Døden er et kjærtegn

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Movie
Original title Døden er et kjærtegn
Country of production Norway
original language Norwegian
Publishing year 1949
length 88 minutes
Rod
Director Edith Carlmar
script Otto Carlmar
Arve Moen
production Carlmar Films AS
music Sverre Bergh
camera Kåre Bergstrøm
Ragnar Sørensen
cut Olav Engebretsen
occupation

Døden er et kjærtegn (Norwegian for "Death is a Caress") is a Norwegian film in black and white from 1949 by the director Edith Carlmar and is the first film noir in Norway . It is based on the novel of the same name by Arve Moen . The film premiered on August 29, 1949 in Norway and caused numerous scandals because of its erotic allusions.

action

Oslo . The young Erik Hauge works as a car mechanic in a workshop where he meets a wealthy customer named Sonja Rentoft. She openly shows her erotic interest in him and tries to seduce him. When she is unsuccessful at first, she lets him hire him as a driver through her husband in order to be close to him. Erik soon replies to her advances, although he is planning a future with his fiancée Marit and Sonja Rentoft is married. The life of wealth and carelessness is very attractive to Erik. Soon he neglects both his fiancée and his job and an intense erotic relationship develops between him and Sonja. However, this is characterized by mutual humiliations and misunderstandings right from the start.

It soon becomes apparent that the classic role distribution between men and women has turned into the opposite in their relationship. Erik quits his job and moves into an apartment that Sonja makes available to him. He is not only financially but also emotionally dependent on her and prefers an introverted, domestic life. Sonja, on the other hand, wants to persuade him again and again to integrate into Sonja's circle of friends. On the other hand, she jealously watches every movement he makes, in which she herself cannot participate.

Eventually they get married, Erik takes a job and they both decide to have a child. As a result, however, their conflicts only intensify. They threaten to fail because of their different social status, their concept of partnership and their different life concepts. Their coexistence is characterized by obsession, violent arguments and jealousy. There is one last major scene between them, which ends in a physical argument over the consequences of death.

criticism

The screenplay for the film was developed based on the novel of the same name by Arve Moen , who drew the material for his book from his work as a judge. Content and style borrowings from the book by James M. Cain , When the Postman Rings Twice (1934), are unmistakable. Edith and Otto Carlmar had probably fallen for the genre of film noir because of the sensation that the contemporary film adaptation of the novel in 1946 (English title: In the Net of Passions , 1946) had generated in the USA.

Critics repeatedly emphasize that this is Norway's first film noir, both stylistically and thematically. In fact, in a flashback, the film shows a dramatic love affair that is characterized by the narrowness of a strange couple relationship, the increasing loneliness of the partners and an inevitable, fatal fate. At the end of the film, Erik makes the hopelessness of the situation clear by realizing that he wants to see his wife again after death, be it in heaven or in hell.

The film attracted a lot of public attention in post-war Norway because of its game with the distribution of roles between men and women, the very courageous erotic allusions (verbal and visual) for the time, its theming of the possibility of an abortion, and its dark tone. He was u. a. Accused of pornography and moral reprehensibility. The director Edith Carlmar was threatened with death while the film was running in Oslo, the Kristiansand commune refused a public performance. It was also the first film in Norway to be directed by a woman.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Audun Engelstad: Doing genre history - the case of the Norwegian film noir (pdf download). Retrieved July 26, 2017 (English).
  2. ^ Bergen Filmklubb: Døden er et kjærtegn. filmweb.no, November 29, 2011, accessed July 26, 2017 (Norwegian).