One of the most important actors in the German-speaking world, Guntz is best known for his role as Hitler in The Destruction of the Empire. But this role is more like an exception to all the characters he plays. His interpretations of characters are often philosophical, and his performances not only tap into the depth of human nature, but also give images to thought, spirit and soul.
Lead Writer /Pu Shi
Swiss actor Bruno Guntz died at the age of 77 (Courtesy of Visual China)
The poetry of Europe
Upon learning of Bruno Guntz's death, his singing, deep voice rang in my ears. The guardian angel Damir began to endlessly ask philosophical questions: "Why am I?" Why am I not you? Where does time begin and where does space end? "His monologues of reflection on the characters of the films Under the Berlin Sky and Eternity and a Day, such as the philosopher and the poet, are deep, soothing, melodious, with the unique ups and downs and rhythms of the German language, and the song is like a song, which becomes the soundtrack of the timeless long shots of Wim Wenders and Angelopoulos. At this time, I realized that watching his movies was more than ten years ago. His voice is like an old-school gentleman from the last century, and the kind of serious, classical rhythmic pace is hard to find in today's faster-paced film and television productions.
Guntz was born in Zurich, Switzerland in 1941. His father was a mechanic and his mother was a farmer from northern Italy. Guntz once said in an interview that people like him from humble backgrounds need strong willpower to come out. He rarely talks openly about his life. According to his colleagues, in his early years he gave the impression of being irritable and arrogant, and had also relied on alcohol, but he quickly made a change. What "willpower" is, it can probably also be glimpsed from his acting career. He made his appearance in the theater in 1961 and co-founded the Berlin "Theater" troupe with PeterStein in 1970, focusing on the stage for 20 years. His film career and theater career coincided, and from the early 1960s to the 1970s, he appeared in dozens of films, acting superbly, but he has been unknown. It wasn't until he played the guardian angel in Berlin in 1987 and Hitler in 2004 in The Destruction of the Empire that his fame began to extend beyond the German-speaking world and to the world. While he did not stop acting in movies, he never gave up the stage art, and his plays continued to play roles in classic plays such as Shakespeare and Goethe. His line skills in movies have a lot to do with his stage performances.
Before working with German director Wim Wenders on Under the Berlin Sky, they worked on another film, 1977's American Friend. In that Ripley detective film, Wenders implicitly expressed some of West Germany's concerns about accepting american cultural influences as it approached the United States. Under the Berlin Sky is a European film. Two angels overlook the world, and the last angel comes down because of love, which is a fantasy story. The film hardly adopts any special effects to create fantasy effects, but uses a lot of long shots to give people a strong impression of reality. Guntz and his partner, Otto Sandel, play angels who walk like ordinary people walking on earth, dressed in black tweed coats, walk through the neighborhoods of Berlin. Only when I revisited it again did I realize that playing an angel in the form of an ordinary person is not winning with the drama of the story, but there are many subtle acting skills.
How do I play as an angel with a human form? How do angels walk, how do they act, how do they talk? No one knows what angels look like. Guntz once said in an interview that they had been discussing it for a long time, constantly discussing Rilke's poems, discussing Paul Kerry's paintings, and reading some research works on angels— "angels" is an Anglo-Saxon invention. How to represent angels? What will the angel do, fly or walk? If you're walking on the street, not invisible on a screen, but in another world, how can you express this alienation through facial expressions and body language? Guntz realized that he should be more of a "physical presence" in the film, and did not need too many actions to express.
The angels have some shots of Berlin from above, and most of the time they walk the streets of the city. What impressed me was the scene of two angels sitting in a traffic jam, watching the city in a spectator manner. With listening and contemplative expressions, Guntz and Sandel convey a precise sense of distance, making people feel that they are in the human world, but they are only guests of this world, belonging to another world. They have a poetic dialogue: "A pedestrian put away his umbrella in the rain and let the rain soak through." A student told his teacher about the origin of ferns on earth, which shocked his teacher. A blind woman rubbed her watch and felt my presence. How good it is to live by spirit, day after day until eternity. But sometimes I get tired of my spiritual existence, I don't want to be out of reality forever, but I want to have a real feeling in my body, so as to end the state of nothingness and make me close to the world. I hope that every footstep, every breeze, can say the present, not forever and eternally. Guntz watched the silence of all beings, and the innocent smile of the otherworldly world appeared on his face, giving people the feeling that he was an angel. Before I saw the angel played by Guntz, the angel in my mind was never the appearance of a middle-aged man; but Guntz branded the image of the angel he created into people's hearts, so that wherever he went, people called him "angel".
Revisiting the scene in the library, I learned more about how he created the feeling of "coming from another world." When the angel puts his hand on the man's shoulder and leans close to hear the thoughts in people's heads, the symbolic movement of the shoulder and the indifferent reaction of the person being put on convey the feeling of weightlessness of the action, drawing a line between the two worlds between the two people who are in physical contact. Guntz uses all the subtle body language to convey this isolation, including an action he designs: he sits in a corner of the library, holding the handrail of the staircase with his hands open backwards, a gesture that contrasts with the library's space. When he talks to another fallen angel in the small shop, the three of them create a relationship and atmosphere to set off this parallel world: a surprised coffee shop owner, a fallen angel who seems to talk to himself, and an invisible angel who has fled in a hurry. When the angel played by Guntz falls into the human world, the film transitions from black and white to color, his footprints appear on the ground, and the soldiers on the other side of the wall follow his voice to look for it, while Guntz conveys the texture of "people" with a vibrant and joyful gait, which contrasts with the previous wandering and steady gait that is not similar to that of the human world. Wenders' films use little montage, do not edit movement, and often develop calmly, waiting, and without pause. Guntz's still-water performance does not require dramatic conflict and emotional fluctuations, but has a profound power.
Guntz is also able to present the poetic pursuit of spirit and soul by European directors like Angelopoulos. In Eternity and One Day, he plays an old poet who is preparing to enter the hospital due to cancer, and his life journey on the last day before admission. It's a film in which the poet needs to travel through reality, memory, and illusion, and like Wenders, Angelopoulos records these transitions not through stunts, but through long shots. Guntz's performances are always precise in place. I remember pulling back the curtains of his daughter's house, walking from his apartment to the balcony, and crossing the shot of his former wife's seaside house when she was still alive. It is a shot from reality to memory, and In an instant, Guntz becomes a smiling, flexible, sunny person, in stark contrast to the lonely and sad mood before death reflected in the previous stagnant footsteps and gloomy expressions in the house. Between this contrast, reality and memory leave no trace of switching. Angelopoulos creates the feel of stage in the film. Hordes of tourists arriving by bus, relatives and friends at lunch by the sea, people adopting children in abandoned garages... Their gaits and costumes convey the feel of a stage play, and Guntz moves smoothly through them, smoothly switching freely between reality, memory, and illusion.
Bruno Guntz played Hitler in the 2004 film The Destruction of the Empire
A sense of history
The more widely known film The Empire Destroys shows Guntz's ability to converge and explode as he transitions between capricious emotions. The film is the most controversial German film of the past 20 years, telling the story of the last days of the life of dictator Hitler, when the Red Army conquered Berlin, and he committed suicide in an underground bunker with his new wife, Eva Braun. All the criticism points to the question: Can a man like Hitler, who has committed a crime of mass murder, be presented as a normal human being? In an interview with Süddeutsche Zeitung, Guntz said that many people around him who he trusted opposed his role, and that the Germans had internalized not playing Hitler as a taboo. What convinced him to come was that they found a lot of historical information about Hitler's last moments, including a tape of Hitler in which he spoke in a normal, rather than inflammatory, voice, and memoirs of many people around him describing Hitler's gait, the way he spoke, and even how he cleared his throat and his hands that were trembling from Parkinson's syndrome. He decided to follow these details to present Hitler's image, rather than wandering on his dead Nazi ideology.
In the final moments of the dissolution of the Third Reich, quarrels and parties were taking place in the underground chambers. Hitler was emotionally unstable, crying out for self-pity one minute, and immediately gathering strength to roar or gobble up the next. Guntz grasps the capriciousness that can go from being reserved to being abrupt in an instant, or transitioning seamlessly between whispering and roaring. No actor has ever imitated Hitler and disappeared himself from his role like Guntz. When the audience could not recognize Guntz, Hitler also had a human nature. Guntz once said in an interview that people around him at the time felt that when he talked about Hitler, he often lost a sense of reasonable, politically correct distance. He even bluntly admitted that he had a moment of sympathy for Hitler; this sentence immediately caused an uproar in Germany. But it was in this danger that Guntz created the pioneering and unique Hitler: he sketched a portrait of Hitler's realism and broke taboos in German culture. It is the humanity embodied in hitler he plays that makes people more deeply aware that evil is something that lurks in human nature, one of the most powerful forces in the world. For Guntz, he has an inescapable sense of history that allows him to play a role in films of historical and political significance. In the film The Age of Fading Light, he plays the majestic elder of a family in East Germany, projecting into family life the teetering shadow of East Germany and the ideology associated with it.
Wonder where European stars like Guntz come from, their musical and poetic lines, their artistic grasp of the situation, where they come from. Later I approached Guntz at a memorial concert by conductor Claudio Abbado, reciting a video of Hölderlin's "Bread and Wine," a sophisticated fusion of his rhythms and the music of a classical orchestra. At the 1991 Christmas Eve Concert, the Berliner Philharmoniker performed Beethoven, Egmont, and the theme of freedom, also recited by Gonz. He also performed on classical music records and collaborated on a record with the Berliner Philharmoniker. Thus I learned the source of the musicality and rhythm in his film lines, how he could combine the tone of his voice and the freedom of the length of words into a precise rhythm. In his late film The Secret of the Big Tree, he uses a slightly old, steady voice to present the solemnity of time that the ancient tree has passed.
Guntz belongs to the circle of European cinema and Hollywood celebrities, and directors like Herzog, Bertruch, Coppola, Ridley Scott and others are very fond of him. He is very multifaceted and plays a wide range of roles, from the dictator Hitler ("The Destruction of the Empire") to the angel who yearns for the world ("Under the Berlin Sky"), from the poet ("Eternity and One Day") to the kind grandfather ("Heidi and Grandpa", "The Piano Boy Who Wants to Fly"), from the vampire ("Ghost of the Night") to the hotel waiter ("Dream Tulip"), and many of the stage images he has created in theatrical classics. But he avoided Hollywood's Vanity Fair. In the middle of his career, he completely lived the characters he created, simple, profound, introverted, not at all like a world celebrity. After a brief stint in the United States, he returned to Berlin and Venice, and finally to Zurich, where he grew up. He has played many patients with cancer and played death, but when he was diagnosed with bowel cancer, he said those death roles did not help him prepare for his own death. For some time before his death, he was often seen in little Niederdorf in Zurich, "always carrying a rucksack on his shoulder and a mischievous smile on his face". At the end of his life, he said, he wanted to see where it began, and that his hometown was for him the place where he grew up as a child.
His last film was der trafikant, an adaptation of the novel of the same name by the Austrian novelist Robert Seethaler. He played the Austrian psychologist Sigmund Freud as a spiritual symbol.