This not only looks heavily like a student art film, it is one: The young http://www.winkelmann-film.de/ Adolf Winkelmann has strapped a camera to his chest, aimed the lens at his face, and walks through Kassel. Shot in black and white, you see him riding a tram and eating a bratwurst, while passersby curiously turn to look at him. "Adolf Winkelmann, Kassel, 09.12.67" is the title of this experimental short film. What it has in common with his later works is the view of real life. The background is more interesting than the director's face. The car brands, the fashion, the people – historical glimpses into the West German past.
The same applies to Adolf Winkelmann's feature films. From Kassel, it became Dortmund in 1975. There, "Die Abfahrer" (1978) is also set, a story about three young unemployed individuals who hijack a moving truck in search of nothing less than freedom and the wide open spaces. Winkelmann forwent studio sets and filmed in the streets of Dortmund with a cast of amateur and professional actors. Regulars like Detlev "Delle" Quandt acted alongside theater actors like Tana Schanzara or Hermann Lause.
In "Die Abfahrer" and the next film "Jede Menge Kohle" (1981), you can visit the 'old' Ruhr area. The small mom-and-pop stores, the backyards, and the long-closed "Phoenix" steelworks in Dortmund-Hörde. Nevertheless, the formula "Everything was better before" falls short with Winkelmann, as his films always address social issues as well. In "Jede Menge Kohle," the miner Katlewski from Recklinghausen runs away from his old life – underground, until he reappears after two weeks in a Dortmund mine. He falls in love anew, but quickly realizes that the problems from his old life have not disappeared.
The spirit of the early 80s demanded problem awareness. This is particularly evident in Winkelmann's futuristic eco-shocker "Super" (1983), in which he herds Renan Demirkan and Udo Lindenberg together with Ulrich Wildgruber, Hannelore Hoger, Hermann Lause, and Gottfried John through an apocalyptic world. In retrospect, "Super," with its local limitation to a motel in no man's land (filmed on a dump), feels like a filmed stage play. Winkelmann was closer to the Ruhr area again with the film "Nordkurve" (1992), in which he depicts a typical Ruhr area football Saturday – from various perspectives, from the manager to the fan.
In recent years, Winkelmann mainly produced television films like "Der letzte Kurier" or the award-winning two-parter "Contergan – Eine einzige Tablette," which addressed the pharmaceutical scandal of the 60s.
A few years ago, Winkelmann returned to cinema – and did so with aplomb. It was clear that he would eventually encounter Ralf Rothmann. Especially since here the two actor and author brothers Niels and Till Beckmann, also from the region and well-versed in all the nuances of the Ruhr, provided the script and assisted. "Junges Licht" with Charly Hübner and Peter Lohmeyer is, as often with Rothmann, written from the perspective of adolescents: With twelve-year-old working-class boy Julian Collien (Oscar Brose), we experience the world of yesterday in a very contemporary way: his view of the adults, marital crises, pubescent worries, states of excitement, fear and ecstasies, and the grim silence of the grown-ups. If a home movie, then like this: as a wonderful, accurate, lovingly animated, but not nostalgic drama and panorama.
At Expo 2000, Winkelmann honed his film installation "Deutschland.Pict" in the German pavilion to enhance the cultural external image of the country. He staged similar works with his "Flying Images" for the Capital of Culture year 2010 in the creative quarter Dortmund's "U." There, short films run in nine "virtual window holes," intended to bring visitors closer to life in the region. Winkelmann, who is also a professor of film design at FH Dortmund, outlines his project as follows: "I have radically subjectively condensed my 50 years of life in the Ruhr area into a few images and even fewer figures."
Once again, a few years have passed. Things are happening at Dortmund's U, but the images have not forgotten how to fly. Adolf Winkelmann, born on April 10, 1946, in Hallenberg, knew and knows that one will look at these films in years and decades and be able to say: So this is how it was back then in the Ruhr area.
