The Strange Girl (1913)
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | The strange girl |
| Original title | The okända |
| Country of production | Sweden |
| original language | Swedish |
| Publishing year | 1913 |
| length | 54 minutes |
| Rod | |
| Director | Mauritz Stiller |
| script | Mauritz Stiller based on the story of the same name (1911) by Hugo von Hofmannsthal |
| production | Svenska Biografteatern AB, Stockholm |
| music | Hanns Richard Weisshoeppel |
| camera | Julius Jaenzon |
| occupation | |
| |
The Stranger Girl is a Swedish silent film by Mauritz Stiller based on a template by Hugo von Hofmannsthal with the Austrian dancer Grete Wiesenthal in the title role and the later Faust actor Gösta Ekman as the youth who adores her.
action
The story with little action is told mainly in pantomime performances. “The strange girl” is like a lovely flower that thrives in the swamp and morass as a living environment. Luxury and elegance on the one hand, depravity, misery and criminality on the other are the two spheres of action. The story begins with a posh, young couple who are having a good time in a trendy, posh garden restaurant with "gypsy music". She is wrapped in a precious fur coat; he, the over-stimulated young man, looks tired and bored at the street and can no longer enjoy the usual, lightweight conversations too much. There he sees a beautiful and young, but very poorly dressed girl, who is accompanied by three sinister types and an aged old woman, who offers him flowers for sale. This strange girl conveys endless sorrow through the expression on her face. The young man looks the girl in the face and soon cannot detach himself from her until she disappears from his field of vision again. Seized by an almost hypnotic fascination, he follows her.
Change of location: a bar, a filthy basement, where worn-out, criminal and light-shy types hang out with their respective wives. Here also lives the strange girl, who has adapted to this environment in her outward appearance, but still has a pure soul. Like a Cinderella, pure innocence is tormented and tormented by the rabble because it does not want to equalize with them. As a special humiliation, the bandits force them to dance in front of them and for them. All the hostel mother, the old woman accompanying the girl in the restaurant, noticed exactly how the young man reacted to the impressive encounter with the strange girl and arranged a second rendezvous as a matchmaker - not without ulterior motives. The young man's friend wants to keep her husband away from this new encounter; she suspects that there is danger and that she could end up as a loser. A conflict between sin and seduction, virtue and vice fuels the situation.
But the young man can no longer let go of the fascination that emanated from the strange girl and runs into ruin. Dressed in tails, he literally climbs down to her and ends up in the rascal's basement bar. The strange girl, who doesn't want to dance in front of him, is beaten by the crooks to make the young man docile. And so the ragged beauty dances and for a moment forgets all her suffering and misery in this one dance. But she still preserves her virtue from the young man who desires her, and perhaps it is precisely this purity of the soul that inspires the man over-stimulated. Then his wife appears and snatches him one last time from the abyss towards which she thinks he is heading. Both return to their world of cleanliness, abundance, the comfort of a heated home. The young woman wants to make the strange girl forget, to win her lover back for herself, and both mouths move towards each other for a kiss. Then the strange girl appears in the spirit before his eyes. He tears himself away from his wife and races back to the bar.
But no girl is waiting for him here, evil is waiting here: the criminals rob him, beat him half to death and tie him up with ropes. More dead than alive, the villains want to get rid of their victim as quickly as possible and deposit him like a wretched bundle of rubbish on a rock, believing that he must already be dead. The strange girl has seen what these criminals did to the young man and is tracking them down. She is caught by the band of robbers, but she is able to escape the criminals. She tries to escape them over hill and dale. The feet bleed, everything aches, and their strength fades. Finally, on all fours, the girl reaches the spot where the lifeless-looking body of the battered youth has been deposited. She pulls on his rope shackles and can loosen them. The young man actually comes to. It will be a brief moment of absolute bliss for both of them in which two lovers have found each other. Then the strange girl sees herself as redeemed, sinks to the ground with a transfigured look and dies.
Production notes
The Strange Girl was created in Stockholm in May 1913 . Just two months later, the film passed the German film censorship and was shown for the first time in Germany that same month, July 1913. The Stranger Girl celebrated its Austrian premiere in Vienna on January 23, 1914. The film had four acts and a length of around 54 minutes.
As a result of the first successes of auteur cinema in Germany ( Der Andere , Der Student von Prag ), in the same year 1913 in Scandinavia, too, thought of bringing literature and plays to the screen. This year, based on German-language templates, Atlantis (based on Gerhart Hauptmann ), Liebelei (based on Arthur Schnitzler ) and The Stranger Girl .
Reviews
"Hugo v. Hofmannsthal has left his pantomime "The Stranger Girl", which Grete Wiesenthal performed here in the theater on Königgrätzerstrasse about two years ago, to the cinema director. The book has stayed exactly the same as it was then, but the result has become completely different. Because now the little poem, at least surrounded by the sheen of poetry, presents itself as a kitschy, mendacious-sentimental film drama that is stripped of all irritation. The mystical-supernatural, the blurring, the gliding has disappeared, replaced by clumsy realities, by natural backgrounds, by all those verisms that the cinema requires: The melting has been stripped from the colorful wings of a butterfly (...) The Filmtext-Verlag-GmbH mediated yesterday in "Cines" -Nollendorfplatz an invited audience presented the new design of Hofmannsthal's work, which had been recorded somewhere in Scandinavia with Scandinavian actors. Only for the strange girl herself, the flower seller who exercises fatal, suggestive power over the rich young man, had Grete Wiesenthal been won over again. Not to the benefit of the film. Participation in a pantomime or in the cinema is also twofold, and as much as the stylized and rhythmic art of Wiesenthal created enjoyment in the original definition of Hofmannsthal's poetry, just as much it fell this time - in the midst of actors who, sharply characterizing, a picture of true truth - out of the ordinary. And one might wish that "The Stranger Girl" and Grete Wiesenthal would have stayed away from the film forever. "
“A film by a poet. It is not people but characters from the poetic imagination that Hugo von Hofmannsthal lets appear in the cinematographic image. Figures that only a great poet is able to create, figures in which only the soul and not the shell lives. It is a work of peculiar splendor that keeps us captivated from beginning to end. Without realizing that it is the poet's power ... we follow the plot with keen interest and find ourselves familiar in the unfamiliar environment. (…) That is the plot in which Grete Wiesenthal's incomparable art plays in the role of the strange girl, who knows how to say everything the poet wants to say in rhythmic movements and mystical dances. The film is a work of art that will continue to occupy us for a long time… That this real poetic work in film, both in terms of equipment and photography, corresponds to the purpose it is supposed to serve, does not need special emphasis…
After the Vienna premiere, Vienna's Neue Freie Presse reported in its edition of January 25, 1914: "An exciting plot with interesting characters lets the simple and true sombolics shine through: even the rich are not happy, they long for the strange, the indescribable, and if he has achieved it, thanks to his money, it still melts between his hands into nothingness. In addition to Grete Wiesenthal's already honored performance in the main role, the actor of the rich, young man, Gustav [sic!] Ekmann, should be mentioned above all. a strikingly pretty appearance with an elegant, expressive game. "
Individual evidence
- ↑ according to the poster
- ↑ "The Strange Girl". In: Neue Freie Presse , January 25, 1914, p. 26 (online at ANNO ).
Web links
- The okända in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- The Stranger Girl at The German Early Cinema Database
- The okända at filmportal.de