Woyzeck (1979)

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Movie
Original title Woyzeck
Country of production Germany
original language German
Publishing year 1979
length 77 minutes
Age rating FSK 16
Rod
Director Werner Herzog
script Werner Herzog
production Werner Herzog
music Fiddle Quartet Telč
Antonio Vivaldi
Alessandro Marcello
camera Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein
cut Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus
occupation

Woyzeck is a feature film by Werner Herzog that was released in 1979. Herzog's film is the best-known adaptation of Georg Büchner's eponymous drama fragment . The main role is played by Klaus Kinski .

style

Herzogs Woyzeck sticks to Büchner's literary model, only a few minor characters are missing. Very long shots in the scenes, mostly shot with almost no counter cuts , should it the impression of a theater play arouse. Sharp cuts between the scenes without filling transitions indicate the fragmentary nature of Büchner's piece.

Emergence

Werner Herzog filmed the material, which he valued very highly ("the best that was written in our language"), in the summer of 1978. The shooting took place in Telč (then Czechoslovakia), immediately after the shooting of Nosferatu . With a small budget (approx. 900,000 DM), the shoot was completed in just over two weeks. Bruno S. (who was already seen in Herzog's Kaspar Hauser film ) was originally intended for the main role, but Herzog decided at short notice for Kinski, whose exhaustion he wanted to exploit for the film after Nosferatu . Herzog later expressed himself critically about the cast of the main role. One night he had a flash of enlightenment that only Kinski could play the part. The failure was predictable and all of his friends warned him.

criticism

The close proximity to the original was rejected by critics who expected a more “contemporary” interpretation. The camera and editing work in the film (see above) was also mixed. Some critics criticized the fact that the film does not take a moral position, for example to the main character, and leaves the viewer at a distance. Earlier performances would have dared and achieved more here. Others saw this distance from the plot as an important stylistic device.

The performances of the main actors Klaus Kinski and Eva Mattes met with praise and criticism. Following on from the director's self-critical words, the film critic Richard Roud pointedly expressed the point of view of the 'wrongly cast Kinski' in the magazine Sight and Sound :

“Now Kinski is an extraordinary actor , but the only thing he can't play [...] is a dull creature. [...] Kinski may try as hard as he wants: he cannot possibly convince us that he is not smarter, more powerful and more commanding than all the other characters in the film. "

Hellmuth Karasek writes in his review in Spiegel that "the remake of the Büchner fragment [looks] like a schedule management and not like an attempt to expose oneself to the laconic quality of the most concentrated German theater play". However, in contrast to Roud's criticism, he praises Kinski's acting performance, which is "impressive and worth seeing".

Not least because of the ambivalent view of the cast, this film is generally not as highly valued as other Herzog Kinski films, such as Fitzcarraldo or Aguirre, the Wrath of God .

"However, excellent acting achievements can hardly reconcile the disappointment that this Woyzeck" vision is overly stylized and therefore largely non-filmic and bloodless. "

Awards

literature

Individual evidence

  1. See Fischer / Hembus, Der Neue Deutsche Film , p. 264.
  2. Quoted here from Fischer / Hembus, Der Neue Deutsche Film , p. 264 f.
  3. On cue . In: Der Spiegel , May 21, 1979. Retrieved October 2, 2013.
  4. Woyzeck. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed October 12, 2017 .Template: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used 

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