The violinist of Florence

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Movie
Original title The violinist of Florence
Country of production Germany
original language German
Publishing year 1926
length 68 minutes
Rod
Director Paul Czinner
script Paul Czinner
production Erich Pommer for UFA
music Giuseppe Becce
camera Otto Kanturek
Adolf Schlasy
Arpad Viragh
occupation

The Violinist of Florence is a German silent film from 1926. Directed by Paul Czinner , his future wife Elisabeth Bergner plays the leading role.

action

The young Renée is a bubbly, fun-loving young woman. She has a very close relationship with her young father, the worse it is for her relationship with her stepmother. One day she urges her husband to “deport” Renée without further ado. The girl then has to move to boarding school in Switzerland . But the self-determined girl quickly turns out to be rebellious. Her rebellious nature is viewed as bad behavior and leads to the fact that the stepmother, hardly older than herself, instructs her husband to keep Renée there during the upcoming vacation.

But she doesn't even think about being deported permanently. Renée puts on pants and dresses up as a boy. Then she travels to Italy , to Tuscany . In Florence , a delicate, sensitive artist discovers the “boy” and asks Renée to model for him. The painter absolutely wants them for his planned painting “The Violinist of Florence”. Renée, always a little over the top, quickly falls in love with the quiet artist and plays the violin as his muse obsessively while the young man captures this scene in his studio. Indeed, “The Violinist of Florence” is a great success.

The picture soon caused a sensation, and one day his father also saw a picture of it. Of course, despite his boyish disguise, he immediately recognizes his daughter and immediately travels to Florence to bring Renée back home, into the lap of the family, and to celebrate reconciliation. The painter, however, has long since fallen in love with his model and doesn't want Renée, who now reveals herself to be a girl, to go. Finally, the father agrees to marry the two of them.

Production notes

After the great success of Nju , UFA producer Erich Pommer hired director Czinner and the two main actors Bergner and Conrad Veidt for this film in 1925 . The actress appears here in a trouser role typical of that time . The violinist from Florence was premiered on March 10, 1926 in the Gloria Palast in Berlin.

The film was shot from September to November 1925 in the Efa studios as well as on Lake Lugano and in the Mark Brandenburg region . The film structures come from Erich Czerwonski and OF Werndorff . Nora Gregor , who plays Elisabeth Bergner's stepmother here, was actually four years younger than her “stepdaughter”.

Reviews

Film critic Dr. In the Lichtbild-Bühne , Mendel particularly praised the Bergner's play: “Today she is perhaps the most brilliant German film actress of all; and that even though she has only made her second film. This whole work stands and falls with her art. She carries you away to honest enthusiasm in a role that allows her to pull out all the stops of true humor and deep seriousness from childlike defiance and cockiness to all the emotions of a mature, genuinely female soul. Even though a Conrad Veidt is her partner at the same time, she, and she alone, rules the evening. "

The Film-Kurier wrote true eulogies about Bergner's acting power: “A triumph for Bergner in a Pickford role . A psychoanalytic flapper experiment? The most delicate interpretation of the soul that the film has ever conveyed. In the face of this film, one finally speaks of existence again, feels the hold of the human, sees female magic again, so foolishly chaste and so touchingly seduced ... The production problems, film issues are forgotten. You smile and experience the obvious change of a foolish girl who comes from the home of her father, whom she loves dearly, to the Swiss boarding school, from which she escapes to stroll around as a street boy in Italy. A painter finds the supposed boy, just as he plays the violin for an old beggar on the street, takes him into his house as a model - until he discovers the woman in the boy and makes a commitment for life. [...] And how carefree, how fluid, how unaffected are the charming events. How does a discreet glossing of all processes develop from the individual scenes, how unintentionally wind and meadow, dog and human play past in the stripes of a girl's soul. Because the great actress is Elisabeth Bergner. 'Nju' - that was a first attempt. This time it is a perfect achievement. She dominates the film, she is constantly at the center of interest, which does not fade for a second in the inner melody of the film. Although, from the outside, the bizarre boldness of the visual technique often confronts the viewer with unusual tasks. And one has to announce with great satisfaction that the unusual and special of Bergner's depiction itself, revolutionizing against any convention, carries away and inspires. This is tomorrow's film art - not the day before yesterday. A natural spectacle - this woman. With her self-forgotten bliss, with this sinking into the feeling of the moment, to which she never completely succumbs, but is able to escape with her healthy strength, this charming little girl who suffocates without love, embodies the golden serenity of the south under the open sky of Italy. "

The cinematograph reads: “The director Paul Czinner is not only one of our finest, but also one of our most ingenious minds: he just lacks a little creative imagination. He tries to compensate for this lack of creative power that the viewer requires. His way of integrating the objects into the picture and allowing fate to grow out of the counterplay of his actors is sometimes something amazing and suggests that this director, after overcoming the ambition to write the manuscript himself, will produce an impeccable directing performance. Czinner is still a great hope today. Elisabeth Bergner was a sensation for Berlin. This actress, who works on stage primarily through her voice, has adapted perfectly to the film and its conditions since 'Nju'. She is, what not even her most fanatical supporters will doubt, not a movie appearance. It doesn't help at all, one cannot avoid the observation that a film actress must first and foremost be very beautiful, which one cannot exactly say of Bergner. But she uses her intellect to create the role that suits her physicality, and in brief moments she matures towards a cinematic design that reveals a great future for this actress in film. "

Siegfried Kracauer said in the Frankfurter Zeitung : “It is not just the game that makes the enchantment come from; rather, of the essence that is. It also comes out without the voice. It is expressed in the relation of the forehead to the nose, it is represented by walking, by running through the garden. The figure is already talking before there is talk. It hides the opposites. The face is naive and depraved at the same time, young and old, womanly and boyish. It is actually this indeterminable essence whose image excites. The being points beyond gender. That's why Bergner likes to show herself in trouser roles. It then becomes a mignon, beyond man and woman. Because that is crucial: as a boy she is not male, as a girl not just woman. But this is by no means to say that her being between woman and man has its place; it is shaped by a spiritual area that lies above the distinction between male and female. Bergner gives the androgynous quality that ambiguity that nowhere allows a limit to be found and that makes its shape a secret. "

In Heinrich Fraenkel's Immortal film it means to Elisabeth Bergner three central silent film work in the 1920s: "In the Geiger of Florence (with Walter Rilla ) in which Arthur Schnitzler's novella as sensitively modeled Kammerspiel Fräulein Else and Nju (with Emil Jannings and Conrad Veidt) Bergner had the opportunity to try their very idiosyncratic stage style with cinematic nuances ”.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ In Heinrich Fraenkel : Immortal Film. The great chronicle from the magic lantern to the sound film. Kindler, Munich 1956, says on page 353: “The film found a completely new type in Elisabeth Bergner, who already had an unusual stage success before she was discovered for the camera. The shy grace of the boyish graceful figure, the touching, delicate helplessness of a child's face with the knowing eyes of a woman, a face in which abysmal grief could be paired with goblin-like mischief. That was the new "Bergner type" who was soon very popular and widely imitated. In the film "The Violinist of Florence" directed by Paul Czinner, Bergner finds almost lyrical tones for the girl who is in love with a painter (Walter Rilla) and yet still childishly obstinate. "
  2. ^ Photo stage . No. 59, dated March 11, 1926.
  3. ^ Film courier . No. 60, dated March 11, 1926.
  4. ↑ cinematograph. Vol. 20, No. 995, from March 14, 1926, ZDB -ID 575137-8 .
  5. ^ Frankfurter Zeitung . No. 393, No. 995, of May 29, 1926.
  6. ^ Heinrich Fraenkel: Immortal Film. The great chronicle from the magic lantern to the sound film. Kindler, Munich 1956, p. 192.

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