Wake In Fright (Australien 1971)

Bei Andreas. Mit Sven, Gunnar und Silke.

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“The best and most terrifying film about Australia in existence” – Nick Cave

“Wake In Fright is a deeply — and I mean deeply — unsettling and disturbing movie. I saw it when it premiered at Cannes in 1971, and it left me speechless. Visually, dramatically, atmospherically and psychologically, it’s beautifully calibrated.” — Martin Scorsese

http://www.cinefamily.org/films/
wake-in-fright-brand-new-35mm-print/

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Ein Schullehrer aus Sydney muss im Outback die ihm staatlich gewährte Ausbildungsförderung abarbeiten. Anschließend will er nach Europa, wenn er genug Geld dafür zusammenbekommt. Aber erstmal soll es über die Weihnachtsferien zurück in die große Stadt zur Freundin. Er bleibt allerdings im nächstgrößeren Ort Bundanyabba, von allen nur "The Yabba" genannt, hängen und lässt sich hier mehr und mehr moralisch korrumpieren.

In der Cannes-Vorführung 1971 kam der Regisseur Ted Kotcheff vor einen Filmquatscher zu sitzen, dem er geschmeichelt und genervt zugleich während des ganzen Films zuhören musste:
"Then there is this voice behind me going, “Wow. Wow, what a scene. Boy. I didn’t expect that. This is great.” […] I knew he was a filmmaker because only directors, producers, and writers are allowed to sit in that area, in the first balcony. And this guy just keeps going on and on. […] There’s the homosexual rape scene. Which may be nothing now, but in 1971 it was out-there. And the scene comes on and this guy behind me says, “This director. He’s going to go all the way. He’s going to go all the way. He’s going all the way! Oh my god he went all the way!”
So afterwords, the movie ends, the lights come up and I turn around to look at him. He’s this young America, with spectacles. I go outside. And the film’s PR guy comes up and asked how it was going. I said, “Good. But there was this guy sitting behind me. This American. And he kept talking; really liked the film.” At that moment the guy came out of the theater and I pointed at him. “Oh, yeah, he’s a young America filmmaker. Only made one film and it flopped.” So I asked if he knew the guy’s name. “You don’t need to know him.” I didn’t give a crap, I wanted to know his name. So he asks another person standing nearby if they knew the kid, and this guy says, “Yeah. His name is Martin Scorsese.” And I said, “You’re right. I’ve never heard of him.”
And after it was restored, when it was declared a Cannes Classic. You know who declared it a Cannes Classic, who was [head] of the Cannes Classic department? Martin Scorsese. He remembered the film after all those years. 38 years. I found that one of the most moving things of my creative life."

Lustigerweise wählte Scorseses später, um seine Bewunderung für den Film auszudrücken, die Formulierung “It left me speechless”, wie auch oben und auf dem Plakat zu lesen.

Der Film war nach seiner Vorstellung in Cannes lange verschollen gewesen; schließlich wurde mit viel Glück eine brauchbare Kopie geborgen und restauriert. Ich nehme an, dass wir diese Fassung gesehen haben. Scorsese war, wie Kotcheff erwähnt, Head of the Department von Cannes Classic. Als er von der Wiederfindung des verlorenen geglaubten Films hörte, sorgte er dafür, dass der Film als "Cannes Classic" 2009 dort wieder aufgeführt wurde - interessanterweise ist er damit abgesehen von "L'avventura" der einzige Film, der zweimal auf dem Festival zu sehen war.

Kotcheff ergänzt noch: "I only met him [Scorsese] once. At an Oscar party. I saw him with DeNiro. So I went over to him, and Scorsese got all excited and started telling DeNiro who I was and how much he liked my film. And then later I told DeNiro the story about Cannes that I just told you, and he said, “Ted, he talks through everybody’s films! And not always complimentary either.”"

(Kotcheffs Zitate sind von hier:
http://www.chud.com/112171/ff2012-interview-director-ted-kotcheff-wake-in-fright/)

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Auch die von Kotcheff woanders erszählte Geschichte, wie endlich eine Kopie gefunden wurde, ist der Wiedergabe wert:

The film was lost for twenty-five years. The editor [Anthony Buckley] spent ten years of his life going all over the world looking for it and finally found it in a warehouse in Pittsburgh, two hundred cans of negative, tri-separation, inter-negatives, inter-positives, music tracks and so on in two large wooden containers. On the outside of the containers was written in big red letters, ‘For Destruction’. If Tony had arrived one week later it would have been incinerated and the film would have been gone forever. However, the negative was almost useless. It was scratched, torn, nobody had looked after it. It was badly faded. Another fan of the film, a guy from Deluxe Sydney, spent three years of his own time using digital techniques to save it. And working frame by frame he restored the film to this pristine condition. The print that was made from it was astonishing, as if it was shot yesterday.

http://www.webcitation.org/6V8BD4H62

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Szenen, die man nicht vergißt: Das Känguruschlachten. Der damals bereits vegetarisch lebende Regisseur Ted Kotcheff dazu:

"I didn’t know how I was going to do this climactic sequence. This is where this guy hits rock bottom and discovers that he is capable of things that are morally wrong. The whole film is about a man who succumbs to the dark shadow, the dark side of his own nature. An odyssey of self-discovery and education and civilisation have a very thin defence against the yahoo in each every one of us. I didn’t know how the hell I was going to do this climatic sequence, feeling as how you and I both feel."

And then I was saved as one of the crew came up to me, who had heard about my dilemma. He said, ‘Ted, you do know they kill hundreds of kangaroos every night in the Outback.’ I said, no, why? He said, ‘Oh it’s big business. They shoot the kangaroos, they skin them and they send them to America for the pet food industry’. I said, you mean American cats and dogs are eating kangaroos?!. He told me that they go out every night, six pairs of hunters, going in different directions. And they have a big refrigerated truck and they kill all night long. They kill hundreds and they hang them up in this huge transport truck, which is refrigerated. So I managed to find these guys and they allowed me to put a camera up on the back and they have this spotlight that freezes the kangaroos and then they shoot them. I tell you, if you’re vegetarian like me, it was horrendous. My producer was a vegetarian too and he fainted when they started to shoot.

They had a retractable windshield and mount the guns on the dashboard. They have a spotlight that they work from inside and the kangaroos freeze. One of the guys asked me where I would like them to shoot them. In the brains, the heart or the kidneys. I asked what the difference was. He said that if you shoot them in the kidneys they die right there on the spot. If you shoot them in the heart they take a few leaps before they die. Shoot them in the brain and he said it was amazing, they do this huge, huge leap into the air and then they crash to the ground dead. I said, look, don’t do anything for me please, just go about your business. I didn’t want them to do anything for me. You understand why. I asked them to just get on with it.

Some of the footage is unviewable. The Australian Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals had one of their guys with me and he said, ‘Ted you’ve got to show this.’ And I said, I can’t, I can’t show this. The audience will run screaming from the movie theatre.
What happens was that [the marksmen] were so accurate but they started drinking, I discovered, at about two o’clock in the morning. And they started to miss! [The kangaroos] were bleeding to death. They had to chase them and put them out of their misery. It was a nightmare. It was a total nightmare. The guys from The Australian Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals kept pushing me, telling me that people in Sydney don’t know what’s going on in the Outback. Pleading me to show it. The worst fifty percent, I didn’t put in the picture. People would have just gone screaming, yelling out of the cinema.

One good thing that came out of it though is that fifteen years ago I got a call from the The Australian Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals saying that because of my film – they screened it continually – and the pressure that it exerted, the Australian government banned the killing of kangaroos for the pet food industry. So I was full of virtue.

www.webcitation.org/6V8BD4H62

Kotcheff hier auch zum Titel:
"It comes from an Australian folk-saying. “May you dream of the devil and wake in fright.” And it means that there is a dark side in all of us, as I was saying before. The idea is that it is frighting to wake up to the reality of who you are and what you’re capable of."

Wild lebende Tiere mit Autos jagen, damit sie kleingehäkselt als Hundefutter verkauft werden können, erinnerte mich an die Mustang-Jagd in "The Misfits" (USA 1961), vielleicht kein Zufall. Marilyn Monroes Figur verabscheut hier die Jagd auf das Heftigste. Ein direktes Pendent fehlt in "Wake In Fright", die wenigen Frauenfiguren im Film nehmen allerdings generell eine Haltung von abgeklärter Resignation ein angesichts der saufenden, glücksspielenden und jagenden Macho-Macker im australischen Outback.

Dem die Hauptfigur übrigens nicht entkommen kann: Alle Fluchtversuche führen ihn immer wieder zurück nach "The Yabba" (reales Vorbild bereits für die Romanvorlage Kenneth Cook von 1961 hierfür war ein Städtchen mit dem passenden Namen Broken Hill). Bis endlich die großen Ferien vobei sind und er zurück muss zum Schulunterricht in dem noch kleineren Ort Tiboonda. Wenn das nicht an Sartre und den Existentialismus erinnert ...

Weitere interessante Seiten dazu, u.a. mit Links zu weiteren Kotcheff-Interview:

• www.indiewire.com/2012/10/interview-wake-in-fright-director-ted-kotcheff-talks-martin-scorsese-his-lost-film-and-what-a-canadian-was-doing-directing-an-australian-classic-104985/
• http://www.chud.com/112171/ff2012-interview-director-ted-kotcheff-wake-in-fright/
• http://screenprism.com/insights/article/in-wake-in-fright-how-was-the-kangaroo-scene-filmed 
• https://wolfmanscultfilmclub.wordpress.com/2017/05/15/wake-in-fright-1971-the-greatest-australian-film  

(nachgetragen von Silke im August 2017)