Director Siegfried Kühn – The Beautiful Unholy Ein

There is a partnership between hiking circus and consecration, and there are films that mix, as it were, the sawdust of the ring with the star dust of the mythical: The dazzling parable asks the gray uniform of everyday life to dance. So Defa director Siegfried Kühn tried again and again.

A face, a man, and almost an overall artistic denomination is recorded: We talk about the grandiose actor Fritz Marquardt. Title design in the DEFA film “The second life of Friedrich Wilhelm Georg Platow” (1973). A barrier attendance loses its workplace through the use of modern signaling technology and becomes a strange, growling, childish, angular Don Quichote. Marquardt: mysterious, Plebejisch, Schelmisch converts; A Buster Keaton of the tricky, beautifully unholy simplicity. Nothing can happen, even if everything happens to him. Platow’s route houses are devastated by young people, the old man himself sits on the edge, as not present at all, as not alive at all. In the end, he defies progress with a draisine, which is always a siding.

As sad as the story seems, there is another truth: the happiest and most spiritual invention of human art is the defiant joke. Kühn’s film almost escaped a ban, only a few copies, pushed off into studio cinemas, without an official premiere, documented with a ban on review and export. A strip presented by the authorities of unpopularly only hidden. Because he supposedly distorted the image of the working class.

Platow like Marquardt like Kühn: There is a while – which is never that that he fit in. He disturbs, he stalls. This is the radicality of internal incapacity to be unplanted. There is a person in every landscape so that this area happens incorrectly from a certain point. In the arguments of Platov’s silence – which in the film became a certain picture! – you could get lost like in a thick, deep forest. Deep and sometimes cool. Platow like Marquardt like Kühn: a person, quite with themselves. So alone. Not lonely, because someone has his experience and he trusts her.

If you think of faces in Kühn’s films, then also of Heidemarie Wenzel, leading actress in “Zeit der Stork” (1971) based on Herbert Otto’s novel. Every serious picture of her radiated somewhat attractive bright and hugging. She embodied the reserved elegantly, the close relationship of which is a secret and danger. Or Hilmar That in »Don Juan-Karl-Liebknecht-Str. 78 «(1980). An opera director in the Zerrfeld of patriarchal presumption and artistic drive; that ego as the field of territory of the egoisms. The opera: By the way, the real, unfulfilled dream location of the filmmaker.

The Silesian, born in Breslau in 1935, initially worked as a mining engineer. He studied in Babelsberg and Moscow, with Großmeister: Sergei Gerassimow, Mikhail Romm, Grigori Tschuchrai. With his DEFA films (“The Dream of the Elch”, “Elective Agency”, “The actress”“Today only the others die”) Kühn was never the type of seller, he was not a provider, he staged in rhythm, not in time. He loved technical experiments, played cinematic with colors, remained an artist in everything he started in the “Nebendrunst” (Hermann Lenz). And there was always a hint of bizarre missions.

“Childhood” (1987) is one of his films. A farmer flees the farm towards one – hiking circus. There she is again to get rid of the longing to get away from the ball of the narrowing things. After the end of the DEFA the foreseeable end of the shooting time. Now the way to write. The stories band “My heartbreaking enemy” appeared at Eulenspiegel. Previously the autobiographically misleading book “The Erd organ or wonderful abysmal world” – here too the return to an origin. Umming and the magic of the undergrowth: “If I should show you the nature, you have to get down.” Today Siegfried Kühn is 90 years old.