The Student from Prague (1913)
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| Original title | The student from Prague |
 | |
| Country of production | Germany |
| original language | German |
| Publishing year | 1913 |
| length | 85 minutes |
| Rod | |
| Director | Hanns Heinz Ewers ; Assistant: Stellan Rye |
| script | Hanns Heinz Ewers (synopsis) |
| production | German Bioscop GmbH |
| music | Josef Weiss |
| camera | Guido Seeber |
| occupation | |
| |
The Student from Prague is a German horror film by Hanns Heinz Ewers , Stellan Rye and Paul Wegener from 1913. It is considered the world's first auteur film and art film.
action
Prague around 1820. The poor student Balduin sells his mirror image to the satanic magician Scapinelli for 100,000 guilders in order to be able to participate in social life and to raise his social status with this money. He succeeds in climbing and falls in love with Countess Margit; he disdains a gypsy girl in love with him . His reflection accompanies him constantly and stands in the way of his free action. There is an argument with the Baron Waldis and a duel demand. Waldis is supposed to marry Margit according to her father's will, which is why the latter asks Baldwin - known as the best fencer in Prague - to spare Waldis.
Baldwin arrives too late for the duel and finds his opponent already killed. Contrary to his promise, Baldwin's reflection competed for him and was victorious. Dishonored by this breach of word, Baldwin loses Margit's love, his social respect and is avoided. He is pursued by his "other self" and finally shoots his doppelganger in desperation . Baldwin killed himself and Scapinelli triumphed.
Remarks
The story is in the tradition of German Romanticism .
The name of the student Balduin is a tribute from Hanns Heinz Ewers to his friend, the writer Balduin Möllhausen, who died in 1905 .
The buildings were designed by Robert A. Dietrich based on designs by Klaus Richter . The costumes were designed by Max Tilke and Rochus Gliese .
The double exposure shots by Guido Seeber are considered to be an important step towards separating German film from the theater towards a film-specific expression.
For this film, Josef Weiss wrote the first original score for a full-length feature film.
The film was shot in June 1913 in the Bioscop studios in Neubabelsberg , today's Studio Babelsberg in Potsdam , in Prague in front of and in the Hradschin , Belvedere Palace and the Palais' Fürstenberg , Windischgrätz and Lobkowitz .
Ewers created the first art film that did not have a well-known literary model based on the French model of the Film d'Art , but achieved artistic significance solely because of its cinematic stylistic devices such as décor, image design, exposure and drama.
In July 1913, the film was completed with a length of four acts at 1,548 meters, which at a frame speed of 16 frames / sec corresponded to a running time of approx. 85 minutes. The Berlin censorship imposed a youth ban. The Bavarian censorship even forbade individual shots.
The student from Prague premiered on August 22, 1913 in the Berlin Mozart Hall-Lichtspiele .
A 10-minute shorter English-language “export version” of the film (“The Student of Prague or A Bargain with Satan”) was shown in many countries from 1913 onwards.
As early as 1914, The Student of Prague , directed by Emil Albes , was parodied under the title The Other - Student of Prague .
In 1926 the German original version from 1913 was mutilated, cut and given many additional subtitles (“Glombeck version”), now divided into 6 acts, and brought back to the cinema.
The story was remade as a silent film in 1926 by Henrik Galeen with the assistance of Ewers (with Conrad Veidt in the leading role) and in 1935 as a sound film by Arthur Robison without authorization .
Based on the film adaptations from 1913 and 1926, the material was edited by Leonard Langheinrich-Anthos as a story and by Heinrich Noeren as a music drama, both published in 1930 by Ewers.
In 1987/1988 Wilfried Kugel reconstructed the original German version of the 1913 film on behalf of the Düsseldorf Film Institute with funding from the State of North Rhine-Westphalia and UNESCO . After original viraged nitro copies from 1913 were discovered in Japan (1990) and the USA (2010) Wilfried Kugel reconstructed the film again in 2012/2013 in cooperation with the Munich Film Museum and on behalf of ZDF / arte . The company Alpha Omega Digital (Munich) got the digital image restoration. The premiere of the newly reconstructed and restored original version of the film took place on February 15, 2013 as part of the “ Berlinale ” in the Volksbühne Berlin .
At the end of 2016, the Munich Film Museum published a DVD edition of the film. In Wilfried Kugel's opinion , this was completely unsuccessful, because museum director Stefan Drößler did without a historically authentic reconstruction and instead designed the reconstruction according to his personal taste. Although it says in the DVD material: “Edition: Stefan Drössler in collaboration with Dr. Wilfried Kugel ”, Kugel distanced himself from this edition.
Reviews
... not the insignificant literary source of Hanns Heinz Ewers, who began with horror stories ... and ended with the Nazis, determined the level of this film, but the high quality of the visual implementation and design by a creative collective.
When the film was shown again in the cinema 54 years after its premiere, the Protestant film observer came to the following assessment: "This Paul Wegener film, which is more than 50 years old, seems to us today to be thematically unsatisfactory and strongly tied to the taste of the time it was made, but his pictorial style offers those interested in film revealing opportunities for study and comparison. "
literature
- Ilona Brennicke, Joe Hembus : Classics of the German silent film. 1910-1930 (= Goldmann Magnum. Citadel-Filmbücher 10212). Goldmann, Munich 1983, ISBN 3-442-10212-X .
- Hanns Heinz Ewers / Leonard Langheinrich Anthos: The student from Prague . 112 p. With numerous illustrations and the original exposé from 1913. MEDIA Net Edition , Kassel, 2015. ISBN 978-3-939988-30-4 . ( Films to read . 3).
- Rainer Fabich: The student from Prague . In: Music for the silent film - analyzing description of original film compositions , Lang, Frankfurt am Main / Berlin / Bern / New York / Paris / Vienna 1993, pp. 127–157, ISBN 3-631-45391-4 (= Europäische Hochschulschriften, series 36: Musicology , Volume 94, also dissertation at the University of Munich 1992).
- Rudolf Freund: The student from Prague . In: Günther Dahlke, Günther Karl (Hrsg.): German feature films from the beginnings to 1933. A film guide. Henschel Verlag, 2nd edition, Berlin 1993, pp. 18 f., ISBN 3-89487-009-5 .
- Helmut H. Diederichs: The student from Prague. Introduction and minutes (= Focus-Film -tex 2). FOCUS, Stuttgart 1985, ISBN 3-924098-02-6 .
- Reinhold Keiner: Hanns Heinz Ewers and the Fantastic Film . Olms, Hildesheim / Zurich / New York, NY 1988, ISBN 3-487-09050-3 (= Studies on Film History , Volume 4).
- Reinhold Keiner: Hanns Heinz Ewers and the Fantastic Film (Updated Edition) (E-Book). MEDIA Net-Edition, Kassel, 2012 ISBN 978-3-939988-15-1 (E-Pub), ISBN 978-3-939988-16-8 (PDF)
- Reinhold Keiner: "The act that he did not want to commit was committed by the other." Thoughts on Hanns Heinz Ewers and his films and novellas, Der Student von Prag . In: Hanns Heinz Ewers / Leonard Langheinrich Anthos: The student from Prague . 112 p. With numerous illustrations and the original exposé from 1913. MEDIA Net-Edition , Kassel 2015. ISBN 978-3-939988-30-4 . (Films to read. 3).
- Niels Penke: The self in the mirror. THE STUDENT FROM PRAGUE between narrative tradition and media innovation . In: Rainer Godel / Barry Murnane (eds.): Between popularization and aestheticization. Hanns Heinz Ewers and the modern age. Aisthesis, Bielefeld 2014, pp. 151–171.
- Hans Günther Pflaum : Into your own heart. Paul Wegener's “Student from Prague” 1913. In: Peter Buchka (Ed.): German Moments. A sequence of images for a typology of the film (= "Off" texts 1). Belleville, Munich 1996, ISBN 3-923646-49-6 , pp. 20f. (P. 21: scene design), (first in: SZ , 1995).
Web links
- The Student of Prague in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- The student from Prague in the online film database
- The student from Prague at filmportal.de
Individual evidence
- ^ The student from Prague at 35Millimeter.de
- ↑ The Student of Prague ( Memento of the original from October 1, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) 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. at film-zeit.de
- ^ Rudolf Freund in German Feature Films from the Beginnings to 1933, p. 18 f.
- ^ Gerhard Lamprecht: German Silent Films 1913 - 1914 . Deutsche Kinemathek eV, Berlin 1969, p. 391 .
- ↑ The Student from Prague - With 8 pictures from the [two] films of the same name - An idea by Hanns Heinz Ewers. Contains a foreword by Ewers, Dr. Langheinrich-Anthos: The student from Prague, novella after d. Film by H. H. Ewers and Heinrich Noeren: The Student from Prague, Dramatic poetry for music based on the film by H. H. Ewers.
- ^ The reconstruction of the silent film THE STUDENT FROM PRAGUE (Deutsche Bioscop GmbH, Berlin 1913) Lecture at the UNESCO symposium on film restoration, Düsseldorf, 1. – 4. September 1988, printed in: “The Student of Prague. Program. ”, Filminstitut Düsseldorf 1988, pp. 7–15; “Film restoration. A work by cultural detective ”(Ed. Minister of Culture of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia / Filminstitut der Landeshauptstadt Düsseldorf), Düsseldorf 1988, pp. 37–40
- ^ Unsuccessful DVD edition of the silent film "The Student of Prague" | Global equality. Retrieved on July 2, 2017 (German).
- ^ Rudolf Freund in German Feature Films from the Beginning to 1933 , p. 18
- ↑ Evangelischer Presseverband München, Review No. 105/1967.
