Jonathan

Federal Republic of Germany 1970 | 97 mins 
by Hans W. Geißendörfer (Regie, Buch)
with Jürgen Jung, Hans-Dieter Jendreyko, Paul Albert Krumm, Hertha von Walther, Oskar von Schab, Ilona Grübel, Sophie Strehlow, Gaby Herbst, Arthur Brauss

Rating R 16

The film is set in an unspecified past, when a vampire count ruled a small, middle-class city and its surrounding farmland. Young people are especially vulnerable to the blood lust of the count and his followers. So a group of students, encouraged by their professor, plan a revolution. One of them, Jonathan, is chosen to lead the way and scout out the situation. But on his way to the castle, he runs into a series of obstacles. His coachman is assassinated and a vagabond working for the count tries to kill him. Upon reaching the castle, Jonathan witnesses bloody excesses. And he is forced to realise that his fiancée has fallen victim to the count …
In gory scenes, artfully arranged in long takes by cameraman Robby Müller, and in genre images familiar from the 19th century, Jonathan depicts a collective of freedom fighters in the battle against oppression. And like genre painting, Geissendörfer’s pictorially fascinating genre movie has a didactic moral background. Even at its premiere, Jonathan was recognised as a political parable of Germany’s ex-parliamentary protest movement of the 1960s. - www.berlinale.de