Wild clique
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | Wild clique |
| Original title | Berliners |
| Country of production | Germany |
| original language | German |
| Publishing year | 1983 |
| length | 86 minutes |
| Rod | |
| Director |
Hannelore Conradsen , Dieter Köster |
| script |
Hannelore Conradsen , Dieter Köster |
| production | Hannelore Conradsen |
| camera |
Dieter Köster , Jürgen Volkery |
| cut |
Dieter Köster , Hannelore Conradsen |
| occupation | |
Wilde Clique is a German film by the directors Hannelore Conradsen and Dieter Köster from 1982. It tells a real-life story of young people in West Berlin in 1982. In a differentiated representation of their everyday life at the weekend, the authors stage and Directors a Berlin film in which the wall hardly seems to exist for the protagonists, but is made all the more visible to the viewer (the protagonists bathe directly below the GDR death strip). One of the oldest stories in cinema is varied: The simple (eternal) Midsummer Night's Dream (here - right below the Berlin Wall)
action
Each of the protagonists of the film Wilde Clique wants to get out of their actual circumstances. Where are they going, against their everyday background without money and education? The imagination seems to have completely vanished here, nowhere is there a real upswing in sight, nothing is progressing, everything seems to have already been experienced, said, thought, imagined and done. And yet, you only have to look carefully, a tiny obstacle prevents you from joining in the general gloom: the everyday existence of every individual, no matter how empty and banal.
From this a rotating movement develops in the history of film towards the everyday weekend of the protagonists - Vivienne, Marni, Beule and Pellworm. An adventure film about the lifestyle of a few insignificant people in the western part of the divided city of Berlin.
Beule (17) is doing gymnastics with his battery radio over freight tracks, backyards, through Kaschemen and over mountains of junk, looking for some kind of work. He is downright hit by one of the many rejections , in the form of a tin can thrown after him: Go away, you left-wanker! This tone of voice remains decisive in the film. Beule turns on his portable radio and with imagination jumps into the planted kohlrabi beets from Pellworm (22): In my comic strip fantasy, the world is clearer than ever!
Bruno Pellworm also pushes him out of his green makeshift property , only nicer than the others. He actually comes from the nearby GDR. There he acquired the ability to make something out of nothing and thus secure a living. He trades and shuffles cheap junk, now also in the west of the city. Not much more can be learned about its origin. Only a motorcycle cap, which he always wears, reminds of the past in the Middle East. During the course of the film he will send his rutting cry over the wall on Bernauerstrasse. In vain, as Bump predicts. Bump plucks beneath the wall (“If you come through here, you get a mark from me.”) For Pellworm rabbit food, which it trades with pet owners who are unable to walk. Pellworm admires the ailing VW pickup truck and its business acumen: This is how you force the Rudis!
Pellworm is suddenly troublesome with bulging attachment. He placed an ad and arranged to meet a secretary at the Kreuzberg fair.
Meanwhile, his hope, Marnie (21), is still standing in a snack bar on Potsdamer Platz and serving “cool Americans” sweating. She doesn't speak English, adores Liza Minnelli, hates the taste of Thuringian sausage and lives directly above the border wall in Neukölln, where she intones “Cabaret” in her own way: Life is a cabaret! Out of the fat clothes, in the top pants suit, coordinated with the bronze-colored pumps and her bleached storm hairstyle: School is the shitty thing there is!
Now she looks like a real secretary and her mother hopes that this time she will finally meet an officer (so that the daughter can move out of her cramped apartment). The meeting point at the Kreuzberg hustle and bustle doesn't quite fit into the hoped-for picture: But are you looking for honesty? Honesty always means giving something!
Vivienne (18) meanwhile gives her dark hair color for a striking, fiery red mane. The high school student uses her parents' weekend trip to go out slutty. She dares to follow a feeling that is alien to her. Vivienne no longer wants to be herself for the weekend, the perfect athlete and top of the class, but the “man ripper”. She just wants to let herself go, but during her manhunt in Loretta's garden, she runs into Bump, which pursues Pellworm and disturbs him as he tries to explain to the disillusioned “secretary” Marni that Schrottis can also be people.
On their way through the divided city, in the deep yellow setting sun towards the walled-up Brandenburg Gate, the thrown-together clique meets 42 (42), a former acquaintance of Pellworm, from GDR times, who has now managed to get a VW convertible in the west and gave Pellworm the contract to procure an ancient Isetta with front entry for him .
The U-Bahn handler plays here as a teacher, especially opposite Beule, as non-terminable and rigorous he propagates his original Berlin values. Marni sees her chance in him. But 42 would prefer to hang out with the younger Vivienne. She prefers to stay by Beule's side, which forces 42 to join the group (fighting).
A strange journey begins through a completely impoverished Berlin, where rusted ships rock in the blue hour, drunks join the choir, begging for redemption through drunkenness and sex. Expensive pumps stumble over rusty steel plates through the night and for the wearer of the most broken sneakers far and wide, illuminated by the searchlights of threateningly low-flying traffic machines, the spark of love does not jump over. Vivienne and Beule only have sex with each other, but Pellworm disturbs them.
Small, subtle aggressions and irritations result from this in addition to strange "insider" business that is done on the side: But feelings are something original that mock any compulsion.
... Until everyone finds themselves outside for breakfast early in the morning, between kohlrabi beets in Pellworm's overgrown garden. Pellworm leads 42 to Waltraud (55), a fruit seller whom he met in a dump and who owns an Isetta . 42 reminds Waltraud of a “deceased” who once announced the lottery numbers with music on GDR television. She brings her old Isetta into play at 42 and Pellworm has earned his commission: Better together than lonely.
Conclusion: Basically, not much has happened and yet a suggestive power emanates from this night: There is no person, no matter how empty and banal his fate may be, who does not experience something like rapture in unpredictable moments.
criticism
The film was shown at almost all major film festivals (Berlinale, Chicago, Bombay, Amsterdam, Paris and Saarbrücken, where it created the special prize of the jury, which was extra ( and because of the joy of Wilde Clique ) from the jurors' own pockets (including Clemens Klopfenstein, Peter Hajek ...) was donated).
“ New German Cinema!……
This is one of those pics that points a new direction in the Berlin film scene: A low budget production free of tv chliches and uninspired stereortyped acting. Pic could be effectively programmed abroad. "
Design
As can be seen in the production documents and press reports, the film was made spontaneously within 2 months. The directors were bored with their work for television, where they caused a sensation with documentaries (such as "Die Mauerbande" (1981) and "Die kleine Freiheit - Unter deutscher Dächern " (1982)), and were looking for a "more pleasurable way" of realization your ideas. They did not want to “trick committees, beg donors” again and implemented the Wilde Clique project entirely from their own resources. You write about this aspect on your site "We are true heroes":
“The real heroes in Germany are the free 'filmmakers' who not only take full risk, but also make it out of their own pocket without funding - with their own story. So we don't mean those who only get funding because they do everything right, are streamlined on the market or fulfill the cultural mandate brilliantly, with bestseller films or Valium shows, stories about coming to terms with 1968, resistance, emancies, lesbian and gay milieu, foreigner problems and whatever Compatible no matter how much there is, but those who, without great compromises, happily manage to realize their own view or idea that does not follow a program mandate, against all odds, not pulled by the hair, not by funding bodies, program managers and taste censors can dream more. You don't know what that could be ?! You see! We only rarely get it demonstrated from this country ... "