The burning heart
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| Original title | The burning heart |
| Country of production | Germany |
| original language | German |
| Publishing year | 1929 |
| length | approx. 113 (1929) minutes |
| Rod | |
| Director | Ludwig Berger |
| script | Hans Müller |
| production | Country film, Berlin |
| music |
Artur Guttmann and Willy Schmidt-Gentner (conductor) Ufa-Palast am Zoo Giuseppe Becce Mozart Hall |
| camera | Curt Courant |
| occupation | |
| |
The Burning Heart is a late German silent film by Ludwig Berger from 1929. The main roles are cast with Mady Christians and Gustav Fröhlich .
action
The young composer Georg Wittig has developed an ether wave instrument that is revolutionizing the music scene and with which one can produce tones that the human voice is unable to produce. While he is preparing for his first concert, he falls in love with the young singer Dorothee, whom he met in the cemetery. The young woman has just finished her singing studies and appears in a second-rate cabaret called “Odeon” in order to be able to support herself. As she is ashamed of her poverty and her appearances in the Tingeltangel, Dorothee poses as a post office clerk to Georg. A real post office worker, Inge Keller, covers her white lie to Georg out of pity.
Wittig very quickly notices that the young woman he has fallen in love with has a beautiful, clear singing voice and therefore asks Dorothee to help her singing at his upcoming concert. He has already dedicated his recently composed symphony “The Burning Heart” to her. Before Dorothees can sing, Wittig ends up by chance one evening - he tracks down his foster mother, an alcoholic who ended up looking for a bottle of schnapps at the "Odeon" - in the very night club where Dorothee is for Evening entertains the simple crowd. In a mixture of anger and disappointment, he confronts the young artist, who is also being hit on by a baron at the same time, and makes her violent reproaches. Finally there is a rift.
Dorothee rushes headlong into the open and ignores the traffic. She was hit by a car and injured. Lying in the hospital, she waits in vain for Georg to visit her. Meanwhile, the composer realizes why Dorothee had not told him the truth about her true existence: his foster mother had urgently advised her not to do so, old Wittig admits. When Georg Wittig's concert is due one evening and he wants to demonstrate the sonic power of his ether wave instrument for the first time, the maestro is hyper-nervous. His strength is dwindling. This is where the decisive concert solo begins. The voice of Dorothee resounds from the audience, which has secretly entered his performance and with its commitment leads Wittig's concert as well as his etheric wave instrument to an outstanding success.
Production notes
The Burning Heart , a production by Länder-Film GmbH, was created in December 1928 and January 1929 in the studios of the Staaken Film Works in Berlin. The outdoor shots were shot in Berlin. The eight-stroke with a length of 2858 meters passed the first censorship on February 16, 1929 and was banned from youth. The premiere took place on the same evening in the Ufa-Palast am Zoo . In December 1929 Lignose-Breusing-Nadelton produced an audio version of this silent film. Kurt Schwabach provided the text for the songs sung by Mady Christians . This version, 2505 meters long and distributed over ten files, was submitted to the censors on February 14, 1930 and also banned young people. This clay version could be seen for the first time in Bremen on January 26, 1930. On April 14, 1930, the sound film version of The Burning Heart was finally launched in Berlin (Terra-Lichtspiele in the Mozart Hall).
Director Ludwig Berger also took over the production management. His older brother Rudolf Bamberger designed the film structures, which were carried out by Ernst Meiwers.
A corresponding version was also produced for the English-speaking market under the title The Burning Heart . This ran on February 20, 1929 as a silent film in London. A sound film version was also provided: this could also be viewed in the British capital from January 14, 1930.
Reviews
“Ludwig Berger, committed by education, intelligence, taste and culture, slipped unrestrained and calculating into the utmost kitsch. It's getting hard to grasp such a decline. Ludwig Berger, the director of Shakespeare's 'Cymbelin', 'Maß für Maß' and Kornfeld's 'Heaven and Hell', the director of the films Glass of Water and The Lost Shoe , puts down a work here for which all requirements are missing in Germany, including those of the audience. (...) This silly emotional affair from Hans Müller's novel box, this little Kammersängerdaughter from whom her father dies ... this childlike love affair, this sweetest confectionery - no, unbearable and outrageous. "
“A romantic film. A musical film. Ludwig Berger, the director, is conducting a score here, so to speak, very sensitively, with an eye for the subtle, lovingly lingering in some places, but always with a tight rhythm, with the most lively movement. He does not tolerate half-measures and amiable sloppiness, his direction is still in the ornate and dusky ... of wonderful linearity. How hauntingly and genuinely does he portray an atmosphere, how much care he takes in every scenic detail. (...) Berger's ability to empathize with the personal and individual, with which he leads his actors, is admirable, eliciting their extraordinary performance and at the same time keeping them extremely frugal in their mimic-gestural means. "
“It's a kind of romance in which the music not only plays a role in terms of content, but almost gives birth to the content. In any case, the action is so improbable that it could only rightly exist as an illustration of sequences of sounds. (...) Ludwig Berger rightly did without too much realism in the direction of the director, but instead slipped into Expressionism in places. In addition, apparently with the intention of creating the appearance of unreality, he has determined the lovers to behave in an expressive manner, which acts less as the fruit of inner excitement than as haste. Mady Christians… has moments when she fully unfolds her rich dowry of charm. Her partner Gustav Fröhlich is a fresh, pious boy who is just too thick. The most attractive is Ida Wüst, who rushes along in a false glow. "
“This film, which is unusual in everything and in everything, and also unusually beautiful, was the result of the collaboration of a poet, who could also be a film director, with a film director who is undoubtedly and proven to be a poet. A poet in pictures. [...] Mady Christians proves to be a first-rate actress of real, living people. […] Gustav Fröhlich is the right young German musician. He is it with body and soul and even in the sometimes too jittery vehemence of his gestures does not let the feeling of 'theater' arise for a moment. [...] In a short role, Friedrich Kayßler makes a strong impression. […] Ida Wüst's concert agent is a realistic figure with a number of malicious, satirical traits. "
Karlheinz Wendtland wrote: “Of course, they ended up getting married back then - in German and foreign films. The happy ending was almost always mandatory, and everything ended in the marital port. This maxim also applied to Germans of the Jewish faith, such as the author Rudolf Bamberger and his brother, the director who called himself Ludwig Berger, here. Today's film journalists try to fool their readers and make them believe that such a thing only existed in German film between 1933 and 1945 and call it 'marriage propaganda'. That is - let it be clear - an absolute misleading. Either intentionally and against better knowledge [sic] or out of ignorance. Both are unscrupulous and shameful. "
Web links
- The burning heart at filmportal.de
- The burning heart in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- The Burning Heart Illustrated Film-Kurier No. 40 (Cover picture: Mady Christians and Gustav Fröhlich)
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b Karlheinz Wendtland: Beloved Kintopp. All German feature films from 1929–1945 with numerous artist biographies born in 1929 and 1930, Medium Film Verlag Karlheinz Wendtland, Berlin, first edition 1988, second revised edition 1990, p. 24, film N4 / 1930. ISBN 3-926945-10-9
- ↑ "The Burning Heart". In: Neue Freie Presse , January 31, 1930, p. 12 (online at ANNO ).