Vogelfrei (film)

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Movie
German title Bird free
Original title Sans toit ni loi
Country of production France
original language French
Publishing year 1985
length 100 minutes
Rod
Director Agnes Varda
script Agnes Varda
production Oury Milshtein
music Joanna Bruzdowicz
camera Patrick Blossier
cut Patricia Mazuy ,
Agnès Varda
occupation

Vogelfrei (original title: Sans toit ni loi ) is a French fiction film drama by Agnès Varda from 1985 , which is about a woman who wants to live in absolute freedom and travels as a vagabond through the wintry, rural southern France (the Midi ), but also is exposed to a harsh environment (both humans and nature), corresponding to the ambiguity of the German film title (the original title means "without roof and law").

The story is told in a pseudo-documentary style, sometimes in short flashbacks and "interviews" by people who briefly met the young woman. The viewer has to fill in gaps in the narrative himself. The film remains sober and does not allow any sentimentality to arise. Cinematically, this finds a correspondence in the barren winter landscape and in the brittle music.

Agnes Varda said: "I wanted to make a moving film that also meditates on some thoughts, such as freedom ... and that is a well thought out puzzle, but with some pieces missing". The film was released in French cinemas on December 4, 1985 and in German cinemas on April 24, 1986.

action

A North African farm worker discovers Mona, frozen overnight, in a vineyard. Afterwards, episodes from the last few weeks of the vagabond Mona are shown in short flashbacks and from the perspective of different people, mostly fleeting encounters with a gas station tenant, a professor who explores trees and takes Mona with her in the car, an intellectual who has dropped out with her own goat breeding or a Tunisian farm worker in a vineyard. She is evicted from a cemetery where she camps and receives offers to act in a pornographic film and to plant a potato field.

Mona always moves on after a short time when she sees her freedom threatened. The end of Mona is just as coincidental: exhausted, after losing her few belongings in a fire, she wanders through a field, stumbles into a ditch and lies there. Mona herself remains a mystery. It arouses the most diverse feelings and in its harshness and coolness does not invite identification. She hardly talks about her past. Only at one point does she reveal something about herself and say that she used to be an office worker.

background

After almost ten years of mainly making documentaries, the first feature film by Nouvelle Vague director Agnes Varda is Vogelfrei . The film won the Golden Lion in Venice in 1985 . Sandrine Bonnaire received her second for her performance in 1986 César as Best Actress and celebrated with the film its international breakthrough that her among other things, the Best Actor Award of Angeles Film Critics Association Los earned. Varda also won the award of the Syndicat Français de la Critique de Cinéma as the best French film .

In the film, Agnes Varda uses the narrative structure of Orson Welles ' classic Citizen Kane , as she herself suggested in an interview: What makes Citizen Kane so interesting is the way Welles tells about the man - he draws attention to that what others think of him . Instead of a rich press mogul, Varda applies this narrative to a dropout from the margins of society. According to Varda, the focus of the film is the reaction of the people who met Mona briefly to her, the Mona effect that she exerted: she is a catalyst , one that forces others to react .

Reviews

"Varda, who has always been fascinated with the audience's participation in the production of meaning, has created a film in which the reactions of secondary characters build a portrait of an enigmatic woman."

“ Varda, always intrigued by the audience's involvement in creating meaning, has created a film in which the reactions of supporting characters portray an enigmatic woman. "

- Michal Quigley

literature

  • Frieda Grafe: Frozen blue . First published in: Süddeutsche Zeitung on April 24, 1986; in: Schriften, Volume 3 , ISBN 3-922660-82-7 . Pp. 127-130.

Web links

Notes and sources

  1. ↑ quoted in the essay [1] by Sandy Flitterman-Lewis about the film
  2. ↑ Quoted in Sandy Flitterman-Lewis To Desire Differently: Feminism and French Cinema , Chicago, University of Illinois Press, 1990. Agnes Varda and Sandrine Bonnaire also comment on film in the Cahiers du Cinema of December 1985.
  3. ↑ Quigley, essay on the film [2]