Stehaufmädchen

The central paradox of Willy Bogner’s debut consists in the fact that the scion of an industrial family, working on commission from the foreign studio United Artists, made a hippie satire in the spirit of the New German Cinema. Let’s leave aside the fact that Bogner’s cinematic contemporaries differed from the decorated athlete and heir to a clothing brand only in their study of the humanities and self-proclaimed position as intellectual elites, but otherwise were also products of the well-off upper class. For Bogner, film was a hobby and a source of pleasure, not a medium for expressing his personal worldview or for artistic self-realisation. Thanks to that, he approached his work in an extraordinarily broadminded and playful way. While his contemporaries were presenting sombre treatises on the clash of generations and basking in festival acclaim, Bogner came up with a typically more authentic form of New Wave impertinence. Rather than with the German cinema of the time, Bogner’s approach has more in common with the formalistic radicalism of the French New Wave, but it ventures rather into the domain of the casually rebellious and commercially focused opposition typical of the key voices of American indie film, particularly Roger Corman, Dennis Hopper, Bob Rafeslon and Robert Altman. However, Bogner also remains true to his roots in advertising and his work foreshadows the emergence of a new generation of filmmakers from that sector, led by the British brothers Ridley and Tony Scott, who at the time were still searching for their own voice, burdened by the legacy of the domestic British New Wave. Though Bogner’s formalistic signature of autotelic camera angles and adrenaline-fuelled dolly shots, zooms and pans maximally suits his later spectacular sports-action exhibitions, these aspects are paradoxically put to better use in his first work as an illustration of the film’s absolute boisterousness. Stehaufmädchen is a totally random meta-film in which absolutely anything is possible and which, thanks to its origins, simultaneously takes aim at both predatory capitalists and self-admiring naïve hippies. In the spirit of the ambiguous title, which can mean both “I like girls” and “Rise up, girl”, despite expectations the narrative is not content with a typical celebration of the free-spiritedness of young love, but continues even after the initial buzz wears off and the existential considerations of everyday life come into play. The climax, in which the roles are reversed and the protagonist emerges as the central and fully active character, casts the whole project in an unexpectedly progressive light. Bogner makes fun of not only authorities personified in particular characters, but also of the ideological structures and basic principles of modern society, with money and its power at the forefront. Throughout, however, he remains playful and formalistically unrestrained above all else. This is also apparent in the fact that, true to his nature, he stages a free-thinking blockbuster packed with chases and breakneck physical sequences, which, however, he conceives in a purely Dadaist and slapstick manner. (10.07.2022) (vähemmän) (lisää)