Reisender Krieger is a Swiss film by Christian Schocher. The film depicts a week in the life of a travelling cosmetics salesman, inspired by Homer's Odyssey and the novel Ulysses by James Joyce. A road movie with amateur actors, it was aired in 1981 in television and premiered in cinema in early 1982.
This plot description follows the director's cut of 2008.
On a grey autumn morning, a middle-aged man named Krieger leaves his Swiss Plattenbau home in a housing estate called Wohninsel Webermühle,[2] driving a Citroën CX. Krieger visits beauty and hair salons, trying to sell products of the Blue Eye label, especially the Blue DreamEau de Cologne, advertising with the slogan "That's how this winter smells in Switzerland" (in Swiss German: "Eso schmeckts dä Winter i dr Schwyz"). He isn't very successful. His route leads him to Basel via Olten. In Basel, Krieger visits the autumn fair (Basler Herbstmesse) after having phoned his wife from the hotel room. He drinks in a bar and in a dance hall, though rather observing the night life surrounding him than taking an active part in it.
The following day Krieger drives on, into the Swiss Alps. He takes along another salesman who had his driving licence suspended. Krieger mentions to him that he was a member of the French Foreign Legion. After visiting a hair salon in a Graubünden tourist village (the woman in charge mentions that Blue Eye's eye shadow doesn't sell well), they go to a local evening event with dance music.
Krieger's morning shower and shave are shown extensively. He then travels without the other salesman, and now takes along a hippie sporting a full beard and felt hat. At first quiet, his new travel companion soon makes homosexual advances, but is refused by Krieger who says that he's content with his wife. Finally, Krieger throws him out of the car. After a drive through Lucerne, Krieger talks with the female owner of a hair salon. The hairdresser, talking in Basel German and smoking a lot, asks Krieger about his life and his relationship to his wife while they drink champagne. She berates Krieger for spending his time in bars and driving. According to her, Krieger is always tired when he visits her and looks in need of a hair wash[3] - "you want to sell me something, but I'd have something much better for you". Krieger fears for his job and stresses that he has to provide for his wife - to which the hairdresser responds asking him whether he thinks that leaving his wife alone in a tower block means providing for her. And for the rest, the hairdresser professes, she's fed up with the "arsehole-ness" ("Arschlochigkeit") of the world in general. - After leaving her, Krieger wanders aimlessly around the city streets at night-time.
Another day. Krieger sleeps in his car on the side of a mountain road. A young woman walks by, he notices her and offers her a lift to Tenna. Krieger is allowed to stay overnight on her parents' farm. The four of them eat "Gschwellti" (potatoes boiled in their jacket) and conduct a faltering conversation. The father is rather suspicious of Krieger and asks the daughter - in Krieger's presence - where she has "picked up that one". Krieger gives her a flask of perfume.
Krieger drives to Zürich, visiting Blue Eye's office. Apparently he's looking for someone or something there, opening various doors on the floor. As Krieger argues with an employee on the floor, a big Blue Eye logo painted on a glass pane is carried to another room, followed by a photographer and female models. - Krieger goes out, into the Zürich nightlife. At a bar, a middle-aged woman offers him sex; it remains unclear whether he accepts, but in the next scene, he sits alone, smoking and drinking before a stage where an Asian female singer performs Strangers in the Night. - Another bar, Krieger smokes and drinks. A young man in a leather jacket comes in, takes a seat at a table, and starts drumming fast rhythms with his hands and feet. Krieger pays and leaves, only to notice at another bar that the young guy is there again. - Krieger dances in a disco. The drummer is also there and accompanies the rhythm with a whistle. Krieger and the drummer - his name is Jürgen - start to hit the nightlife together and become friends. In the early morning, they drunkenly talk in the Shopville subterranean shopping mall under Zürich Main Station, telling of their lives. Jürgen mentions that his deaf stepfather had no understanding of music at all.
At the Blue Eye office, Krieger throws an empty bottle at the building. He gives Jürgen the key to the car and says "Bring me home, boy". On the way, they sing Somebody Loves Me. The car vanishes in the underground parking of Wohninsel Webermühle.
Background
Reisender Krieger was produced in the autumn of 1979,[4] first aired on 6 August 1981 on the ZDF television channel, and premiered in cinema on 12 March 1982.[1] Shot in black and white on 16 mm film, the original cut had a length of 195 minutes.[5] Schocher's director's cut of 2008 is at 142 minutes considerably shorter. Schocher used amateur actors; he noticed his leading actor, Willy Ziegler, at a Stammtisch in Lucerne. According to Schocher, Ziegler "just played himself".[6]
In an outline of 1978, Schocher described the film as a "staged documentary or a documentary feature film".[7] While the film follows stations and themes from the Odyssey, transferring them "to our country and our civilisation",[7] a large part also consists of documentary shoots, showing places and landscapes in German-speaking Switzerland. Reisender Krieger was filmed without written dialogue, without artificial light, and using just a hand-held camera. According to Schocher, the manifest Dogma 95 where Danish directors made similar specifications, made him laugh: "Klopfenstein and me developed this earlier, we just didn't shout it out from the rooftops".[8]
The German title is ambiguous, as Reisender Krieger can be read as "Travelling salesman Krieger", but also as "Travelling Warrior". "Reisender" means specifically a travelling salesman as well as more generally one who travels, and "Krieger" is a family name, but also the German word for warrior.
In 2015, the director's cut was published on DVD with German, French, and English subtitles.[9]
Themes
Schocher's outline mentions various counterparts for characters from the Odyssey. For example, Kriegers wife who waits at home is Penelope, the Graubünden farmer's daughter stands for Nausicaa, her father for Alcinous - and the drummer Jürgen is Telemachus, "whom Krieger, on a booze-cruise, beholds as his own, freer mirror image, and accepts as his son for one night."[7]
Critical response
At the time of its first release, Reisender Krieger was reviewed positively in Swiss and German media. Karsten Witte wrote 1982 in the German newspaper Die Zeit of a "sneaky fascination" by the movie. At first, the viewer would ask where the journey is supposed to lead, but soon one couldn't get enough of the "richness of these images".[10] According to Witte, Schocher is "a pioneer who invents cinema anew, one who cunningly mixes magic with myth".[11]
Also in retrospect and after publication of the director's cut, the film received a positive response. Wolfram Knorr described it in a Weltwoche article on occasion of the 66th Locarno International Film Festival (2013) as a "masterpiece of form and fantasy about Switzerland" and as by far the best Swiss movie, which, however, didn't inspire others to follow with similar studies.[12]
The German Lexikon des internationalen Films attests the movie to be "excellently photographed"[1] and describes it as trying to show alienation and the inability to communicate in modern society by the example of Krieger's conduct of life.[1] In the Lexikon Filme im Fernsehen by Adolf Heinzlmeier and Berndt Schulz, Reisender Krieger is described as a film "that precisely realizes the ambiguity of its title".[13]
Related Research Articles
Curd Gustav Andreas Gottlieb Franz Jürgens was a German-Austrian stage and film actor. He was usually billed in English-speaking films as Curt Jurgens. He was well known for playing Ernst Udet in Des Teufels General. His English-language roles include James Bond villain Karl Stromberg in The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), Éric Carradine in And God Created Woman (1956), and Professor Immanuel Rath in The Blue Angel (1959).
A bob cut, also known as a bob, is a short to medium length haircut for women, in which the hair is typically cut straight around the head at approximately jaw level, and no longer than shoulder-length, often with a fringe at the front. The standard bob cut exposes the back of the neck and keeps all of the hair well above the shoulders.
A hairdresser is a person whose occupation is to cut or style hair in order to change or maintain a person's image. This is achieved using a combination of hair coloring, haircutting, and hair texturing techniques. A hairdresser may also be referred to as a 'barber' or 'hairstylist'.
A mountain film is a film genre that focuses on mountaineering and especially the battle of human against nature. In addition to mere adventure, the protagonists who return from the mountain come back changed, usually gaining wisdom and enlightenment.
Andreas Krieger is a German former shot putter who competed on the women's East German athletics team at SC Dynamo Berlin as Heidi Krieger.
Liselotte Pulver, sometimes credited as Lilo Pulver, is a Swiss actress. Pulver was one of the biggest stars of German cinema in the 1950s and 1960s, where she often was cast as a tomboy. She is well known for her hearty and joyful laughter. Her films outside of German cinema include A Time to Love and a Time to Die (1958), One, Two, Three (1961) and The Nun (1966).
Monte Carlo is a 1930 American pre-Code musical comedy film, directed by Ernst Lubitsch. It co-stars Jack Buchanan as a French Count Rudolph Falliere masquerading as a hairdresser and Jeanette MacDonald as Countess Helene Mara. The film is notable for introducing the song "Beyond the Blue Horizon", which was written for the film and is first performed by MacDonald and a chorus on the soundtrack as she escapes on the train through he countryside. Monte Carlo was hailed by critics as a masterpiece of the newly emerging musical film genre. The screenplay was based on the Booth Tarkington novel Monsieur Beaucaire.
Peter Carlo Bessone Raymond, known as Raymond Bessone and also as Mr Teasy-Weasy, Teasie Weasie Raymond and various combinations of these, was a British hairdresser from the 1930s to the 1960s.
Wir Wunderkinder is a 1958 West German comedy film directed by Kurt Hoffmann and starring Hansjörg Felmy and Robert Graf. The black-and-white film is also known in English as Aren't We Wonderful?.
Prestel Publishing is an art book publisher, with books on art, architecture, photography, design, fashion, craft, culture, history and ethnography. Lists range from museum guides, to encyclopaedias, art and architecture monographs to facsimile volumes and books for children.
Hans-Michael Bock is a German film historian, filmmaker, translator and writer.
Leonard Lewis, known professionally as Leonard of Mayfair, was a British hairdresser, credited with creating the haircut that launched the career of prominent 1960s model Twiggy as well as establishing the careers of other successful British hairdressers, including John Frieda, Daniel Galvin, Nicky Clarke, Keith Wainwright and Michael Gordon. His hair styles were at their most fashionable during the Vogue sittings of the late 1960s and early 1970s, for which he would "illustrate the exuberant moment when hair was somehow a totem of youth and freedom in itself". He worked with many of the leading photographers of the day, including Clive Arrowsmith, Terence Donovan, David Bailey and Barry Lategan for fashion publications such as Vogue and Queen, often collaborating with designer Zandra Rhodes who favoured Leonard's colourist, Daniel Galvin, whose vibrant shades of pinks, blues and reds, were revolutionary at the time.
I Entrust My Wife to You is a 1943 German comedy film directed by Kurt Hoffmann and starring Heinz Rühmann, Adina Mandlová, and Werner Fuetterer. It was shot at the Babelsberg Studios in Berlin. The film's sets were designed by the art director Willi Herrmann.
Who Killed Johnny is a Swiss-American screwball comedy film by Yangzom Brauen, filmed and produced in Los Angeles in 2013.
Christian Schocher is a Swiss independent filmmaker and cinema operator best known for his monumental odyssey Reisender Krieger.
Jürgen Frohriep was a German actor. After 1972 he became widely known for his role as Oberleutnant Jürgen Hübner in Polizeiruf 110, a long running television series that originated in the German Democratic Republic, but which continues to win large television audiences across Germany, following reunification.
Fährmann Maria is a 1936 German horror film directed by Frank Wisbar and starring Sybille Schmitz.
Jürgen Wölfer was a German music writer and historian with focus on Jazz.
Jürgen Theobaldy is a German writer who lives in Bern, Switzerland.
Karola Gramann is a German film scholar and film curator. From 2006 to 2019 she was artistic director of the Kinothek Asta Nielsen e.V.
1 2 3 Christian Schocher: Reisender Krieger. Exposé, included in the DVD publication, Andromeda-Film 2015.
↑ Marcel Elsener (2015-01-22). "Von einem, der in der Enge weit ausholte". WOZ. Retrieved 2015-10-05. Klopfenstein und ich haben das zuvor schon entwickelt, wir habens nur nicht an die grosse Glocke gehängt
↑ Karsten Witte (1982-07-23). "Verschlagensein in der Verzweiflung". Die Zeit. Retrieved 2015-10-05. (...) ein Pionier, der das Kino noch einmal erfindet, der die Magie durchtrieben mit dem Mythos mischt
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
