Benjamin

Willy Bogner is a neglected, though absolutely essential name for the concept of vulgar auteurs, i.e. the attempt to highlight the creativity and formalistic signature of distinctive filmmakers working in the area of physical genres. Unlike most of the filmmakers who were glorified in this way by fannish critics several years ago, this former top-level skier has not only served as the director of his own films, but also as producer, screenwriter and cameraman, so that the resulting works fully reflect the creative personality and distinctiveness of their creator. All of his films are characterised by boisterous cinematography, narrative and logic. Ad hoc formalistic ideas and random narrative twists go hand in hand with unabashedly nonsensical premises and absurd gags performed for their own sake. Bogner was a torchbearer of the advertising aesthetic in the field of feature films and, besides his absurdist hippie debut Stehaufmädchen, the rest of his filmography comprises sports movies focused primarily on skiing sequences. Bogner actually followed in the footsteps of pioneering filmmaker Arnold Fanck, who established the mountain-film genre in the 1920s and whose breathtaking formalistic compositions influenced Leni Riefenstahl’s directorial style. Like Fanck, Bogner strove to depict the emotions and aesthetics of sports in winter landscapes as effectively as possible. Unlike his predecessor, however, he was not bound by traditional narrative structure and its principles. Instead, he embraced the Dadaist principle of free association, the logic of slapstick randomness and the autotelic spectacle of commercials and music videos. Benjamin represents the intersection of the ethos of Bogner’s unrestrained early work and the spectacular nature of his later films set entirely in the world of sports. The film has not one, but two parallel premises. In the first one, a meek office worker unwillingly becomes a global skiing star based on the results of a computer program and in spite of his actual skills. In parallel with that, a storyline in the mould of Jeckyll and Hyde develops, as the same office worker transforms into a self-confident braggart when listening to music. Both of these storylines enable Bogner to develop a crazy satire at the expense of the falseness of marketing and the prefabricated nature of celebrities. Mainly, however, they give Bogner an excuse to fill the feature-length runtime with a series of skiing exhibitions. But the slopes in Benjamin represent a Dadaistically psychedelic world in which anything is possible and things, people and entities simply appear based solely on the logic of the gag. They can thus freely move through time and space just for effect. From standing on skis, the protagonist may suddenly find himself riding waves on a surfboard or at a rodeo. The whole thing is reminiscent of animated slapstick, but the difficulty of execution of the individual shots demonstrates that the randomness is not merely the result of a sudden impulse and its immediate realisation. Behind the madness, there is a method and creative determination to translate the given vision to the screen. We can even say that Bogner, in his second feature film, came up with the cinematic equivalent of turntable scratching in music. This is true not only of the narrative, where he mixes together two fundamentally unconnected plot motifs, but also of his creative method with respect to genres, styles and the approach to the substance of the film in its final compilation in the cutting room. At its core, the film combines the style of music videos and commercials with the style of nonsensical parodies with their incongruous gags, thus creating a new form. In doing so, Bogner lets himself be carried away by his own nonsensical flow and boisterously plays with the rapidity of the shots and their montages. (07/09/2022) (less) (more)