Four minutes

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Movie
Original title Four minutes
Country of production Germany
original language German
Publishing year 2006
length 111 minutes
Age rating FSK 12
Rod
Director Chris Kraus
script Chris Kraus
production Alexandra Kordes
Meike Kordes
music Annette Focks
camera Judith Kaufmann
cut Uta Schmidt
occupation

Vier Minuten (2006) is a feature film by the German director and producer Chris Kraus with Monica Bleibtreu and Hannah Herzsprung in the leading roles.

action

For many years, pianist Traude Krüger has been giving piano lessons in the Luckau women's prison. There she meets 20-year-old Jenny, convicted of murder, closed, unpredictable, aggressive and musically gifted. Traude offers Jenny to take her on as a student on the condition that she takes part in the Jugend musiziert competition. Jenny shows little interest in the competition, but accepts Traude's conditions after long resistance.

Filming location Luckau Nikolaikirche

Bit by bit you learn the life stories of the two women. Jenny was molested by her father; she herself freaked out and took the blame for a murder her lover committed. She was sentenced to long imprisonment; She lost a child at birth through the fault of prison staff and doctors. She is harassed by the guards and harassed by the inmates. She reacts to this with violent outbursts, self-harm and chewing her fingernails. Traude was a nurse during the war and had a lesbian relationship with a colleague who betrayed her to the SS. The viewer learns her fate through flashbacks in which her happy and traumatic memories flicker.

Jenny loves jazz, "Negro music" as it is contemptuously called by Traude, and hates classical music, in which she was trained by her ambitious father since childhood. Despite many obstacles and setbacks, the two women slowly get closer to each other, and Jenny lets herself into the hard, relentless school of her teacher. Jenny reaches the final of the competition, but the prison director does not give her permission to participate, and only through a plot between the teacher and a guard can she be smuggled out of the prison. The final scene shows Jenny's appearance in the competition, which lasts the eponymous four minutes. However, she does not play the Schumann piece that she has practiced, but after a few bars she falls into her own wild music, in which the grand piano is used as drums, Jenny hammers loud clusters into the keys and the strings of the grand piano into hers Incorporates performance. The audience remains silent at first, but then breaks out in loud applause. Meanwhile their escape was noticed; Heavily armed police storm the opera house, arrest Jenny, who is standing still, and handcuff her.

production

Chris Kraus worked on the script for eight years. The main character is inspired by a woman he knew in his youth. He describes her as "an old lady, strict, Prussian, unimaginably shirt-sleeved". The film shows the dedication "For Gertrud Krüger (1917–2004)".

The budget of the film was 1.4 million euros. At the casting, the 25-year-old actress Hannah Herzsprung untruthfully claimed to be able to play the piano well. She immediately began to learn to play the piano. The recordings of her hands while playing were still partially doubled. Monica Bleibtreu wore an aging mask made of latex rubber and thick glasses.

Although music is “a key element” of the film, Kraus had only discovered a suitable composition among the submitted works three weeks before the start of shooting for the concert of the final scene. Based on Schumann's Piano Concerto in A minor, Op. 54 , the composer Annette Focks has created a four-minute piece that not only contains “pianistically difficult passages”, but also musically describes “unheard of, explosive” in the rhythm of Jenny's emotional world and her final stroke of freedom.

The film scenes in the prison were filmed in the Luckau prison, which had recently been closed . The exterior scenes of the "Deutsche Oper" mentioned in the film were created in front of the Stuttgart State Opera , as were the scenes in the foyer and the other interior scenes in the Oldenburg State Theater .

reception

The film was completed by the end of 2005, but initially neither accepted by the Berlinale nor by distributors until it was shown at the Shanghai International Film Festival in 2006 and was awarded the prize for best film. Only then did Vier Minuten become a success in Germany. After the cinema release on February 1, 2007, around 485,000 viewers were reached here by the end of 2008. The film had theatrical releases in more than twenty countries around the world and achieved a total of over one million viewers in Europe and worldwide box office revenues of over nine million US dollars. It was particularly successful in Italy and France, each with over 160,000 and in Spain with over 144,000 moviegoers.

Reviews

“Vital drama about the development of people who learn to free themselves from their inner encapsulation after old wounds. Thanks to the brilliant leading actresses and the furious visual design, an outstanding film of almost physical intensity. "

- Lexicon of International Films

"As a duo, Hannah Herzsprung and Monica Bleibtreu compensate for some of the unevenness of the script with their nuanced play and develop an emotional intensity that is rare in German cinema."

- Barbara Schweizerhof: taz

"What looks so German-author-film-unchic at first glance turns out to be a breathtaking tug-of-war between two almost fatally injured souls, as we have not seen for a long time."

- Hanns-Georg Rodek in Die Welt

Awards

The film won numerous international awards (selection).

2004

2006

2007

  • New Faces Award
    • Best Young Actress (Hannah Herzsprung)
  • German film award
    • Gold film award for best feature film
    • Best Acting Performance - Leading Female Role (Monica Bleibtreu)
  • Undine Award
    • Best Young Lead Actress in a Feature Film (Hannah Herzsprung)
  • Hamptons International Film Festival
    • Rising Star Award (Hannah Herzsprung)
    • Audience award
  • Sofia International Film Festival
    • Best Director (Chris Kraus)
  • German camera award
    • Best Editing (Uta Schmidt)

2008

  • Shooting Star 2008 (Hannah Herzsprung)
  • Rencontres Cinématographiques de Cannes
    • Audience award
  • International Musique et Cinéma Festival in Auxerre
    • Best Actress (Monica Bleibtreu and Hannah Herzsprung)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Release certificate for four minutes . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry , October 2006 (PDF; test number: 107 769 K).
  2. ↑ Director's Notes , Official Website
  3. ↑ News archive January 2007 . From: jasmin-tabatabai.com , accessed February 13, 2008.
  4. ↑ "I drew my own notes". Interview with Hannah Herzsprung. In: Spiegel Online , February 5, 2007.
  5. ^ Berlinale 2007. German Cinema. Four minutes. Berlin International Film Festival , accessed on November 6, 2015 .
  6. ↑ Jan Zwilling: Interview with Annette Focks. (No longer available online.) Original Score - The online magazine for film and film music, February 15, 2008, archived from the original on September 22, 2008 ; accessed on November 6, 2015 . Info: The 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. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.original-score.de
  7. ↑ Dörthe Ziemer: Luckau was an incredibly great location. In: doerthe-ziemer.de. Lausitzer Rundschau , accessed on January 3, 2016 .
  8. ↑ a b Big ascent and descent in "four minutes". In: Die Welt , January 31, 2007.
  9. ↑ a b Four minutes in the Lumiere database of film attendance in Europe, accessed March 7, 2013.
  10. ↑ Four minutes  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. at Box Office Mojo, accessed March 7, 2013.@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www2.boxofficemojo.com  
  11. ↑ Four minutes. In: Lexicon of International Films .
  12. ↑ Duel on the piano. In: taz, February 1, 2007.
  13. ↑ Awards according to the official website