Sommer
West Germany,
1986, 110 min
Shown in 1988
CREDITS
- dir
-
Philip Gröning
- scr
-
Philip Gröning, Ralf Zoller, Nicolas Humbert
- cam
-
Ernst Kubiza
- cast
-
Michael Schech, Philipp Rankl, Barbara vom Bauer, Lene Beyer
- source
-
JMBS
-
COMMENTS
Philip Gröning in person.
OTHER
In this exquisitely crafted poem of a film, a father’s desperate attempt to communicate with his autistic son becomes a metaphor for a much larger futility. Philip Gröning captures the stillness and abstraction of an autistic child’s world, in black-and-white cinematography that turns an Alpine resort—where the father has taken the son for the summer—into a canvas of contemplative distance, alternating with the close-up that shuts out the rest of the world. Only four characters inhabit this universe: the father who has rescued his son from a clinic in hopes of reaching him through love; the boy, Sebastian; a chambermaid; and a fellow vacationer, whose affection only draws out in the father the impossibility of reciprocal love. Young Philipp Rankl is the true revelation of the film; as Sebastian, he becomes that child who finds a world in the infinite depths of a marble, a boy whose intense isolation mirrors that which he senses all around him. Rankl is neither autistic nor a professional actor; thus his performance is doubly incredible. Summer received the 1987 Munich Film Award (given for first features).
—Judy Bloch, Pacific Film Archive
FACTOID #147
The Coppola clan (Francis, Eleanor, Sofia and Roman) is the family with the most filmmakers represented at the Festival. Films screened include Apocalypse Now (1990); One from the Heart (1990); Lick the Star (1998); The Virgin Suicides (2000); CQ (2002); and On the Set of CQ (2002). (And that’s not even counting onscreen appearances by cousins Nic Cage and Jason Schwartzman.)
