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Where
is the garden Eden, the paradies? At the Niederrhein, as old restaurant
legends want it; in us, if we carry out it on ground connection, thus
everywhere, or, how Ernst Bloch says, "where still nobody was",
in the homeland? Over the garden Eden in the gap between utopian and forgotten
draft made the Duesseldorfer Lutz Mommartz an three-hour film. It looks
for its mental way between the Archimedean points of idea "homeland",
"paradies" and "utopia".Mommartz succeeded an unusual
and thoughtful film. Already the first, fantastically beautiful pictures
show the high requirement of the director. In fantastic nebula air water
tableaux is painted the first creation day. The separation from the firm
country, wet and atmosphere shines in colors as of William Turner - until
a breath-robbing zoom lens return motion withdraws us from very far away
golden cloud hole to the vision on our feet. Very suddenly appears rheinischer
Karneval, masks, faces, inside this the film producer on search. Certainly
Mommartz does not mean to find that paradies at its mythologisch niederrheinischen
place. He suggests in his film that humans must order themselves their
ground Eden/ Eden-garden; He digs with his cinematic work in the "niederrheinischen
scholle" and society; the topos of this landscape however is his
only hanger for utopia. Utopia, in the Greek quite logically, a perfect
nowhere country, here completely glaringly the concrete place with its
beauty, its customs, its traditions and also its incrustation confronted..........
(Sebastian
Feldmann RP 20.12.1977)
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........and
when Mommartz places his stereotyped question: "Do you know where
the garden Eden is ?" - then that is not a joke with hidden camera,
but the request to ask oneself also: why one did not ask oneself yet for
it. Because that it is here, is still here and will remain for a while,
of this the camera is convinced, when drives through the village Schenkenschanz
or into the tent of the Schützenverein or again and again investigates
the earth and the sky, the gardens and the far country, the fog and the
Rhine and the silence......... Because of the instant, by which film became
consciously, requires new instants, makes desires in the long term, desires
on time.
(P.W.
Jansen epd Juli 1978) |
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"the
garden Eden", a two and a half-hour discovery journey at the Niederrhein,
documents most impression-fully, where such an experimental entrance can
lead to the documentary film. Apart from some matte gag dramaturgy, which
can bearly support the old times of the Happenigs, the film draws its
strength straight from the fact that the film producer does not show up
as the actual subject of the film, hidden behind the pseudo objectivity
of the observation, but that he is it, who draws the Portaet of a landscape
and its inhabitants. A film full of stories from the perspective of jugglers,
which travel trough the country, put themselve into position and admire
attention from the good-naturedlied village inhabitants. Lutz Mommartz
does not rank reliably among those representatives of the experimental
film, who brought large aesthetic innovations out, but the retrospective
illustrates very clearly -what he shows and what he encourages, the fresh
access, the courage is, to risk something unorthodox which does not shrink
from the risk of the failure. Films as sketch block? sometimes so, sometimes
so.
(Gertrud
Koch Frankf. Rundschau 15.Mai 1978) |
