The light of love (1991)
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| Original title | The light of love |
| Country of production | Germany |
| original language | German |
| Publishing year | 1991 |
| length | 83 minutes |
| Rod | |
| Director | Gunther Scholz |
| script | Gunther Scholz Wolf Müller (scenario) Werner Beck (dramaturgy) |
| production | DEFA , KAG "Berlin" |
| music | Friedbert Wissmann |
| camera | Claus Neumann |
| cut | Karin Kusche |
| occupation | |
| |
The light of love is a fairy tale of DEFA over the wonder of vision and the visible; the theme is inspired by Henrik Hertz's fairytale play by King René's daughter . The film was made in autumn 1989 and premiered on February 28, 1991 at the Berlin Kino International . The film was first broadcast on German television on December 22, 1991. A video of The Light of Love has been available since September 29, 1998 .
action
A loving couple
The story of the fairy tale is framed by a conversation between lovers. A blonde, beautiful girl asks her loved one to tell her a story. And when he wakes up halfway from sleep he makes up his mind. He will tell her the most beautiful love story he knows:
The monastery
The fairy tale takes place in Thuringia in 804 and the events begin in a women's monastery. An abbess rules rigidly here. People write, read and draw in the monastery. A boy without rights belongs to the monastery - he is a serf; Since the boy, who is always called a villain, can draw well and learned to read in the monastery, his services are used in the monastery library. The boy has sail ears, frizzy black hair and is teased by everyone because of his appearance. - We recognize him, it is the storyteller himself. - The poor serf in the monastery wants to please the peasant girl Gigi and is mocked and beaten for it. The abbess reprimanded him furiously, not noticing that she was missing an imperial-sealed parchment. When the boy tries to save it for her, she frantically snatches it from him and carefully seals the mysterious paper. As a punishment for the trouble with Gigi, the boy will have to continue to live in the pigsty.
The black rider
The boy lives in the dirt; here one day he has to watch a traveler sink from his horse. His face is marked with disease and disease. Everything fled mercilessly. But the boy takes the rider into his stable against the will of the nuns and takes care of him. After three weeks the rider wakes up from his deadly unconsciousness. The boy saved his life. He asks him roughly: Who he is - but the boy has no name; the rider also asks if there is another boy in the monastery - but the kid is the only one here. The only thing that makes the boy unmistakable is the rough, badly scarred bite of his donkey, which they both laugh at. The stubborn gentleman with the glittering imperial banner promises his lifesaver when saying goodbye to reward him for the deed. As he rides away, the rider calls out whether the boy might not be Bogumil, Slavomir's only son, the King of the Wends?
The parchment
Step by step, the boy struggles to recognize a connection. Emperor Karl had previously held a council here in Thuringia to establish peace. As a whitewashed picture in the monastery library tells the boy, here the emperor mediated between the margrave of Thuringia and the slave king Slavomir. In order to secure the peace, the emperor designates the newborn daughter of the margrave to the newborn son of the Wenden king as bride. The son of Slavomir is Bogumil and on the fresco as a newborn, like the kid, he has noticeably protruding ears. Bogumil is determined by the marriage to be the future margrave of Thuringia. But the cooked Margrave of Thuringia keeps a back door open. The son of Slavomir is supposed to be brought up to be a Christian in the same Thuringian monastery where the boy serves. The margrave's right to Bogumil is guaranteed by the mysterious imperial parchment. The poor nameless kid who finds parchment and picture and is looking for his identity thinks he can be recognized as Bogumil. He sets off with the parchment to claim his rights.
The tower
After a long hike, the boy arrives at a closely guarded tower-like fortress in the middle of the wilderness. At risk to his life, he succeeds in climbing the platform. But what miracle he encounters here: In a garden, amidst tame, wild animals, a beautiful, blond, courtly dressed girl is strolling around. She is the first person to meet the boy with full respect and attention, and when she says goodbye asks him to come back soon, otherwise Reglindis would be sad. He promises her and hides the day in the dark, gruesome cellar of the castle. We recognize the girl: It is the same girl who is being told the story by her lover.
Reglindis and her lover
At night, the beautiful Reglindis and the boy meet in their bower . Meanwhile, Reglindi's father, the Margrave of Thuringia, also has a visit. He is a famous doctor and the margrave ordered this for his daughter. The doctor is supposed to operate on the girl. Reglindis is blind, but it has been kept from her. All words related to sight were banned. But now the margrave fears the Slavs and Reglindis should function as a means of power. The doctor warns of the pain of the operation. It may be that Reglindis does not gain her eyesight, only endures pain and only receives the knowledge of her blindness. But the margrave insists on his power opportunism . The conversation between Reglindis and the boy is lovely. But gradually the boy, whom she calls “the beautiful”, notices that something is wrong with her eyes: thunder is dangerous lightning for her. The girl is confused by the question of heaven and moon and vision. In order to familiarize the beautiful with the visible world, he begins to describe and rave about:
- The sky is now a strong blue, covered by pale clouds, your garden is green - mixed with gray, the trees are black shadows - Reglindis you can't see all that? - and early in the morning the bright light of the sun flashes up in a thousand small water droplets. I mean the dew that drips glittering everywhere from every stalk, branch and leaf. And next to each such small miracle there is an even bigger one: The whole rainbow shines in many, bright, clear colors, but very small - you, that's wonderful! Wonderful ...
Reglindis is affected. But together with the boy she comes to the conclusion: The most important thing is the heart and you can't see that. Their love becomes increasingly clear to both of them. Then a thunderstorm breaks over them. The lovers are discovered. The boy is captured. Reglindis is confronted with his father's eye surgery plans. The margrave blackmails his daughter: only with the operation can she save her captive lover's life. Reglindis agrees.
Vicissitudes of power
The next morning the impatient count wants to see the success of the operation immediately, although the doctor warns that the eyesight will take some time to adjust. Reglindis' blindfold is removed. A bloody tear flows. The boy is also shown in chains. The gracefully moving Reglindis begins a game of life and death in order to save the boy and, in the boy's words, she tells the most beautiful thing about seeing:
- Just look, the bright, happy glow of the sun flashes in a thousand small water droplets. Is that the dew that drips glitteringly from every branch and leaf, from every stalk? And next to each of these many small miracles there is an even bigger one: The whole rainbow shines in bright clear colors, but tiny - a miracle, wonderful.
The boy asks for the hand of the Reglindis and is laughed at by the count. However, when the boy hears that the girl is the daughter of the Margrave of Thuringia, the boy demands the right of Bogumil, he is promised Reglindis and he shows the unimpressed margrave the parchment. With the prisoner and his daughter, the margrave sets out on the arduous journey to his castle. The Wends attack the entourage , claim the life of the tyrant and enlightenment about the whereabouts of Bogumil. The margrave can pull himself out of the loop by the boy's approval. But the boy as Bogumil is now protected by the turns.
The image of lovers
The margravial intrigues grow again in the castle. But in Reglindi's room the lovers are freely together. But the girl is sad. And she admits she lied. She can't see at all. She lied to save the boy's life. Bogumil is touched and to distract her the children play a game: he should cover her eyes and she should guess who he is. But then everything turns out very differently: the miracle becomes reality. Reglindis presses her lover's hands to her eyes and screams. Suddenly the beautiful can really see her beautiful. And hand in hand, the lovers begin to discover the visible world. There are pots of paint in the hall and the children, innocently like the first couple of people, begin to paint everything: The wall painting becomes the unearthly vision of a mystical reality that is visible for the first time, full of light, full of surreal rainbow colors with two huge centering eyes, one blind brown and one seeing blue.
The right of love
The margrave has meanwhile ordered the nuns from the monastery . They excitedly assure that the villain is a serf, the real Bogumil drowned years ago, and that the villain wrongly appropriated the parchment. The count happily wants to spin his schemes again and hang up the boy. He rushes to the children. Here, despite their hard-heartedness, even the count and the nuns are overwhelmed by the visual vision of the pair of lovers smeared with paint. Then a trumpet sounds. The emperor's messenger announces himself . The margrave tries to put him off. But he insists on Bogumil's appointment. Behind the rider's back, the margrave frantically takes a vow of silence on the nuns , drives Bogumil and Reglindis to the altar and tries to satisfy the emperor's angry messenger. The messenger is the black rider, the same one who saved his life in the monastery. The bride and groom will be shown to him. But he is grumpy and insists on proof: the black rider knows of a sign. King Slavomir made his son distinctive through a bite. The boy can show the required scar - thanks to the donkey - and Reglindis and her loved one happily go into a new future. And happily the lovers who tell the story can greet the lovers in the distant past.
material
The picture
The various forms of seeing , the visible , the image and the beauty give the fairy tale film of the love light its meaningful connection: The protagonist Reglindis is initially blind , but she is able to see the beauty of the boy laughed at by everyone with her inner eye . The boy is outwardly ugly, but he can draw and capture the visible world in the picture. The monastery fresco, the pictorial document from the contract of Emperor Karl, does not reveal to the boy his identity as Bogumil, but it does convey his identity as the future lover of the Reglindis. Reglindis makes the right decisions blindfolded like the goddess Justitia with a dreamlike certainty. When Reglindis finally learns to see her love on the winding path, a wonderful painting of inner visions emerges . This wall picture of the lovers, shining in opalescent colors, testifies to the beauty of the visible world and at the same time gives a picture of the mystical world of the invisible: Pictures by Odilon Redon or Marc Chagall have reached such dimensions and have illustrated surreal color and dream landscapes in such a sense .
Jolanthe
The fairy tale play King René's Daughter by Henrik Hertz served as a source of inspiration for the fairy tale film The Light of Love . Like Reglindis, blind Jolanthe learns to see on the path of love. However, Hertz plays in the 15th century in a valley of the Baucluse in Provence at the time of the troubadours - different in film events , where the place Thuringia and the time of Charlemagne form the framework. Like Reglindis the Bogumil, Hertz Jolanthe has contractually promised Count Tristan von Baudemont as a bride in order to secure the peace of the countries. And just as the boy finds and loves Reglindis and wants to forego his noble future because of her, so is Count Tristan with Hertz. The Count of Bauedmont finds his long-promised but unknown Jolanthe like a Zauberperi in a tower - a fairytale situation as with Zelandine - and the Count compares his Jolanthe with Sleeping Beauty . At Hertz, too, the inner vision of the blind is a supernatural ability, as in the fairy tale film.
actor
Eva Vejmělková plays Reglindis expressively with great sensitivity for all nuances of the visual sense . At her side, Sven Jansen impresses with his versatile portrayal of the humiliated serf and the exalted Margrave Bogumil. Eva Vejmělková is known in fairy tales from the Czech fairy tale films The Traveling Comrade and The Peacock Feather . Rolf Hoppe shines as the power-intriguing Margrave of Thuringia. This internationally sought-after actor is known from fairy tale films from Three Hazelnuts for Cinderella , Hans im Glück and Hans Röckle and the Devil .
music
The film music by Friedbert Wissmann underscores the visual mysticism of the film in a floating transparent manner. In the basic musical motif - without literally quoting - aspects of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's last opera, Jolanthe, can be heard . The template for Tchaikovsky's Jolanthe was like the fairy tale film, The Light of Love, Henrik Hertz's fairy tale drama King René's Daughter . With Hertz as with Tchaikovsky, the blind protagonist is still called Jolanthe. She then becomes the margrave's daughter named Reglindis in the fairy tale film.
criticism
“A young man mocked for his protruding ears fights with the help of the Black Rider for the hand of the blind daughter of the Margrave. Out of love, she agrees to a hopeless eye operation and saves his life through a deception maneuver. Fairytale film set in the Middle Ages about love that makes you see. Carried by the fresh play of the actors and an impressive opulent equipment, a sensual, idyllic story develops, which ironic breaks would have done well. "
literature
- Henrik Hertz : King Renés Daughter (Kong Renés Datter from 1845) Translated from the Danish with the assistance of the author by Fr. Bresemann. 8th edition. Publishing house Gebrüder Paetel, Berlin 1872
- F.-B. Habel : The great lexicon of DEFA feature films . Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf, Berlin 2000, ISBN 3-89602-349-7 , pp. 359-360 .
Web links
- The light of love in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- The light of love in the online film database
- The light of love at filmportal.de
- The light of love at the DEFA Foundation
- Photos for the light of love
- Photos for Das Licht der Liebe on cinema.de
Individual evidence
- ↑ Douglas R. Anderson: La Coquille (The Seashell). Musee d'Orsay, Paris. (No longer available online.) Concordia College, archived from the original on June 2, 2010 ; accessed on November 22, 2010 (English, referenced by this page ). Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Odilon Redon: The journey of Apollon
- ↑ painter of the spouse. Chagall. eliogervasi.com, accessed November 22, 2010 .
- ↑ cf. The fairy tale of the beautiful Zelandine - La belle Zellandine - fairy tale from Le roman de Perceforest . In: French folk tales Volume 1 - from older sources; translated by Ernst Tegethoff. Publishing house Eugen Diederichs, Jena 1923
- ↑ The light of love. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed March 2, 2017 .
