In 1980 "Die Reinheit des Herzens" was quite successful. It was an ironic play on stereotypes of the tired "New German Cinema", a period that lasted from 1962 until - approximately - 1982. Cinemas were filled with laughter, it was actually considered to be a great comedy. In 2003 it returned to the cinema, with one special screening during the Berlin International Film Festival. The occasion was the honoring of film score composer Peer Raben with a lifetime achievement award. He was present, in a wheel chair, accompanied by the director Robert van Ackeren and the female lead Elisabeth Trissenaar, who delivered the laudatory speech.
The start of the movie was greeted with anticipatory applause. During the screening, the audience stayed completely quiet. It was the intense silence of boredom. The story was soapy, the characters lame, the irony unrecognisable. And the music? Somebody got a synthesizer and did some basic, uninspired stuff with it. There was no final applause, though it's kind of obligatory at events like this. The audience just left, tired and silently.
Raben, van Ackeren and Trissenaar, who had followed the screening from some kind of loge, had been turned into pillars of salt. Hardly anything can intensify emotions better than an actual community experience in a cinema. The message could not have been more obvious. Their work was dead, they had outlived their child. They had come for a celebration and had to stay at a funeral. This highly emotional, highly significant moment is long lost in time, too.
