housing association . The competition is actually advertised.

Ms. Helwig's tavern becomes a place of refuge for Franziska if she wants to escape the workers' dormitory for whatever reason. A long time ago she noticed a quiet guest who reads “ Die Weltbühne ” amidst all the hustle and bustle - and hardly ever puts it down on the street. The apparently introverted intellectual appears to Franziska like an oasis in the desert - and yet this Trojanovicz is just a dump truck driver. But one with a mysterious past: he is said to have been in prison, reveals the caretaker of the home. “Better thirty wild years than seventy good, peaceful years”: Your love for him is sincere - and as uncompromising as your life so far. Franziska wants him completely, but Trojanovicz lives with Sigrid, whom he does not want to let sit after she has sacrificed everything for him in a difficult time. So she loses him.

Franziska Linkerhand's design is selected as the best by the jury, which also includes Schafheutlin. Reality alone is not like that: The combine thanks them warmly, but sees no implementation options in the foreseeable future. No old town reconstruction, no love - all that remains is tabula rasa and retreating under the safe wing of the professor. Who only recently assured her at the ceremonial handover of a theater that she was involved in planning that he firmly expects her to rejoin his team. Schafheutlin appears at Franziska's, who is practically already sitting on packed suitcases, for a management meeting ...

production

Initially, Rainer Simon and Frank Beyer were in discussion as directors for the film adaptation of Brigitte Reimann's 1975 posthumously novel. Ultimately, Lothar Warneke turned Regine Kühn's problem-smoothing scenario into a controversial film in which the problems of 1964 were relocated to the present without prejudice. For the dramaturge Regine Kühn , the film is a single open wound and an all-round unpleasant experience.

Our short life was filmed by the artistic work group “Red Circle” on ORWO color and had its premiere on January 15, 1981 in the Berlin Kino International . It was published on DVD on July 3, 2015 at absolut Medien GmbH .

criticism

Renate Holland-Moritz found in Eulenspiegel that the film contains the tragic and the comic, everyday problems and problems of existential importance. He asks questions and doesn't pretend he already knows all the answers. Horst Knietzsch wrote in the daily newspaper Neues Deutschland : “What I like about this film is how consciousness and emotionality in Franziska are artistically determined. Also that this figure is not viewed uncritically: Rigor, ambition can be a useful force for personal as well as social development, but under certain conditions they can also turn into sheer careerism or inhibiting loneliness and prevent insights into what is necessary. "Helmut In the Neue Zeit of January 16, 1981, Ullrich came to the conclusion that it was a good decision to entrust Simone Frost with the difficult role of Franziska. Striking just the external effect that this slim and delicate person is at least a head smaller than their partner. But with that energy and charisma, with a violent temperament and intelligent clarity. It convinces with choleric-destructive outbursts as well as in moments of tender devotion, just as in the tenacity with which it asserts itself, as in attacks of resignation. This Franziska is uncomfortable and she fits into the world; she can fight and yet remains feminine soft; she doesn’t fall apart feeling and understanding, because she has a lot of both.

Awards

literature

  • F.-B. Habel : The great lexicon of DEFA feature films . Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf, Berlin 2000, ISBN 3-89602-349-7 , pp. 640-641 .
  • Our short life . In: Ingrid Poss / Peter Warneke (eds.): Trace of Films, Christoph Links Verlag, 2006, ISBN 978-3-86153-401-3 , pp. 370–372

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ F.-B. Habel: The great lexicon of DEFA feature films
  2. ^ Ingrid Poss / Peter Warneke (eds.): Trace of films
  3. ↑ Renate Holland-Moritz in Eulenspiegel No. 7/1981
  4. ↑ Horst Knietzsch in Neues Deutschland from January 20, 1981
  5. ↑ Helmut Ullrich in the Neue Zeit from January 16, 1981