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10/08/09
Forty Years Ago: RWF’s KATZELMACHER
Premiere in Mannheim and plenty of awards provide seed money
KATZELMACHER premiered at the Internationale Filmwoche in Mannheim on October 8, 1969. The Evangelischer Filmpreis award the film received here was followed by the prize of the Deutsche Filmkritik and, equally still in 1969, the TV prize of the Deutsche Akademie der darstellenden Künste (i.e. the German Academy for the Performing Arts). From a cinematic viewpoint, this second feature-length piece was Fassbinder’s breakthrough. It also brought him, in 1970, the Golden Film Bands for the best script, the best direction and the best production. Measured against this plethora of awards, nine days of shooting and a cost of less than 80,000 Deutschmarks for the entire production the achievement seems absolutely unbelievable from the present vantage point.
The film’s main motif is a totally unabashed xenophobia in 1960s German suburbia. The tableau-like settings show the emotional as well as the financial dependencies between the individuals and their (petty)-bourgeois milieu.
The film’s motto is a Yaak Karsunke quote: “It is better to make new mistakes than to perpetuate the old ones ad nauseam.”
RWF dedicated KATZELMACHER to the writer Marieluise Fleißer.
The German movie-rating agency FBW graded the film “especially valuable”. It opened officially in movie houses on November 22, 1969.
RWFF filmography for KATZELMACHER
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