The cinema was its location – Berliner Morgenpost

  Do, 06.18.2015, 07.56 clock
 
 

 

Elmar Krekeler

 Obituary of a friend and film critic: Dominik Graf’s “What’s here end” over Michael Althen

Once the father says who would like to become a film critic, about his son, who has become a very big film critic that he had, that the son always told him his movie reviews are all well, but his obituaries are much more beautiful. Because what truth to it. And that probably comes from the fact that the film critic Michael Althen, the Dominik Graf has devoted more than three years after his death a cinematic obituary full obituaries, the “What’s here end” is and is much more than a documentary about a film critic that Michael Althen so as nowhere in the obituaries for Audrey Hepburn or about Michelangelo Antonioni so much with him and was what it was cinema.

Michael Althen was a kind of a new German Fieselschweifführer film feature articles. The center of a media generation, the first generation of German critics who in Hollywood movies at home more felt than in the German cinema of the auteur years. From longing perhaps says Althen in one of a surprising number of Althen-film snippets that Graf was in his documentation of discussions with Althen’s friends, colleagues and his family, einmontieren, from nostalgia for a youth who has never had that one only had at the movies.

“What do you mean the end” is the story of an exemplary German suburban citizens youth and their vanishing points, the cinema, the great city, the cinematic temptations that Munich at that time had in store as perhaps no other German city ever. The story of a miracle believers, a highly gifted. From Silence is the speech much. The magic, the rain of images and memories. Much also from death. Again and again jumps Grafs film but the moribund of Cheat Death. Told, can tell the wonders of that world, in which one is drawn as soon as it gets dark. The cinema was Althen an ideal place. He was able to stay and escape the same time.

The camera sweeps past his collection of Citroen DS models. We see his model railway, drive through a miniature Munich. At its movie collection along his bookshelves. Althen was a night clerk and a great reader. What he wrote that he began when the friends were drunk in bed.

Althen was no ideologue of cinema, but a lover who still moments took place at the horrific strip to marvel , a philosopher who believed in loyalty firmly to the realization value of films for life. And the texts that skipped the line between journalistic crafts and literature with relish and always with a melancholy gold rim. And Graf reads them out as if they were of Chekhov.

An anecdotes is “What do you mean the end” rich. You hear them gladly. And you missed him, even though you did not know him. More can not be reached with an obituary.

Documentation: D 2015 127 minutes, with Michael Althen, Christian Petzold

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