Bauarbeiten am Rhein im alten Pionierhafen in Maxau (LFS07453)
Résumé
Contexte et analyse
First of all, there is the glance picturesque Rhine landscape with the forests in the background. Or is it a quarry pond? The tradition of landscape photography is the inspiration for the photographer Erich Bauer filming the area on the Rhine near Karlsruhe in order to approach the construction work on the new oil port that took place in the early 1960s. The photographic view and the precise composition of the images determine the film recordings. It is not yet the finished film. Scenes are repeated. Flaps can be seen again and again and poorly exposed material. It is the raw material for an image film for the construction of the oil port. It was opened on April 23, 1963.
Right at the beginning, the writing board refers to the professional claim: “Erich Bauer film production, Karlsruhe, industrial and advertising photography”. Born in 1908, Erich Bauer comes from a Karlsruhe dynasty of photographers. The great-grandmother had once photographed the Grand Duke Friedrich of Baden at his golden wedding; today, like his father, his daughter portrays families, couples, students. A third generation photographer, Bauer founded the Atelier Leny, named after his sister, in 1932, which he ran until 1982. After 1933, he documented Karlsruhe's everyday life under the NS-regime. During the Second World War, he worked as a Wehrmacht photographer in Russia, but during the front holiday and a hospital stay, pictures were taken in Karlsruhe, sometimes despite the official ban on photography. In the post-war period, Erich Bauer was one of the few photographers who documented the war destruction in Karlsruhe and later the reconstruction. The Bauer photo studio established itself in particular in product and company advertising and for image films - also nationwide.
Cargo ships move slowly in the Rhine water when a swivel brings the port of Karlsruhe into the picture from the opposite bank. Houseboats and the moored ships create an atmosphere before the picture in a long shot belongs to the many trucks. Picked up from ground level, the trucks come into the picture from the background or from the side and gradually leave it again, while the reeds in the front sway in the wind. Erich Bauer films with the photographer's gaze. He composes the individual settings precisely, comparable to the commissioned work from advertising and architectural photography. He brings a subjective element into the documentary, whose self-image is shaped by the claim to objectivity.
Some motifs repeat themselves, and the repetition even more highlights the photographic view, which deliberately stages the entire surface of the picture. There is a tree trunk lying several times in the foreground, between the turns and shadows of which the trucks reappear - up to a picture-in-picture effect. Erich Bauer was objectively oriented in his architectural photography, but working on the documentary demonstrates his flexibility in the approach. He repeatedly approaches the construction work with photographs that appear as pictures: Even a documentary does not show any objective images, but rather brings out the visible by deliberately presenting it with the means of photography in this case.
The photographer's other perspective is established when, after more than a third of the film, the construction work on the Rhine has come to the fore. Presumably it is the construction of the refineries and the oil port. Numbered scenes of construction work are lined up, moving between objectivity and poetry. The documentary demands its right when a helmet diver is lowered into a flooded construction pit and then the workers can be seen at the air pump that supplies the diver with oxygen. The photographer sees an artificial watercourse as a landscape with a forest in the background: a gravel excavator does its work, and the water pipe with the excavator bucket next to it becomes a small study of visual effects with strong black and white contrasts. Construction work leaves traces on the earth, which always attract the attention of the filming photographer: the earthworks of a bulldozer, the tire tracks of the moving trucks or the floor of a gantry crane in the complete picture. At the end there is the factual-documentary again: steel plates are cut to size with a machine - two close-ups that should have found their place in the finished film. The film does not take pictures of the opening in spring 1963. The photographer Erich Bauer stages filmic pictorial spaces that bring out a subjective element without neglecting the objectivity of the documentary. His camera eye engages in the traces of the real and stages them. With his recordings he also refers to the traces of making pictures himself in a film that also shows the “material” of his own creation.
Reiner BaderLieux ou monuments
Bibliographie
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