Magnus von Horn’s movie “The Girl with the Needle” | EUROtoday

In der Fabrik der Familie Kitzler in Kopenhagen arbeiten im Jahr 1918 vor allem Frauen. Noch ist alles auf die Produktion von Uniformen abgestellt, aber ein Ende des Krieges ist bereits abzusehen, und dann kann es endlich wieder um die hochwertigen Textilprodukte gehen, mit denen die Familie reich wurde.

In einer Szene des Film „Das Mädchen mit der Nadel“ von Magnus von Horn sieht man, wie die Belegschaft nach einem Arbeitstag durch das Fabriktor ins Freie strömt. Es sind ausschließlich Frauen. Der Regisseur Magnus von Horn zitiert hier einen der kurzen Filme, mit denen im späten 19. Jahrhundert das Kino begann: „Arbeiter verlassen die Fabrik“ von den Brüdern Lumière. Eine Urszene des modernen Lebens, eine Szene, die den Übergang von der Lohnarbeit in das „eigene“ Leben markiert. Eine Szene, in der es nicht um Individuen geht, sondern um die vielen, die früher oft als die erwerbstätigen Massen bezeichnet wurden.

One woman from this crowd is “The Girl with the Needle.” Her title is Karoline Nielsen. She would love widow help, however there’s uncertainty about her husband’s destiny within the battle. Karoline has been behind on her lease for weeks, and now she’s been thrown out and has to search for a brand new place to stay – a darkish, filthy room that Magnus von Horn seems to be a lot worse than one would have imagined anyway.

“The Girl with the Needle” is an expressionistic black and white movie with nice inventive ambition. Early cinema had a Scandinavian section, which von Horn, who was born in Sweden, additionally attracts on, however extra typically he’s involved with a pastiche of all of the uncanny potencies of pre-classical cinema, from Weimar Caligarism to the American horror movies of the Thirties.

It affords the whole lot that was widespread on the time when it comes to ugly sights: grotesque physiognomies, winding structure, threatening shadows. With this aesthetic, Magnus von Horn is anxious with a really up to date perspective on a social formation that’s notably characterised by one issue: the powerlessness of girls in terms of controlling their our bodies.

Today it’s a widespread feminist slogan: “My body belongs to me.” But what a few lady like Karoline Nielsen? She has a physique that she will make use of as labor. She has a fascinating physique that draws the eye of the manufacturing unit proprietor when she steps provocatively and flirtatiously throughout the road. He impregnates her kind of instantly after this seduction, in a aspect avenue, an obscene, semi-public act, which isn’t completely clear whether or not it’s meant to indicate {that a} wealthy man can do something, or whether or not Magnus von Horn is one Wanted to take the chance to take an offensive image.

These two points in all probability additionally play collectively, as a result of “The Girl with the Needle” combines visible exaggeration with a vivisection of social circumstances. A little bit later, Karoline is confronted by the producer Jorgen’s mom within the Kitzlers’ property, is subjected to a gynecological examination after which proven the door. The promise of marriage was value nothing. The bourgeoisie is closing its ranks.

Just at that second, the husband that Karoline simply wished to neglect seems once more. Peter Nielsen returns from the battle as a monster. He hides his disfigured face behind a masks. When Karoline confronts his look and confronts him towards all odds, she additionally sticks a finger into the outlet the place a watch as soon as was.

Now the story may proceed as a drama of a household, with an impoverished spouse, an illegitimate youngster and a not “functioning” husband. But solely now does Magnus von Horn come to the purpose that’s truly necessary to him. In a scene that additionally makes the title “The Girl with the Needle” comprehensible, Karoline meets the older Dagmar, who makes her a suggestion. She agrees to take the kid away from her after the delivery – for a sure sum, discreetly, and no additional questions ought to be requested. Dagmar has a delicatessen store in a slender, steep alley.

But there’s one other deal occurring within the backroom. She buys and sells newborns, she makes an clearly buoyant commerce within the plight of many ladies who’ve given delivery to a baby however now do not know the best way to increase it. Dagmar isn’t an angel maker, as ladies who had secret abortions had been typically known as previously. However, she isn’t that far faraway from this position, as is revealed within the really sinister climax of “The Girl with the Needle”.

Karoline Nielsen types a friendship with Dagmar Overby that’s on the similar time an alliance of comfort, a coaching relationship and a latent love. Vic Carmen Sonne and Trine Dyrholm complement one another completely, one an up-and-coming star, the opposite already an authority in European cinema, recognized from movies by Tomas Vinterberg, Fatih Akin and Susanne Bier.

In a key scene, Dyrholm talks about Dagmar’s delivery destiny: 5 kids, 4 of them stillborn. Meanwhile, Karoline is nursing seven-year-old Erena, who represents one thing just like the everlasting child in a movie of various levels of monstrosity, with the milk that she nonetheless has for the kid she gave away. The two ladies use ether to anesthetize one another about their double lives, which Karoline solely regularly sees by means of. The man with out a face or with the “face of pain” was taken in by a circus within the meantime. Magnus von Horn repeatedly mixes up the hard-to-bear sight with Karoline’s expressive face, as if life as an entire had been a sequence of disfigurements and accidents.

Life 100 years in the past in black and white at the very least – “The Girl with the Needle” is a “period picture” in a heightened sense: naturalistic social depiction repeatedly ideas over into cinematic bravado. The circus because the setting by which individuals who have nowhere else to go discover refuge can be the vanishing level for Magnus von Horn’s story. Among the celebs of immediately’s artwork home cinema, he’s the showman who, with nice gestures, measures the century, in the beginning of which the one options to ladies’s wants had been jail or loss of life. Or the hell that “The Girl with the Needle” repeatedly reveals us.