Zurich - transit

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Zurich - transit. A sketch of a film is the template of a planned film by the Swiss writer Max Frisch . The film script was published in book form in 1966 after the film project had broken up in the previous year due to artistic differences between Frisch and the director Erwin Leiser and his successor Bernhard Wicki falling ill . It was not until 1992, a year after Frisch's death, that director Hilde Bechert filmed the material.

Zurich - Transit is based on a story from the novel Mein Name sei Gantenbein , published in 1964 : On a trip, a man reads his own obituary notice in the newspaper, after his return he attends his own funeral and the subsequent funeral service without recognizing the mourners to give. The film sketch adopts the concept of the novel, but is more detailed, expanded in the plot and describes the planned visual effects.

content

Theo Ehrismann is 41 years old, a pipe smoker and a former Olympic sailor. Now he works as a graduate engineer at Elektro-Werken Studer and lives with his wife Monika and the angora cat Bimbo in Zurich . The marriage has been broken for eleven years. Ehrismann has an affair with a bookseller named Barbara, while his wife has been "understood" by a young man for some time. His only friend Viktor, who, unlike Ehrismann, leads an independent life as a painter, he has not seen for years.

While Ehrismann flies to London privately for a few days without letting his wife know , someone steals his Porsche, has an accident and burns it beyond recognition in the car. The dead are taken for Ehrismann. On his return flight, Ehrismann reads his own obituary notice in the newspaper . After arriving in Zurich, he tries to reach Monika by phone. But when one of his two brothers-in-law, who never liked him, answers the phone, he doesn't know what to say. On the second attempt, the mourners left for the funeral.

Ehrismann also makes his way to the cemetery. When the guests appear one after the other in mourning clothes, he feels incongruous in his light raincoat and fades into the background. After he also lets his wife pass, supported by his brothers-in-law, it is already too late to disturb the event. He plays soccer during the funeral service. Then he goes to the restaurant where the funeral feast is scheduled. Here, too, he does not find the opportunity to reveal himself to the mourning society. Instead, he disrupts their celebration through the jukebox , in which he plays Je ne regrette rien by Édith Piaf . When he vomits, he meets the pastor in the toilet, who doesn't know him.

Ehrismann then strolls aimlessly through the city of Zurich, he takes a look at Barbara's bookstore, which was not at the funeral. She recognizes him, and after he has disappeared again into the crowd, she wanders through Zurich, desperately looking for him. Ehrismann buys a plane ticket to Nairobi , but after meeting an old friend in the airport bar, he misses the plane. Once more he returns to his apartment, in which only the cat is. He looks at the things that are now all irrelevant to him. He only takes his favorite pipe with him. Then he throws the apartment key in the mailbox and walks off on the night streets.

interpretation

Overlays are repeatedly inserted into the plot in which Ehrismann is portrayed as a loser, inferior, socially marginalized: his employers carry a tiny coffin across the company premises, a company of soldiers then bursts into laughter, the brothers-in-law throw mourning wreaths instead of lifebuoys to the capsized sailor . In addition, the presented scenes are split up into several variants. Two possibilities are played out how Monika could react to the appearance of what was believed to be dead: with relief and understanding, which leads to the married couple's overdue discussion, or with distrust and jealousy because of his hidden trip to London, which ends in the usual marital dispute. Two other variants show a couple getting to know each other at the Zurich Carnival to the Guggenmusik . When the larvae are removed, Monika kisses Ehrismann for the first time, and a guest worker the second time. In an imaginary conversation with his old friend Viktor, he finally encourages him to break out of his life.

According to Jürgen H. Petersen, the variants make Ehrismann realize that he is superfluous, unwelcome and replaceable. By playing through different fictions, Ehrismann finally manages to realize one: the continued existence as someone believed dead. This means that the variants in Zurich - Transit differ significantly from those in Mein Name sei Gantenbein . In the film sketch, the variants revolve around a firmly established person with a clear life story who only plays through their possible circumstances. In the novel, the book itself is variable and in the end not a single one of the possibilities is realized. Petersen summed it up as follows: "In the film sketch, Frisch therefore focuses on the modal, in the novel the existential relationship between possibility and reality."

template

The template for the film sketch Zurich - Transit comes from Frisch's novel Mein Name sei Gantenbein , published in 1964 . The ostensibly blind Theo Gantenbein is one of the main characters in the novel, who is invented by the first-person narrator in order to trace the story of his failed partnership. He tells a made-up story to a prostitute named Camilla Huber, including the one about the man who reads his own obituary and then attends his funeral. The episode comprises around seven printed pages and begins with the lines: "A story for Camilla: about a man who is determined time and again to change his way of life, and of course he never succeeds ..."

The man in the original remains nameless, he also lacks Theo Ehrismann's biographical background. The plot is described much more succinctly, many of the embellished subplots from Zurich - Transit are missing. In essence, however, the template is identical and also ends with a final visit to the man who was believed to be dead in his apartment, from which he only takes a pipe and then leaves the apartment keys in the mailbox. With a view to the planned film, Frisch wrote a short form of the plot in 1965 in the typescript Ashes of a Pipe Smoker , which ends with the lines: “Where to? We do not know that. The film only depicts this day of the funeral, a comedy of alienation . "

Film adaptations

Cooperation between quieter and fresh

Max Frisch (1967)

The impetus for the filming of the episode came from the journalist Erwin Leiser , who had previously become known through documentaries such as Mein Kampf and Eichmann and the Third Reich , but had no experience with the production of feature films. Frisch agreed to the project, which, according to his express emphasis, should not be understood as a film adaptation of Mein Name sei Gantenbein . Hanns Eckelkamp was able to be won as a producer , who with his company Atlas-Film hired actors such as Ernst Schröder , Viveca Lindfors , Christina Schollin and Agnes Fink as well as Sven Nykvist , Ingmar Bergman's long-time companion, as cameraman . Filming began in October 1965.

The working titles of the project were: Je ne regrette rien , The ashes of a pipe smoker and Transit . A mixture of author and director film was planned. Frisch and director Leiser should come to an agreement on the content and form of the scenes. In an interview, Frisch described that he wanted to look over the shoulder of a director in order to learn for future film projects himself: “I wanted me to think in the film like Godard , and not first in language that is translated into the film. but directly. The project failed because one director fell ill and the other was unsuitable. "

The draft of the film was already heavily influenced by Frisch, for example when he wanted to use two language levels as a stylistic alienation effect : the realistic scenes in Swiss German dialect, the scenes that only take place in the imagination of the protagonist in High German . According to his idea, the scenes should remain understandable to a large extent without dialogue anyway, and the film should go back "quite a long way to silent films ". He also got heavily involved in the practical work on filming, which Alexander J. Seiler attributed to his work at the theater. Director Leiser later recalled: “I could not have foreseen that Frisch understood so little about practical film work and that his insecurity would infect the main actor.” After the third day of shooting and on the verge of a nervous breakdown, Leiser gave up.

Substitute Wicki

After the Swedish production partners had also withdrawn, Atlas-Film asked Bernhard Wicki for help, who already played a small role in the cast under Leiser. Wicki agreed, replaced Viveca Lindfors with his wife Agnes Fink and worked with Frisch on the script within a month. Hervé Dumont called the end result "a fascinating but difficult text that is difficult to access for the public".

During the first week of shooting there were several technical problems that delayed the process. Then Wicki fell seriously ill and had to go to the hospital. The team fell apart, the main actor Schröder had to return to Berlin because of follow-up engagements, and Frisch refused to be replaced by Hans Christian Blech . The continuation of the shooting was postponed to January 1967 and finally no longer taken up.

About 72 minutes of the shooting exist in the Düsseldorf Film Archive , but these are only close-ups and samples, not complete scenes. The film left a cost of 700,000 Swiss francs. It was Frisch's first and last independent film work. In the spring of 1966 the film script was published as a book edition. In the preface, Frisch emphasized that the text “cannot and should not be more than an instruction, a plan, a framework […]. So what is here is not a story, but rather a libretto . "

Realization by Bechert

After Frisch resisted another attempt to film the failed project in the following years, Zurich - Transit was realized in spring 1992, one year after his death . Director Hilde Bechert and producer Klaus Dexel , who had previously filmed Frisch's diary sketch, Sketch of a Misfortune , and made a documentary about Frisch, received the rights to the project in 1989. Frisch took off the script even before his death. The actors cast included Dieter Kirchlechner , Peter Ehrlich , Axel Milberg , Monika Schwarz and Gisela Uhlen .

However, the criticism was not convinced of the result. The Neue Zürcher Zeitung accepted the modernization of the plot, in which, for example, Frisch's guest worker became an asylum seeker, but regretted the loss of complexity and associative entanglement. The realism of the film is "consistently superficial", individual scenes lead to "embarrassment", "annoying intrusiveness" and "banality". The Tages-Anzeiger praised Kirchlechner's play as "sparingly differentiated" and individual scenes that stuck. “But with the technically well-organized film, Frisch's subtle thought game solidifies into an all too solid story, which sometimes even comes close to faltering.” At least the film-dienst drew the conclusion: “Two film adaptations in the mid-1960s failed, only the third project succeeded a year after Frisch's death. "

Documentary retelling by von Gunten

In 2011 Matthias von Gunten made a documentary film entitled Max Frisch: Zurich Transit. The failed film project . In it he assembled film scenes shot in 1965, photos from the set, recordings of a staged reading with Max Frisch as well as interviews with Hanns Eckelkamp, Beatrice von Matt , Peter von Matt and the photographer Pia Zanetti into a documentary retelling .

literature

Text output

  • Max Frisch: Zurich - transit. Sketch of a movie . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1966.

Secondary literature

  • Luis Bolliger (Ed.): Now: max fresh . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2001, ISBN 3-518-39734-6 , pp. 173-187.
  • Jürgen H. Petersen: Max Frisch . Metzler, Stuttgart 2002, ISBN 3-476-13173-4 , pp. 136-137.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Jürgen H. Petersen: Max Frisch , pp. 136-137.
  2. ↑ Max Frisch: Collected works in chronological order. Fifth volume . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1998, ISBN 3-518-06533-5 , pp. 248-255.
  3. ↑ Max Frisch: Ashes of a pipe smoker . In: Luis Bolliger (Ed.): Now: max frisch , p. 181.
  4. ↑ a b c d Alexander J. Seiler : Too cinematic for the film? In: Luis Bolliger (Ed.): Now: max frisch, p. 133.
  5. ↑ a b Interview by HW Ohly with Max Frisch in the Evangelisches Filmbeobachter 1965. Excerpt in: Luis Bolliger (Ed.): Now: max frisch . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2001, ISBN 3-518-39734-6 , pp. 182-183.
  6. ↑ Hervé Dumont : Max Frisch once again missed his rendezvous with the film . In: Luis Bolliger (Ed.): Now: max frisch , p. 183.
  7. ↑ Max Frisch: Collected works in chronological order. Fifth volume , p. 587.
  8. ↑ Hervé Dumont: Max Frisch once again misses his rendezvous with the film , pp. 183–184.
  9. ↑ Hervé Dumont: Max Frisch once again misses his rendezvous with the film , p. 184.
  10. ^ Transit on the Hanns Eckelkamp Filmproduktion website .
  11. ^ Max Frisch: Zurich - Transit . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1966, p. 5.
  12. ^ Hilde Bechert : Zurich - Transit . In: Luis Bolliger (Ed.): Now: max frisch , p. 185.
  13. ^ Zurich - Transit in the Internet Movie Database (English).
  14. ↑ ms: "Zurich - Transit" - unsuccessful . In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung of April 7, 1993. In: Luis Bolliger (Ed.): Now: max frisch , p. 187.
  15. ↑ Tages-Anzeiger of April 6, 1993. In: Luis Bolliger (Ed.): Now: max frisch , p. 187.
  16. ↑ Zurich - Transit in the film lexicon of Kabel eins .
  17. ^ Website for the 100th birthday of Max Frisch, Schweizer Radio und Fernsehen SRF. ( Memento from May 18, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) The documentary was broadcast for the first time on May 15, 2011 as part of the Sternstunden program on SF1.