The director Peter Fleischmann has died - and the scandal of this news is the fact that far too many will say: who is that? Never heard. On the one hand, this is due to the fact that film historiography is unfair and often capricious (luckily its judgments can be revised) and the German film canon is a work of ignorance. Apparently it also has to do with the fact that this Peter Fleischmann was able to stage a lot of things very well, but not himself: a friendly man with a staid name, a boyish face who spoke a seemingly harmless Palatinate dialect. And apparently had no interest in stylizing himself as a brilliant young filmmaker. From appearances with the insolence of Rainer Werner Fassbinder,In any case, nothing is known of the provocative sensibility of Wim Wenders or the cosmopolitan eloquence of Volker Schlöndorff. And only in his later years, as Schlöndorff has just described in a beautiful obituary, did his habitus gain an Orson-Welles-like gravitas. Having become heavier and more dignified, he said, smoking a cigar, he waited for film history to rediscover him and finally celebrate his skills.
The so-called bums
Claudius Seidl
Editor in the features section.
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In addition to studying in Munich, he had also studied in Paris, had been the assistant to the extremely headstrong Jacques Rozier and had seen first hand how the filmmakers of the Nouvelle Vague went out into the open to see more life, more presence, more movement to bring into their productions.
But while the films of the young Godard or Truffaut's Antoine Doinel cycle are also present to the German audience, only specialists remember Fleischmann's early films, “Autumn of the Bum” from 1967 or the “Hunting Scenes from Lower Bavaria” from 1969.
Which is a failure because these films have a pull, a tension, an effortlessness that was otherwise rather alien to the young German film. "Herbst der Gammler" is a documentary without any spectacular locations. Fleischmann lets the so-called bums talk and talk about themselves; and that the almost irresistible image of a dream of freedom is formed from it: this is due to the fact that the staging does not pretend for a second that it knows anything better. Or the fact that the gaze of the camera seems so enamored with the faces and movements of these girls and boys. The film might not have needed the evil philistines who all want to be sent to the labor camp. "Hunting scenes from Lower Bavaria" is the film adaptation of a play by Martin Sperr,that makes it a bit too easy with the story of the obdurate villagers who do not want to tolerate a homosexual man. And the fact that this film still moves you today has above all to do with the fact that Fleischmann, along with Angela Winkler and Hanna Schygulla, primarily lets real villagers play themselves. Which is especially nice and complex in the moments when the script doesn't dictate anything.
To direct means to forego total control - and that a film can get out of hand is something that Fleischmann experienced and suffered with his expensive, over-ambitious German-Soviet co-production "It's not easy to be a god" from 1990. That's what he looked for easier tasks; For example, he saved the Babelsberg studio from ruin. Peter Fleischmann, 84 years old, died on Wednesday in Potsdam. Immortality would be the bare minimum now.