CH 2005 88'
Director: Clemens Klopfenstein
Script: Clemens Klopfenstein
Camera: Clemens Klopfenstein, Vadim Jendreyko
Sound: Nicola Bellucci
Editing:: Remo Legnazzi, Lorenz Klopfenstein
Music:: Ben Jeger, Polo Hofers Schmetterband
With: Polo Hofer, Max Rüdlinger, Sabine Timoteo, Mathias Gnädinger, Ursula Andress
ST FRANCIS BIRD TOUR
Max and Polo, two aging actors from Bern, look up their one-time director in order to pitch him their film idea, a sequel to their last great success 10 years ago. After a number of breakdowns with their car in the wintry Appenines, they finally arrive at the director's Umbrian retreat. A bit of a hermit now, the director has become an ascetic, more interested in monasteries than mainstream consumer culture. However, he asks Max and Polo to do some test shots for a Franciscan film he is working on. As they are led off into the woods in Monks' habits, reciting and chanting, the hapless duo has no idea what they have let themselves in for. With one-time Bond girl Ursula Andress in the role of God's mother, Klopfenstein's film is an entertaining romp about movie making in Switzerland.
"Philosophizing with film: this is how one could characterize Clemens Klopfenstein's DIE VOGELPREDIGT, whereby 'philosophizing' is to be understood in a very broad sense. Reflecting and brooding are as much a part of it as are tomfoolery and everyday conversation as a form of thinking out loud, which can result in some realization or another or not. The medium of film is thereby not merely an instrument of documentation, but at the same time also a means of stimulation and itself in turn the object of often ironically broken reflection and examination... DIE VOGELPREDIGT is a home movie and costume film, an experimental film and genre cinema; there is no difference between the trivial and the sublime the stigmata that, so to speak, ennoble the designated portrayer of Francis of Assisi, Max, are made from the blood of cheap horror films."
Thomas Allenbach