Why is Mr. R. running amok?

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Movie
Original title Why is Mr. R. running amok?
Country of production Germany
original language German
Publishing year 1970
length 84 minutes
Age rating FSK 16
Rod
Director Michael Fengler ,
Rainer Werner Fassbinder
script Michael Fengler,
Rainer Werner Fassbinder
(improvisation template)
production Michael Fengler,
Rainer Werner Fassbinder
music Peer Raben ,
Joachim Heder (songs)
camera Dietrich Lohmann
cut Rainer Werner Fassbinder (as Franz Walsch) ,
Michael Fengler
occupation

Why is Mr. R. running amok? is a film by Michael Fengler from 1970 . The film was marketed as a cooperative directorial work by Fengler and Rainer Werner Fassbinder . Fassbinder was only on the shoot for a few days and then withdrew from the project. But his name stayed in the cast.

action

The film takes place in Munich in the run-up to Christmas. Mr. R. is around thirty and lives a middle-class, inconspicuous life with his wife and son. He works as a technical draftsman and is rather calm and reserved. His seemingly monotonous work takes place in an impersonal and unadorned office that he shares in a small space with two colleagues and a typist. Occasionally R. is criticized by his superior. The rest of everyday life is also filled with monotony and rather bleak. The couple met Hanna, one of the woman's school friends, in a bar. Hanna is unbound, appears emphatically anti-bourgeois and distances herself from the conventional and determined life of the others with reference to a class reunion. R. clearly notes that his wife, like Hanna, “couldn't walk around” because of Rs. Position in the job and the close contact with the boss. But Hanna could “afford” such a life. Here he shows himself to be a domesticated, coercive, latently aggressive and envious petty bourgeois. However, R. does not seem to be able to meet his wife's expectations for a promotion. The couple's eight-year-old son is having a hard time at school. Certain financial problems and a “living beyond the means” are also indicated, while neighbors who are visiting Rs. Rumor whether a technical draftsman could afford such an apartment and furnishings. How the conversation between this group of neighbors and Ms. R. is more like an interrogation of Ms. R.

Interpersonal contacts are characterized by monologues rather than dialogues. R. sits like a foreign body when his wife is talking to a friend in the family's living room. Even when he visits his parents, R. is practically indifferent, while Rs. Wife makes conversation with her mother-in-law and maintains the family ties. A dissent arises when the mother-in-law suggests to Ms. R. to go to work for a short time to finance a Christmas present for the husband, as she used to do herself. However, Ms. R. is of the opinion that R., as the husband and sole breadwinner, is responsible for the income. She expects this from him. Later, when the family walks with the grandparents, the dominant trait of the mother-in-law becomes clear. She harshly rebukes Ms. R. to take better care of her son, who had briefly disappeared.

At a company party, Mr R. gets up late in the hour to give a drunken eulogy for the company and to express his sympathy with his colleagues. After all, he even wants to "drink brotherhood" with the boss. The clumsy advances are kindly but firmly repulsed by the boss; he leaves quickly for home. After the embarrassing appearance, R. sits down again. His wife rebukes him in a whisper. Apparently he was not interested in a promotion and he was too fat, which the neighbors had already noticed. Here, of all things, he had to give a speech, while otherwise he was as dumb as a fish.

Only when indulging in memories with a childhood friend who visits R. does he appear lively and happy. Again it is shown that R. gives up his restraint under the influence of alcohol and goes out of himself. One obviously remembers the time together in a Catholic boarding school. R. starts a hymn to the harmonica accompaniment of the friend and once gives space to his soul. Only now R's wife sits next to it all the time, indifferent.

R. health problems are also indicated. The family doctor cannot diagnose where these come from, but criticizes R's heavy cigarette consumption.

After the life of Mr. R. has been described in detail, it suddenly comes to the incomprehensible. A neighbor is visiting Mr. R's wife and chatting with her about trivialities. Meanwhile, Mr R. tries hard to follow a jazz program on television, which the neighbor with her loud statements makes almost impossible. Even the fact that R. turns the television up several times does not induce her to leave the room and continue the conversation with Ms. R. in the next room. Mr R. is - as has often happened in the course of the plot - ignored. When the said neighbor turns his back on R., the latter suddenly grabs a candlestick and kills her and his wife and son.

The next morning, R. drives to his work place on time as usual. When the criminal police appear, R. is in the toilet. Meanwhile, his colleagues cannot explain how this rampage came about . When they look after R. they find him hanged on the toilet.

background

“In KATZELMACHER we wanted to offer the possibility of an alternative attitude through the style, in AMOK through the color: People should understand the content and see that it has to do with them, but at the same time through the form in which it happens to have a distance to it in which they can reflect what they are seeing. I think it's really possible to create the distance that is necessary for such films through stylistic means. "

Three years after its release, Fassbinder viewed the film very critically: "[...] I find the result to be extremely disgusting and actually almost disgusting, because it really only transmits to people what is disgusting about them. If you have a topic that you say to two people, so, imagine you are sitting together and eating supper, and there is your son, and something has to happen now that you don't agree on the table manners of the child can and that the woman wins the argument. Then the people only come from what is in them anyway, you understand? "

Kurt Raab commented on his role that since he never liked his film partner Lilith Ungerer anyway, it was a particular pleasure for him to at least be able to kill her in the film.

The writer Martin Walser described the method used in this film: “Only when everyone has been denounced is the film over.” The petty bourgeois are “exposed with grim humor”.

The dialogues were improvised by the actors according to a roughly outlined scenario . Fassbinder was skeptical of Michael Fengler's idea.

The shooting lasted a total of 13 days, the cost amounted to approximately 135,000 DM. It was the first color film by Fassbinder, starred as Mr. R. played Kurt Raab .

Reviews

"Fassbinder ruthlessly records the banal everyday life of an average existence and examines the fatal history of an alleged short-circuit - the case study of an outsider who perishes in frighteningly normal circumstances."

- Lexicon of international film

“A bad movie, penetrating everyday. The dialogues, improvised by the actors [, ...] are so banal and average that just listening is almost painful. The film is already unbearable without its end, to which the depleted colors contribute. He makes it clear how abnormal this seemingly normal bourgeois life is in its constant routine. [...] What makes the film so bleak is not just its content, but also its aesthetic method. [...] If there is a naturalistic film, this is it. It lacks every utopian element, every idea of ​​what a more humane life could look like. "

- Wilhelm Roth

“Fassbinder takes in Why is Mr. R. running amok? much of this slow, ailing life in advance, this torment that he later staged even more clearly in Dealer of the Four Seasons (1971). The terrible speechlessness of the language of the people, the hidden aggression and auto-aggression that threateningly wait under the surface of a world to discharge, are expressions of an almost completely frozen society. And looking back on this film it becomes clear what it could mean that it is normality, at least a certain one, that brings about violence in extreme form - one way or another, as an expression of the act of an individual or as an excess of entire groups against other."

- Ulrich Behrens

“Thanks to skilful improvisations in the creation of scenes and dialogues and yet more careful, if seemingly unintentional selection of images, this everyday occurrence comes to light penetratingly and for many viewers cannot remain without a relationship to their own life. The grotesque-looking murder and suicide of Mr R. at the end of the film turns out to be a useful irritation for the viewer to rethink what is depicted. A film that deserves serious interest […]. Recommended for ages 16 and up. "

- Protestant film observer

Awards

Nominations

Theatrical performances

literature

  • Michael Töteberg: Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Rowohlt, Reinbek 2002 (Rowohlt's monographs), ISBN 3-499-50458-8
  • Peter Iden: Rainer Werner Fassbinder - with contributions by Peter Iden et al. 4., erg. U. exp. Ed., Hanser, Munich 1983 (Film series; 2), ISBN 3-446-13779-3

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Wolf Donner in DIE ZEIT of July 31, 1970
  2. ↑ a b Fassbinder in conversation with Corinna Brocher quoted from Why is Mr. R. running amok? ( Memento from February 6, 2013 in the web archive archive.today )
  3. ^ First in the literary yearbook octopus , 7/1974, quoted here from: Michael Töteberg: Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Rowohlt, Reinbek 2002 (Rowohlt's monographs), ISBN 3-499-50458-8 , p. 76
  4. ^ Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werkschau Programm, p. 15, Ed. Rainer Werner Fassbinder Foundation , Berlin, 1992
  5. ↑ Why is Mr. R. running amok? In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed March 2, 2017 .Template: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used 
  6. ^ Wilhelm Roth: Annotated Filmography. In: Rainer Werner Fassbinder / with contributions by Peter Iden et al. 4., erg. U. exp. Edition Hanser, Munich 1983 (Film series; 2), ISBN 3-446-13779-3 , here p. 130ff
  7. ↑ Follow-me-now.de
  8. ↑ Evangelical Press Association, Munich, Review No. 338/1970.
  9. ^ German Film Academy ( Memento from March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive )
  10. ^ Announcement of the Münchner Kammerspiele about the play ( Memento of December 4, 2014 in the Internet Archive ), accessed on November 30, 2014.
  11. ↑ Christine Dössel: The horror of normality. In Susanne Kennedy's language laboratory, the people don't speak, it speaks out of them: the director produced Fassbinder's film "Why is Mr. R. Amok?" At the Münchner Kammerspiele. staged - as a rendezvous for zombies. , in: Süddeutsche Zeitung , November 29-30 , 2014, No. 275, ISSN  0174-4917 , p. 21.