Cyankali (film)

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Movie
Original title Cyanide
Country of production Germany
original language German
Publishing year 1930
length 91 minutes
Rod
Director Hans Tintner
script Hans Tintner
production Hans Tintner for Atlantis-Film, Berlin
music Willy Schmidt-Gentner
camera Günther Krampf
cut Herbert Selpin
occupation

Cyankali is a moral drama based on a play by Friedrich Wolf , which advocates a legal abortion in social distress. Directed by Hans Tintner , the main role took on Grete Mosheim . The premiere took place on May 23, 1930 in Berlin .

action

Berlin, late 1920s. The young Hete Fent works as an office worker in a factory. Her fiancé, the worker Paul, is also employed there. One day, Hete finds out that she is pregnant. Their social hardship - they have no prospect of living together - will make it very difficult as parents to look after their future child. Still, they choose the baby.

When one day the workers are locked out of the factory for demanding wage increases, the dream of a small family is finally shattered. Paul is now unemployed and no longer earns any money. Hete is trying to find a doctor willing to abort her. She fails her search and then goes to an “ angel maker ” who gives her cyanide . But the dose is wrongly portioned, and so Hete dies painfully from poisoning.

Her mother is then arrested on suspicion of having assisted in the unauthorized abortion (see Section 218 ). Paul and his friend Max, who broke into a grocery store to escape their social misery, are also arrested.

Production notes

Hans Tintner remarked on his production of Cyankali : “In this film I was almost slavishly adhering to the play. From the main scenes of the play I got the manuscript in close cooperation with the author of the play, Dr. Friedrich Wolf, written. While the play on stage portrays more of a family's private, family relationships, in the film I had the opportunity to go far more into the social causes. "

The film started as a silent film , with two passages at the end marking the transition to the sound film.

Since the first submission on March 13, 1930, the highly controversial film has gone through a veritable marathon of tests with the film censors. Again and again new cutting requirements were arranged. Until the last censorship test on December 12, 1930, "Cyankali" was always banned from young people.

Helmut Schreiber made his debut at Cyankali as a production manager, the film was awarded by Deutsche Fox-Film AG, whose director was Tintner.

The painter Otto Nagel , who was friends with Heinrich Zille and Käthe Kollwitz , was also involved in the production of the film .

Reviews

The film has received a great deal of attention from contemporary critics. Here are two examples:

Herbert Jhering wrote in the Berlin Börsen-Courier : Cyankali “does not achieve the sharpness and clout of the drama. The indictment turns into a lewd milieu sketch and begging for pity. Here too, even more clearly, the spiritual objective is missing. ”Jhering's conclusion:“ What a shame. Here, too, one had the courage to turn a daring topic and the effect was destroyed by the lack of consistency. Something is going on in German films. You can tell that the old topic cannot go on. One dares something. But you don't do it right yet ”.

Paul Marcus wrote in Das 12 Uhr Blatt : “This time and purpose film does not want and should not be criticized in an aesthetic way. Premiered in the middle of Berlin's Scheunenviertel, far from all piquant sensations and ambitions, Friedrich Wolf's filmed material was as disturbing as in the 'group of young actors'. Nothing is coarser, perhaps a little wider and more stretched; so the effect is less direct, less revolutionary, but all the more profound, agonizing, more lasting. ”And:“ Hans Tintner's direction sometimes blurred, sometimes got stuck in the traditional. But what does this mean for the performance of Mosheim, which has not taken over anything from Stobrawa. She understood the role quite differently. Even before the catastrophe, it was burdensome, but the suffering grew far beyond the outbreak. It increased the pain to the extreme. A human child went up almost resignedly into painless nothingness. "

Cyankali in post-war criticism:

In Kay Weniger 's 'In life more is taken from you than given ...' the circumstances surrounding the premiere of the Wolf film were remembered: “Cyankali” was hotly debated in public, was extremely controversial and only came after numerous Film censorship imposed editing requirements in the movie theaters. "

Horst Knietzsch gave the following opinion on the film in Film History in Pictures from the Socialist World View of the GDR: Cyankali “did not do justice to the literary model by Friedrich Wolf, but it was an artistic statement on the hotly debated paragraph 218, which forbade pregnancy interruptions for social reasons . Tintner remained on a bourgeois democratic position. He did not demand the possibility of social indication corresponding to the miserable social conditions, but rather birth regulation by the state. "

See also

literature

  • Günter Agde : Film utopias before the catastrophe. Friedrich Wolf's film projects for Meshrabpom Film Moscow (1931–1933). In: Kulturation. 2, 2003, ISSN  1610-8329 .
  • Kerstin Barndt: Aesthetics of Crisis. Motherhood, Abortion and Melodrama in Irmgard Keun and Friedrich Wolf. In: Women in German Yearbook. Vol. 24, 2008, ISSN  1058-7446 , pp. 71-95, online .
  • Nadine Bender: The proletarian Berlin in the film of the Weimar Republic. Marburg 2003, pp. 63-75 (Marburg, Philipps University, Master's thesis, 2003), online .
  • Uta Berg-Ganschow (Ed.): Berlin. Outside and inside. 53 films from 90 years. Materials for a retrospective. Deutsche Kinemathek Foundation, Berlin 1984.
  • Hans-Michael Bock , Tim Bergfelder (Eds.): The Concise Cinegraph. Encyclopaedia of German Cinema (= Film Europa. Vol. 1). Berghahn Books, New York NY et al. 2009, ISBN 978-1-57181-655-9 , pp. 193, 239-240, 260, 265.
  • Andreas-Andrew Bornemann: Grete Mosheim (1905–1986) .
  • "Cyankali". In: Workers' Stage and Film. Volume 17, No. 6, June 6, 1930, ZDB -ID 281881-4 . Printed in: Gertraude Kühn, Karl Tümmler, Walter Wimmer (eds.): Film and revolutionary workers' movement in Germany. 1918-1932. Documents and materials on the development of the film policy of the revolutionary labor movement and on the beginnings of socialist film art in Germany. Volume 2. Henschelverlag Art and Society, Berlin 1978, p. 487.
  • Peter Drexler: The German court film 1930–1960. Approaches to a Problematic Tradition. In: Joachim Linder, Claus-Michael Ort (ed.): Crimes - Justice - Media. Constellations in Germany from 1900 to the present (= studies and texts on the social history of literature. Vol. 70). Niemeyer, Tübingen 1999, ISBN 3-484-35070-9 , pp. 387-402.
  • Peter Drexler: The German Courtroom Film During the Nazi Period: Ideology, Aesthetics, Historical Context. In: Journal of Law and Society. Vol. 28, No. 1, 2001, ISSN  0263-323X , pp. 64-78, here p. 3, doi : 10.1111 / 1467-6478.00179 .
  • Ralf Forster, Jens Thiel: Otto Nagel and the film. Documents in the Otto Nagel archive. In: Filmblatt. Volume 3, No. 7, Spring / Summer 1998, pp. 33–37, online (PDF; 4.2 MB) .
  • Rudolf Freund: Cyankali. In: Günther Dahlke, Günter Karl (Hrsg.): German feature films from the beginning to 1933. A film guide. 2nd Edition. Henschel-Verlag, Berlin 1993, ISBN 3-89487-009-5 , p. 224 f.
  • Laurence Kardish (Ed.): Weimar cinema, 1919–1933. Museum of Modern Art, New York NY 2010, ISBN 978-0-87070-761-2 .
  • Barbara Kosta: Unruly Daughters and Modernity: Irmgard Keun's Gilgi - one of us. In: The German Quarterly. Vol. 68, No. 3, Summer 1995, ISSN  0016-8831 , pp. 271-286, here p. 278.
  • Daniel Kulle: Section 173 of the St.GB Incest. A paragraph film and censorship. In: Hans-Peter Becht, Carsten Kretschmann, Wolfram Pyta (eds.): Politics, communication and culture in the Weimar Republic (= Pforzheim Talks on social, economic and urban history. Vol. 4). Verlag Regionalkultur, Heidelberg et al. 2009, ISBN 978-3-89735-554-5 , pp. 71–87, here p. 73.
  • Joachim Linder, Claus-Michael Ort (ed.): Crimes - Justice - Media. Constellations in Germany from 1900 to the present (= studies and texts on the social history of literature. Vol. 70). Niemeyer, Tübingen 1999, ISBN 3-484-35070-9 , pp. 266, 364, 382-383, 386, 389.
  • Martin Loiperdinger : Film censorship and self-control. Political school leaving examination. In: Wolfgang Jacobsen , Anton Kaes, Hans Helmut Prinzler (Hrsg.): History of German film. 2nd updated and expanded edition. Metzler, Stuttgart et al. 2004, ISBN 3-476-01952-7 , pp. 525-544, here pp. 12-13.
  • Cornelie Usborne: Cultures Of Abortion In Weimar Germany (= Monographs in German History. Vol. 17). 1st paperback edition. Berghahn Books, New York NY et al. 2011, ISBN 978-0-85745-166-8 , pp. 23, 26, 29, 37-39, 42-56.
  • Karlheinz Wendtland: Beloved Kintopp. All German feature films from 1929–1945. With numerous artist biographies. Born in 1929 and 1930. Medium Film Wendtland Berlin publisher undated [1987], ISBN 3-926945-06-0 .
  • Renate Wittern-Sterzel (Ed.): Gynecologists in the first half of the 20th century. In: Christoph Anthuber, Matthias W. Beckmann, Johannes Dietl , Fritz Dross, Wolfgang Frobenius (eds.): Challenges. 100 years of the Bavarian Society for Obstetrics and Gynecology. Thieme, Stuttgart et al. 2012, ISBN 978-3-13-171571-5 , pp. 47-59.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ CYANKALI ( Memento of the original from January 7, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. at deutsche-kinemathek.de, accessed on February 3, 2014.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / verleihfilme.deutsche-kinemathek.de
  2. ↑ They contain dialogues and were recorded using the Tri-Ergon method (optical sound), cf. Photo stage . Vol. 23, no. 124, v. May 24, 1930: The film is produced as a sound and speech film (Tri-Ergon system). Music and language come out acceptable. Schmidt-Gentner draws for the musical illustration.
  3. ↑ cf. Photo stage. Vol. 23, no. 124, v. May 24, 1930: The lack of language, which is also expressed in the expressive design of the subtitles, is evident here on the threshold of the sound film. The subsequent furnishing of the film with Willy Schmidt-Gentner's music could not compensate for this, it even had a counterproductive effect.
  4. ↑ cf. Forster, Thiel: Otto Nagel and the film. In: Filmblatt. Volume 3, No. 7, Spring / Summer 1998, pp. 33–37, here p. 33: Otto Nagel was also involved in the film Cyankali (1930) based on Friedrich Wolf's original.
  5. ↑ Berliner Börsen-Courier , evening edition v. May 24, 1930.
  6. ↑ Neue Berliner Zeitung. The 12 o'clock hand. Vol. 12, May 24, 1930, ZDB ID 821491-8 .
  7. ↑ Kay Less : "In life, more is taken from you than given ...". Lexicon of filmmakers who emigrated from Germany and Austria between 1933 and 1945. A general overview. Acabus-Verlag, Hamburg 2011, ISBN 978-3-86282-049-8 , p. 507.
  8. ^ Horst Knietzsch : Film history in pictures. Henschelverlag, East Berlin 1971, p. 119 f.