Lili Marleen (1981)

Regisseur:

Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Drehbuchautoren:

Lale Andersen (novel)
Rainer Werner Fassbinder (additional dialogue)

Premierendatum:

14. Januar 1981 (Bundesrepublik Deutschland)

Genre:

Drama

Plot:

In Switzerland German singer 'Wilkie' falls in love with Jewish composer 'Robert' who offers resistance to the Nazis by helping refugees...

Plot Keywords:

Border Crossing | Singer | Famous Song | Impossible Love | Resistance Movement

Nutzerkommentare:

The Chiasm of Offender and Victim

Besetzung

Hanna Schygulla	...	Willie
Giancarlo Giannini	...	Robert
Mel Ferrer	...	David Mendelsson
Karl-Heinz von Hassel	...	Henkel (as Karl Heinz von Hassel)
Erik Schumann	...	von Strehlow
Hark Bohm	...	Taschner
Gottfried John	...	Aaron
Karin Baal	...	Anna Lederer
Christine Kaufmann	...	Miriam
Udo Kier	...	Drewitz
Roger Fritz	...	Kauffmann
Rainer Will	...	Bernt
Raúl Gimenez	...	Blonsky (as Raul Giminez)
Adrian Hoven	...	Ginsberg
Willy Harlander	...	Prosel

Alternativ:

Lili Marleen (Österreich) [de]

Länge:

120 Min | Brazil:111 Min

Produktionsland:

Bundesrepublik Deutschland

Sprache:

Englisch | Deutsch

Farbe:

Farbe

Seitenverhältnis:

1.66 : 1

Tonverfahren:

Mono

Altersfreigabe:

Iceland:16 | Finland:K-16 | Singapore:R(A) | Sweden:15 | UK:15 | USA:R | West Germany:12

Drehorte:

Bavaria Filmstudios, Geiselgasteig, Grünwald, Bavaria, Germany

Firma:

Bayerischer Rundfunk (BR)

Dies und das:

The character of Willi is loosely based on the German singer Lale Andersen who was the real Lili Marleen.

Pannen:

Faktische Fehler: After having tried to commit suicide, Willi is seen performing "Lili Marleen" in the Berlin Sportpalast as part of a deal with the Nazis, dazzlingly dressed up in front of thousands, and the event is transmitted live. Then suddenly all is held up by the announcement that all German forces have surrendered (VE Day, May 8, 1945). Of course, in the final months of the regime no-one would bother about arranging a sumptuous live transmission of music; by this time, Berlin was a heap of rubble.

Bezüge zu anderen Titeln:

Remake von Lilli Marlene (1950)

The Chiasm of Offender and Victim

Many critics have felt offended that R.W. Fassbinder has portrayed both protagonist Wilkie and the Nazis in this movie in a human-like manner. Connoisseurs of other Fassbinder films, however, will realize that "Lili Marleen" (1981) belongs to Fassbinder's "women movies" like "The Marriage of Maria Braun" (1979) and "Lola" (1981). Fassbinder was convinced that "stories can be told much better with women than with men", because, according to Fassbinder, while men usually fulfill their determined roles in society, "women are capable of thinking in a dialectic manner". Dialectics, however, means that there is not only a thesis and its antithesis like usually in our black-and-white world, but a synthesis where the oppositions coincide. Moreover, dialectic means that because of the third instance of synthesis the absolute opposition of the difference between thesis and antithesis is abolished. Concretely speaking: Starting from a dialect point of view and portraying the fascist state, the underground fighters must necessarily use the basic means like the rulers do, and between offenders and victims there is thus a chiastic relation, so that every offender is also victim and every victim is also offender. Fassbinder has illustrated this abstract scheme, that transcends classical logic, in his play "The City, the Garbage and the Death" (1975) which was filmed by Daniel Schmid under the title "Shadow of Angels" (1976).

Therefore, approaching an a priori controversial topic like Nazi Germany, in a dialectic manner, the depiction of this time in the form of a movie gets even more controversial, especially for people who cannot or do not want to see that our recognition of the world is by far not exhausted with a primitive light-switch schema, but needs the third instance of synthesis as controlling instance of its opposite members thesis and antithesis. The mutual relationship between offenders and victims has to scrutinized, since it is simply not true that the offenders are the bad ones and the victims the good ones. In a synthetic viewpoint, the bad ones participate on the goodness as the good ones participate on the badness. They are mutually related. In a world-view based on classical logic, a relation between good and bad cannot even been established, and in an ethics based on this insufficient system of logic, the bad conscience of the survivors of Nazi Germany, feeling (illogically enough) responsible for the deeds of their ancestors, exclude the possibility of a relationship between the two extremes and thus a synthesis in the form a new evaluation based on this relationship as well. From Fassbinder's dialectic viewpoint, it follows that neither Lili Marleen nor Lola nor Maria Braun can be condemned for their "misuse" of the ruling system for their private purposes, because they don't misuse them, they just use them. In the opposite, since victims must repeat the actions of the offenders as the offenders must repeat the actions of the victims, because "good" and "bad" are no longer simple mirror images of one another like in two-valued logic, their strategies are legitimated by the chiastic structure of a logic that describes our world, that is not black and white at all, much better than a black-and-white logic.