If something helped to preserve the tiresome school reading Stefan Zweig “Schachnovelle” in long-term memory, this was his haunting portrayal of a life on the edge. Maria Schrader’s film “Before the Dawn”, an episodic exploration of Stefan Zweig’s last years in exile in America draws freely from the Erklärungswut common celebrity biographies discrete parallels desperate situation of the writer, in 1942 in Brazil took his own life.
“Schachnovelle” tells of an Austrian who escapes after the takeover by the Nazis of isolation torture of a Gestapo prison. Ironically, in idle luxurierenden ambience of the passenger ship, which allows him to escape to America, but he is confronted with his drawn from the madness self. The grueling prison survived the man without betrayal by practicing in imaginary chess games, is split into two strategic targets and thus received his intellectual activity.
anxiety, depression and schizophrenia
the steamer now met him a real chess champion and with it, the temporality of the game, also a cold one’s own advantage-calculate opponents and a round of passionate voyeurs – lifelike realities thus leading the lonely the more dramatic the recurrence of his anxiety and schizophrenia in mind. ” / p>
the script for Maria Schrader’s film, wrote the director together with Jan Schomburg, accesses the momentum of such disunity, without imitating the psychologizing Zungenschlag today biopics. “Before the Dawn” penetrates into the mental state of Stefan Zweig an extent that it is documented in letters, speeches and its written in Brazil autobiography “The World of Yesterday” and statements by witnesses.
focusing the film on a few episodes of his exile years and make it so, to make room for the contradictory impulses of the author in dealing with his neighbor and urgent to him news from Europe. It takes you along in the world of cosmopolitans without financial worries, who is revered in Brazil and Argentina as an artist. In a bright tropical landscape he wants to retreat to the writer-work and it can not escape the horror.
Josef Hader embodies the suffering writers literally
The Austrian cabaret artist and actor Josef Hader embodies this man who keeps his stoop, literally; a historical figure he seems thereby not having to earn. Once one sees while driving the blooming landscape on the disk pass before him while his barely perceptible smile anticipates the farewell.
Stefan Zweig, the life considered himself a “Jew by chance”, became an avowed pacifist 1934 to the attention of Austrofascists and initially fled into exile in England. 1939 finally went through New York to South America, which he had as a celebrated artist visited several times.
In one of the episodes reconstructed “Before the Dawn”, the international writers’ meetings in 1936 in Buenos Aires, in which Stefan Zweig opposed the appeals of his colleagues for themselves categorically insists on the separation of art and politics. Charly Hübner shines in this scene as exiled writer Emil Ludwig in a furious, staged in full entirety speech with the call for political partisanship of the gathered artists against fascism.
A historical refugee film, amazingly currently
As the skeptical attitude of Stefan Zweig was contradictory to his suicide, taking more episodes in the view. Branch visited with his second wife Lotte a sugar cane plantation, taking tired towards the honors of provincial elites and investigated immediately run away. A brief scene earlier, in which he alone makes notes for themselves and soaks up the atmosphere, has a book advance, in which he dictatorially ruled Brazil as a country of the future celebrated at that time – probably to a for himself and his wife obtaining permanent visa, which should enable him to life in Petropolis, near Rio de Janeiro.
A not least theatrical confrontation, the encounter Stefan Zweig / Josef Hader with Barbara Sukowa in the role his divorced first woman Friderike 1940 in New York. The ex-wife of him amicably connected with her daughters had achieved through his help America. . And with her now the petitions of her friends and acquaintances arrive, for the well-established in America branch may be used absolutely
“Before the Dawn”, the question of commitment to political refugees new – from a historical perspective. The director Maria Schrader is an intense visual narrative with great actors succeeded in an unexpected current movie.
In Berlin in cinemas Blue Star Pankow, Capitol, Delphi, FaF, Hackesche Hofe, International, Yorck
No comments:
Post a Comment