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GALLERY

DIE SCHAUKEL

(The Swing), 1983

"Like a gracefully floating dream...about totally impossible people."

– Ponkie, Münchner Abendzeitung

A film by Percy Adlon

Anja Jaenicke  •  Lena Stolze  •  Joachim Bernhard

Susanne Herlet, Christine Kaufmann

Rolf Illig, Marianne Sägebrecht

Screenplay by Percy Adlon, based on the novel Die Schaukel by Annette Kolb.

Produced by Eleonore Adlon

Director of Photography – Jürgen Martin

Editor – Clara Fabry

Production Design – Heidi Lüdi

Costume Design – Regine Bätz

Music by Peer Raben

A pelemele Film/Roxy Film/Pro-ject Film production

German with English subtitles, 133 min

Based on Annette Kolb’s autobiographical novel of the same name, THE SWING is a lavish, breathless reconstruction of life in Munich towards the end of the 19th century. The deceptively simple story centers around the Lautenschlags, a Bavarian-French Catholic family overflowing with artistry but short on practicalities like financial acumen. The family's ups and downs, little tragedies and comical failures are seen through the eyes of Annette herself. Youngest of four, plain, brusque, and ambitious, the writer's fictionalized childhood self reflects upon the good-natured chaos around her with fondness, but disturbing undercurrents remind us that we are glimpsing a world long lost to the writer by the time of the novel, and even further out of reach from us.

Bavarian Film Awards for Anja Jaenicke, Lena Stolze, Susanne Herlet, and Joachim Bernhard

FRÄULEIN ANNETTE KOLB

(Miss Annette Kolb)

The companion documentary for the feature film

THE SWING (DIE SCHAUKEL)

A film by Pecy Adlon

produced by Eleonore Adlon

TV Producer Benigna von Keyserlingk

Cinematography Jürgen Martin

Edited by Clara Fabry

1977, in German with English subtitles, 16mm, 43 minutes

The Bavarian writer Annette Kolb fought for positive French-German relations, women's rights, and the independence of the arts, before fleeing Hitler’s Germany out of loyalty to her many Jewish friends.

 

She was the subject of my first film. It was just 7 minutes long, and contained an archival interview with her, in which she describes the terror and the joy of her first flight in a small airplane. She was around 80 then, but she never told anybody her real age. When she died in 1967, one of her falsified passports was discovered, listing a birth date that made her 5 years younger than she was.

She was born in Munich in 1870, to a frustrated French pianist (a “housewife in the wrath of god”), and a royal landscape architect who, despite the lucrative appointment, couldn’t keep his finances straight. Annette was a tomboy, with a love of theatre and opera and ambitions of becoming a conductor. Identifying equally with both her French and German ancestries, she grew up in genteel poverty with her two older sisters and their lazy-bones younger brother.

 

In 1915, early in World War I, she gave her first pacifist speech, earning equal parts outrage and admiration from the public. The extravagant, witty, melancholy, unattached loner took shape over the course of the writing of three novels, all loosely composed and with an unforgettable fragrance. Of these, Die Schaukel (The Swing) is her best, a fictionalized portrait of her hometown and childhood. Never a best-selling writer, Annette Kolb became something more important: a true original.

Kolb
MISS ANNETTE KOLB

MISS ANNETTE KOLB

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