The sons of the great she-bear (film)
The Sons of Great Bear is a DEFA - Indian film from 1966. It is based on motifs from the book series of the same name , the sons of the bear spirit of the author Liselotte Welskopf-Henrich . With this film, Gojko Mitić's career began as a “GDR Chefindian”.
action
In 1874 the Indian Mattotaupa is murdered in a log cabin by the white criminal Red Fox because he does not want to reveal the hiding place of the Indian gold. This murder is seen by his son Tokei-ihto. As the war chief of the bear gang from the tribe of the Oglala , Tokei-ihto throws the whites into constant unrest through raids and blows up the fort on the place where his father was killed. Two years after the murder, Tokei-ihto is invited to a peace conference in the rebuilt fort. He was arrested by treason and held in a cellar for months.
After his release, Tokei-ihto decides to leave the reservation with the bear gang and move to Canada . But the way there is very difficult. Not only must the Missouri be crossed, but hostile Indians must also be defied. But the worst danger follows the gang of bears, Mattotaupa's murderer, who is after Tokei-ihto.
After an arduous hike, the gang of bears cross the Missouri safely, while Tokei-ihto faces a final duel with Red Fox and is able to defeat him in the end.
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The film is based on the one-volume novel published in 1951. In the later six-volume version, the storylines are mainly divided into volumes 5 The Young Chief and 6 About the Missouri . Only the scene of the assassination of Mattotaupa is from the fourth volume Homecoming to the Dakota .
Production notes
In the GDR, there was strong regulation of public life, which also had a decisive influence on art and cultural life. When the idea for a western came up, they did not want to copy American models in which "greedy" gold prospectors or "trigger-happy" cowboys were stylized as heroes. In order to avoid these “bad habits”, historical facts and ethnographic research were kept, so that the Indian everyday life and tribal rites were given special weight.
With the film The Sons of the Great Bear and the later DEFA Indian stripes, efforts were made to find a different form of portrayal of Indian life, probably as a counterpart to the Karl May films that were very successful in the FRG at that time . ( At that time Karl May was still considered a persona non grata in the GDR , before he was assigned his place in the cultural theory of the SED from 1981 onwards.) Gojko Mitić , who had previously worked as a supporting actor in three Karl May films , was quickly found as the main actor would have. Although Mitić mastered the German language, he was dubbed in all Indian films because of his accent. The then 26-year-old practiced handling horses while filming and, as a former stuntman, practiced all the action scenes himself, so that critics had to certify that he was "credible". Mitić became DEFA's “Chefindian” with this film and has been an idol of the GDR youth since the film premiered on February 18, 1966.
Another eleven classic DEFA genre films followed, shot between 1965 and 1983 and shown very successfully in GDR cinemas, especially during the summer film days in open-air cinemas and on campsites. With around five million viewers and grossing 4.8 million marks in 1966, The Sons of the Great Bear became the most successful DEFA flick of the year. In total it reached 9,442,395 viewers in the GDR. In Czechoslovakia it saw 1,737,900 visitors and in the USSR , the film had 29.1 million viewers.
The shooting of the various Indian films took place in the DEFA film studios in Potsdam-Babelsberg, the landscape shots were mostly made in Georgia and Yugoslavia , but also in Romania and Mongolia .
Ruth Hohmann interprets the film songs Missouri and Saloon Song on the record released for the film; Brigitte Krause sings the saloon song in the film .
The cut version available today differs noticeably from the one shown in the GDR - many sequences (especially the opening scene) have been significantly shortened, the fight at the end of the film is cut very differently in both versions (both versions do not correspond to the original version). This results in a time difference of almost ten minutes, although no scene has been removed as a whole.
Reviews
Stefan Kolditz analyzed:
“The real message of the Indian films, which were closer to the adventure films than the westerns, was rather the restoration of the body in its old rights against all ideologies and isms. 'The Sons of the Great Bear' was nothing more than the break-in of the romantic protest against rationality and stale principles of reality, into a film landscape that was ideologized from all sides down to the aesthetic level. To the musty puritanism of the GDR, the existence of an irrepressible pleasure principle, which promised the viewer satisfaction beyond the everyday troubles, never seemed entirely unsuspicious. "
A contemporary view of DEFA films put it: “The West German Karl May films actually lag behind the topic and choice of conflict in good American films in which the Indian and his right to resist have already been discovered. Let's try to create a new kind of Indian film. ”The result described the lexicon of international films as“ somewhat lengthy and awkward ”, but praised the“ great scenic effort ”and the quality of the main actor. The Protestant film observer complains that the extra series sometimes does its job better than the main actors and that the end of the mass slaughter of the contingent by Tokei-ihto is very exaggerated, but comes to the conclusion that the film is still worth watching.
Web links
- The Sons of Great Bear in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- The sons of the great she-bear at Filmportal.de
- The sons of the great she-bear at Defa-Sternstunden.de ( Memento from February 10, 2013 in the web archive archive.today )
- The sons of the great she-bear at the DEFA Foundation
Individual evidence
- ↑ Gojko Mitić, Winnetou of the East, is 70 ( Memento from September 8, 2012 in the web archive archive.today ). Progress-film.de, June 8, 2010.
- ↑ The most successful GDR films in the GDR . Insidekino.com.
- ↑ Synové Velké Medvědice . Phil.muni.cz.
- ↑ Сыновья Большой Медведицы . Kinopoisk.ru.
- ↑ Stefan Kolditz : In front of the camera. Fifty actors in Babelsberg , Henschel Verlag 1995, ISBN 3894872357
- ^ Lieselotte Welskopf-Henrich : With the Dakota in the Woodmountains ; Weekly Mail , May 14, 1966.
- ↑ The sons of the great she-bear. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed March 2, 2017 .
- ↑ Evangelical Press Association Munich, Review No. 101/1967