Dämmerung – Ostberliner Bohème der 50er Jahre
Peter Voigt
THE LANDSCAPE WAS BLEAK. THE PEOPLE WERE OPTIMISTIC. THE SCHNAPPS WAS GOOD ...
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Dämmerung – Ostberliner Bohème der 50er Jahre
Credits
Producer
Rainer Ackermann, Brandenburger Filmbetrieb, DEFA-Studio für Dokumentarfilme GmbH, MDR, SFB
Director
Peter Voigt
Music
Olivier Messiaen
Cinematographer
Christian Lehmann
Editor
Peter Voigt
Script
Peter Voigt
THE LANDSCAPE WAS BLEAK. THE PEOPLE WERE OPTIMISTIC. THE SCHNAPPS WAS GOOD.
In an age that’s about to throw off everything old, on the backdrop of a Berlin of dug-up streets, in a dilapidated ruin that used to be the legendary “Ganymed”, once more at the bar: the actors Rolf Ludwig, Stefan Lisewski and Ekkehard Schall, Barbara Brecht-Schall, the sculptor Werner Stötzer, Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler, Jutta Voigt and other in-crowd celebrities of the past. The glitzy life of an avant-garde who, as the “emergency association of work-shy intellectuals”, occasionally bought up all the schnapps at the Konsum shop to prepare for the 17 June revolt.
“Peter Voigt edited and mixed the elements of life, the images and sounds, in a way that makes his memories seem to float in the air. He compressed life to the core that cannot be explained or interpreted. There are people who took third, fourth and fifth paths when there seemed to be only two main streets. Paradise is not what will be but what used to be. Three times Knaup tells the story of the Australian who was locked up in an asylum. He had bought a new boomerang and wanted to throw the old one away.” (Fritz-Jochen Kopka)
---Grit Lemke
In an age that’s about to throw off everything old, on the backdrop of a Berlin of dug-up streets, in a dilapidated ruin that used to be the legendary “Ganymed”, once more at the bar: the actors Rolf Ludwig, Stefan Lisewski and Ekkehard Schall, Barbara Brecht-Schall, the sculptor Werner Stötzer, Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler, Jutta Voigt and other in-crowd celebrities of the past. The glitzy life of an avant-garde who, as the “emergency association of work-shy intellectuals”, occasionally bought up all the schnapps at the Konsum shop to prepare for the 17 June revolt.
“Peter Voigt edited and mixed the elements of life, the images and sounds, in a way that makes his memories seem to float in the air. He compressed life to the core that cannot be explained or interpreted. There are people who took third, fourth and fifth paths when there seemed to be only two main streets. Paradise is not what will be but what used to be. Three times Knaup tells the story of the Australian who was locked up in an asylum. He had bought a new boomerang and wanted to throw the old one away.” (Fritz-Jochen Kopka)
---Grit Lemke
Der Ort Die Zeit Der Tod – Ein Heimatfilm
Peter Voigt
Lake Tollense in Mecklenburg, a landscape powdered with snow that looks delicate, Far Eastern. A landscape marked by death: mass suicide, euthanasia, prison camps ...
Der Ort Die Zeit Der Tod – Ein Heimatfilm
Credits
Director
Peter Voigt
Cinematographer
Christian Lehmann
Editor
Thomas Malz
Speaker
Karl Burmeister, Alexander Lang
Lake Tollense in Mecklenburg, a landscape powdered with snow that looks delicate, Far Eastern. A landscape marked by death: mass suicide, euthanasia, prison camps, German Wehrmacht, SS, weapons testing bases, NPA bunkers. THOSE BODIES OF FÜNFEICHEN … A video collage of local studies texts and elegiac images into which blurred, “taste-less” ones are dropped, of Japanese music and typographic inserts of pre-Christian Greek sepulchral steles, of beauty and horror.
HOW OFTEN HAVE I DIED, BUT NEVER LIKE THIS.
---Grit Lemke
HOW OFTEN HAVE I DIED, BUT NEVER LIKE THIS.
---Grit Lemke
Episches Theater
Peter Voigt
At Bertolt Brecht’s request, a performance of his production of J. M. R. Lenz’s “The Tutor” at the Berliner Ensemble in 1951 was filmed in a static long shot, in single frames and with intervals ...
Credits
Director
Peter Voigt
Cinematographer
Wolfgang Hieb
Speaker
Hermann Beyer, Dieter Knaup, Martin Wuttke
At Bertolt Brecht’s request, a performance of his production of J. M. R. Lenz’s “The Tutor” at the Berliner Ensemble in 1951 was filmed in a static long shot, in single frames and with intervals. The untouched reels were discovered in the Bertolt Brecht Archive in 1992. Voigt reconstructs seven scenes of the performance from the material and intercuts them with director’s notes Brecht had written for a planned “Tutor” model. A “film sketch” (P. V.) with an aura.
---Grit Lemke
---Grit Lemke
Heiner Müller: Kentauren
Peter Voigt
THE STATE IS A MILL THAT MUST GRIND. THE STATE NEEDS ENEMIES AS THE MILL NEEDS CORN. THE STATE THAT HAS NO ENEMY CEASES TO BE A STATE. A KINGDOM FOR A PUBLIC ENEMY ...
Credits
Director
Peter Voigt
Speaker
Heiner Müller
THE STATE IS A MILL THAT MUST GRIND. THE STATE NEEDS ENEMIES AS THE MILL NEEDS CORN. THE STATE THAT HAS NO ENEMY CEASES TO BE A STATE. A KINGDOM FOR A PUBLIC ENEMY.
A montage of: “Wolokolamsker Chaussee IV”, written and recited by Heiner Müller, graphics from the Duden German-Russian dictionary, “My Medusa” by Konrad Klapheck, the “Basics of civil defence” wall chart, prints from Goya’s “Proverbios”, “Assyrian Divine Creature”, “Skeletons” and bone studies by Battista Franco as well as Arnold Böcklin’s “Battle of the Centaurs”.
---Grit Lemke
A montage of: “Wolokolamsker Chaussee IV”, written and recited by Heiner Müller, graphics from the Duden German-Russian dictionary, “My Medusa” by Konrad Klapheck, the “Basics of civil defence” wall chart, prints from Goya’s “Proverbios”, “Assyrian Divine Creature”, “Skeletons” and bone studies by Battista Franco as well as Arnold Böcklin’s “Battle of the Centaurs”.
---Grit Lemke
Ich bin Ernst Busch
Peter Voigt
Peter Voigt met the singer and actor Ernst Busch at the Berliner Ensemble in 1953 and was to become part of Konrad Wolf’s crew for the latter’s cycle “Busch Sings”. Here he supplements the gaps in this work: Busch’s rebellious character, which was tolerated only when it was directed against the class enemy ...
Credits
Director
Peter Voigt
Cinematographer
Christian Lehmann
Script
Peter Voigt
Speaker
Klaus Löwitsch
Peter Voigt met the singer and actor Ernst Busch at the Berliner Ensemble in 1953 and was to become part of Konrad Wolf’s crew for the latter’s cycle “Busch Sings”. Here he supplements the gaps in this work: Busch’s rebellious character, which was tolerated only when it was directed against the class enemy and which gradually drove the artist into isolation even among his comrades. ERNST BUSCH NOR GALILEI EITHER HAVE EVER KNEELED IN FRONT OF A POPE. Voigt edits reports, diary entries, songs, documents, score sheets on the backdrop of a repeated sequence showing the Pergamon Altar. Fragmentary, elliptic, painful.
“A film of such relentlessness, absolute integrity and factuality and yet great aesthetic beauty can only be made by someone whose love of the subject, Ernst Busch, merges with own experiences. There is no bitterness, but a lot of rage.” (Renate Stinn)
---Grit Lemke
“A film of such relentlessness, absolute integrity and factuality and yet great aesthetic beauty can only be made by someone whose love of the subject, Ernst Busch, merges with own experiences. There is no bitterness, but a lot of rage.” (Renate Stinn)
---Grit Lemke
Knabenjahre
Peter Voigt
Two men in front of a mirror wall, talking about their youth in Hitler’s Germany. In this pared-down setting the words become powerful ...
Credits
Director
Peter Voigt
Music
Carl Orff
Cinematographer
Winfried Goldner, Christian Lehmann
Editor
Peter Voigt
Script
Christian Lehmann, Peter Voigt
Two men in front of a mirror wall, talking about their youth in Hitler’s Germany. In this pared-down setting the words become powerful. Some are picked out and repeated in typographic inserts: GERMAN FOREST. WE ARE DIFFERENT. FOREIGN WORKERS. LATENT KNOWLEDGE. DEATH SQUAD. In between, goldfish in an aquarium, serene, reassuring.
Men of a specific generation, all of them from the GDR, talk about being raised to be tough and disciplined, dutiful and ready to become part of a group. A taboo was broken in their terrifying normality: a German youth.
“An interior journey, into the hidden mirror hall of our consciousness.” (Hans-Jörg Rother)
---Grit Lemke
Men of a specific generation, all of them from the GDR, talk about being raised to be tough and disciplined, dutiful and ready to become part of a group. A taboo was broken in their terrifying normality: a German youth.
“An interior journey, into the hidden mirror hall of our consciousness.” (Hans-Jörg Rother)
---Grit Lemke
Martha Lehmann
Peter Voigt
In a crossing keeper’s hut near Leipzig, Martha Lehmann notes her thoughts on tiny scraps of paper, the backs of train or lottery tickets ...
Credits
Director
Peter Voigt
Cinematographer
Winfried Goldner
Editor
Ilse Radtke
Script
Peter Voigt
7 JULY, 1952 / POST 46, TAUCHA / VERY HOT WEATHER FOR A FEW DAYS. / RASPBERRIES, STRAWBERRIES, DELIGHTFUL! / 7 OF THE 12 CHICKS ARE COCKS. / HOPEFULLY THERE WILL BE NO 3RD WAR.
In a crossing keeper’s hut near Leipzig, Martha Lehmann notes her thoughts on tiny scraps of paper, the backs of train or lottery tickets. Voigt reconstructs a model biography from these finds – his variation of Brecht’s “unworthy old woman”.
---Grit Lemke
In a crossing keeper’s hut near Leipzig, Martha Lehmann notes her thoughts on tiny scraps of paper, the backs of train or lottery tickets. Voigt reconstructs a model biography from these finds – his variation of Brecht’s “unworthy old woman”.
---Grit Lemke
Stein schleift Schere
Peter Voigt
A city in present-day Poland. The “Polack city” six-year-old Voigt moved to in 1939. EVERY GERMAN BOY HAS A PICTURE OF THE FÜHRER IN HIS ROOM ...
Credits
Director
Peter Voigt
Cinematographer
Winfried Goldner
Editor
Peter Voigt
A city in present-day Poland. The “Polack city” six-year-old Voigt moved to in 1939. EVERY GERMAN BOY HAS A PICTURE OF THE FÜHRER IN HIS ROOM. “Reichsdeutsche” (Germans living in the “Reich”) and “Volksdeutsche” (ethnic Germans living outside its borders). “Jungvolk” (German Youth). The bad guy: the Jew. HE DID NOT ENCOUNTER ANY POLISH. Photos, fragments of phrases, a rolling train, counting rhymes. TINKER, TAYLOR, SOLDIER, SAILOR. The men with the rolling camera, again and again. The images are work, like remembrance. EVERYTHING WAS SO NORMAL.
---Grit Lemke
---Grit Lemke
Wieland Förster – Protokoll einer Gefangenschaft. Teil 1: Die Begnadigung
Peter Voigt
At the age of 16, Dresden-based sculptor Wieland Förster was sentenced to ten years hard labour by a Soviet Military Court for alleged possession of weapons, a sentence which was commuted to seven and a half years
Wieland Förster – Protokoll einer Gefangenschaft. Teil 1: Die Begnadigung
Credits
Director
Peter Voigt
Cinematographer
Christian Lehmann
At the age of 16, Dresden-based sculptor Wieland Förster was sentenced to ten years hard labour by a Soviet Military Court for alleged possession of weapons, a sentence which was commuted to seven and a half years. At his request, Peter Voigt and Christian Lehmann join him on a walk through the building – which houses the Technische Universität Dresden today – in which he was detained for months and subjected to nightly interrogations.
“Förster, on the other hand, enters as a solo character, most closely resembling the subject of a traditional documentary film; and yet it’s different, a rhapsodic recital and nothing else, uninterrupted, no landscape, no music, nothing is done to make the character ‘approachable’. The term ‘records’ is executed with a salute, saluting in the sense of a genre.” (P. V.)
---Grit Lemke
“Förster, on the other hand, enters as a solo character, most closely resembling the subject of a traditional documentary film; and yet it’s different, a rhapsodic recital and nothing else, uninterrupted, no landscape, no music, nothing is done to make the character ‘approachable’. The term ‘records’ is executed with a salute, saluting in the sense of a genre.” (P. V.)
---Grit Lemke
