Lenz

Year: 1971

Runtime: 130 mins

Language: German

Director: George Moorse

Drama

A film adaptation of Georg Büchner’s short story follows the tormented Sturm und Drang poet Lenz as he takes shelter in the home of the compassionate Alsatian priest and philanthropist Oberlin. Beset by increasingly unbearable hallucinations, Lenz hopes the gentle clergyman can help, yet Oberlin, regarding the poet’s illness as divinely ordained, feels powerless to offer any counsel.

Direct adaptation

Read the Lenz book behind the movie

A Young Playwright Walks into the Vosges Mountains and Lives briefly with Pastor Oberlin as Landscape, Religious Longing, Artistic Revolt, and Mental Illness Reshape Perception · by Georg Büchner, Richard Sieburth

Why this book?

George Moorse's television film follows Büchner's fragment as a historical study of Jakob Lenz's stay with Oberlin in the Vosges and his deteriorating perception. Landscape, religious crisis, artistic argument and breakdown are translated into austere black-and-white images rather than treated as conventional biographical explanation. The film supplies bodies and locations for a text famous for its interior proximity, but remains anchored in the same documented 1778 episode presented in Sieburth's edition.

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