The Vintagent Classics: The films that inspired us.
THE KILOMETER EATER aka DER KILOMETERFRESSER (1925)
Run Time: 1:22:00
A Film By: Karl Imelski
Key Cast: Ernst Ganauser, Karl Imelski
FILM MAKERS
Der Kilometerfresser is an Austrian cultural film with a feature film plot. It was shot in the summer of 1923 and premiered in June 1925 in the Urania in Vienna . This silent film takes the title character on his motorcycle from Austria through Italy, Switzerland, the Balkans and Czechoslovakia are shown.
The adult education center in Vienna Urania wanted to use film as a medium for adult education, after having already had success with slide shows. Purely documentary cultural films did not bring the desired response from the audience, so an attempt was made to combine the documentary content with a feature film plot. In the style of Around the World in 80 Days , a bet in this film also provides the reason for describing a longer journey. The film shows landscapes, cities, monuments and customs along the route through Austria, Italy, the Balkans and Czechoslovakia.
The director of the film, Karl Imelski, had already made the cultural film King Dachstein in 1922 with the leading actor, the sportsman Ernst Ganauser. The Kilometerfresser is, according to its own statement, “a film from five countries in six acts (Austria 1923/24)”.
The film was thought to be lost for decades, but was discovered by chance in the warehouse of a Viennese antique dealer and identified as The Kilometer Eater. The tinted film was restored by the Filmarchiv Austria in 2004. No original music has been preserved for this film. The first orchestral score was composed in 2007 by Florian C. Reithner on behalf of the Orchester Filmharmonie. – read more
SUMMARY
New Year’s Eve 1923 in the sports club: club moderator and sportsman Ernest follows the old tradition of pouring lead, and an indefinable lead oracle emerges. His friend, a journalist, interprets the oracle as follows: an oar! an ice pick! a motorcycle! For Ernest, this means that he has to complete a tour of 6,000 kilometers on land, on water and in the mountains. A few months later, the route and conditions are determined. The starting point of the 15-day tour is to be Lucerne and the end point is Vienna. And so Ernest starts his adventure on August 15th at 10:00 a.m. He has previously bet with his club colleagues that he could cover the set route across Central Europe within the set time on his Norton motorcycle and that he would also climb the Großvenediger and, as the crowning glory, row on the Danube through the Wachau to Vienna.
Of course, the sports friends demand that the travel route through the Balkans, through Styria to Pilsen, into the high mountains on the Grossvenediger and then rowing through the Wachau to Vienna is monitored and controlled so that Ernest does not take any unauthorized shortcuts. This task falls to Ernest’s journalist friend, who is supposed to make sure that everything is above board. Since there is also plenty of fun to be had, the two men play little pranks on each other. Nevertheless, Ernest completes all of the agreed points on the journey and reaches Vienna on time, thus winning the bet. – read more
RELATED MEDIA
Buy the DVD with extras including: 100 minutes of bonus material (documentation, trailer for the Filmharmonie film concerts, etc.) and numerous original documents in a Digipak, 28-page booklet.
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A 4-minute, full-speed chase…
Honestly .. despite the added soundtrack being way too Hollywood OTT overblown ( I can think of a thousand pieces of music that would of actually fit the film .. rather than over run it ) …this looks like a kick .
Entertaining ? Sure … educational .. most likely … but to buy it ? Nahhh … this ( like almost all silent films ) should of been released into the public domain a decade ago …
Its no doubt worth the watch … but not the $
Se la vie .
😎
Actually it’s a fascinating example of a motorcycle film, as I wrote in my book, Two wheels and a crank camera. I adore this movie, and the other one restored by the Austrian Cinematheque (“In moto sulle Dolomiti”).
Rather than telling a story, it tells The Story… the time when Fascism and Nazism were taking shape, and the man-hero, strong and fearless, was spreading his wings in all his glory. The motorbike was the perfect beast to tame, all fire, all iron… The man even goes so far as to stage the accident in which he ends up in the water by falling off the bridge!
He stops at nothing… and even goes so far as to give up his bike at the end in order to arrive victorious at the goal.
Buy it? Definitely YES but only if you consider a motorcycle as a philosophy of life, a piece of culture, a mechanical creature that, among other things, has served the Cinema to give a face to history and their people.