Der Neger Erwin

1981
Der Neger Erwin
8| 1h32m| en| More Info
Released: 01 January 1981 Released
Producted By: BR
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Budget: 0
Revenue: 0
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Synopsis

Herbert Achternbusch wrote, directed, and starred in this comedy that pokes fun at the German way of subsidizing the art of creating movies and documentaries. He is a filmmaker playing the role of a filmmaker in a film he is making, and as a result, the film jokes might be a little abstruse for some of the viewers. The story centers on a "film" man just out of prison (Achternbusch) who has to make a living with his craft again. He is followed by a reporter who wants an interview, and winds up at an inn called "Zum Neger Erwin," run by a woman whom he convinces to be the leading lady in his planned production. As the story continues, the filmmaker finds ample excuses to pan the financial powers that be, and to paint the beknighted and talented seekers after funds as Neger Erwins, slaves to the funding process.

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hasosch This is Achternbusch's reaction to Dr. Goebbels' original question. Herbert Achternbusch (*1938), Bavarian writer, painter, sculptor, filmmaker, actor and producer tells in "Der Neger Erwin" ("The Negro Erwin") the story of a man who has just been released from prison and wants to turn the hostess of his regular beer-pub "The Negro Erwin" into a film-star. Naturally for Achternbusch, her name is Susn, like in the novel and film "Das letzte Loch" ("The Last Whole"), and Susn is again played by Achternbusch's marvelous late actress Annamirl Bierbichler. The ex-convict enters the pub and asserts that he is the famous filmmaker Herbert Achternbusch: "I vote that drinkers make movies, since a drinker knows his homeland". Also the pub is a peculiar one: "Since centuries, the pub keeps Negroes as dogs, since the end of World War II only white Negroes" (Der Neger Erwin, Frankfurt am Main 1981, p. 75). Three Bavarian men are pressing their arms against one another in order to become the next Negro, because they want to repeat another feast of drunkenness after the last one lasted for 14 days. The filmmaker says: "I am the writer Do-not-read-me. Erwin Donotreadme. I need a sheet of paper and a few beers. Originally, I have been an airplane-bricklayer. For 25 marks per hour I have pulled up walls in airplanes with trowel and spirit level. When gasoline was out, I have made sight-seeings in nuclear power plants for Thalidomide children. When I asked them something, they lifted their fingers on their shoulders. I explained them that with nuclear power people do not need arms anymore" (loc. cit., pp. 68-69). The hostess Susn shows Erwin the past of the pub: stuffed animals in a barn where the former Negroes were living in a doghouse. Erwin says that his grandfather was King Ludwig II of Bavaria, who did not drown in the Lake of Starnberg, but escaped on the opposite shore, where he was picked up by his girlfriend, the empress Sissi, and they went to Paris, where they lived in anonymity until the end of their days. Although Erwin's film is endangered by some misunderstandings caused by the Bavarian language, at the end, everything's okay: Mamba Anita and the other hippopotami are swimming in the river Isar, Munich is in the desert, the river Isar becomes the Nile, and the filmmaker Herbert Achternbusch becomes the new Negro Erwin, "since only the most depraved of all arts, the film, is allowed to try to say to our descendants that we, too, have been human beings" (loc. cit., pp. 92-93).