The sinking of the Pamirs

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Movie
Original title The sinking of the Pamirs
Country of production Germany
original language German
Publishing year 2006
length 178 minutes
Age rating FSK 12
Rod
Director Kaspar Heidelbach
script Fritz Müller-Scherz
production Matthias Esche
music Arno Steffen
camera Daniel Koppelkamm
cut Hedy Altschiller
occupation

The sinking of the Pamir is a German television film from 2006, the content of which is based on the last voyage of the German sailing training ship Pamir , which sank in Hurricane Carrie on September 21, 1957 . The two-part film, however, deviates from many facts of the actual shipwreck.

action

After the death of his wife, the boatswain Acki Lüders stayed ashore to be with his eight-year-old daughter. He and his mother-in-law run an unpopular farm in Schleswig-Holstein . His friend Hans Ewald persuades him to come to Hamburg and join the Pamir there . Here, however, they have to realize that instead of the hoped-for regular captain, a strict and unyielding captain, Ludwig Lewerenz, is in command. Tensions often arise between the three men, especially since each of them has different views on how to educate and train the young, 16-18 year old cadets.

When the ship arrives in Buenos Aires , the dock workers are on strike. The Pamir's crew lost time and the shipping company suffered a financial loss. Captain Lewerenz, who is being put under pressure by Oldenburg, the shipowner, orders the crew not to store the barley intended as cargo in sacks, but rather by shoveling. He also manages to get military support through the shipping company's local agent. The type of loading makes the Pamir unstable. Lewerenz made the situation worse when he had the deep tanks filled with additional barley. Despite the warnings of his first officer Ewald, the Pamir runs out.

You get caught in Hurricane Carrie , which the ship cannot withstand. It goes under and 80 seamen - young cadets, officers and sailors - are killed. Six men survive.

Correspondence of the film with reality

The film is based very freely on the story of the real Pamirs:

The last survivor, Karl-Otto Dummer , saw the film. “The film is beautiful, the actors are great,” says the 73-year-old, who was a baker, cook's mate and provisions manager on the “Pamir” at the time. "But it's a film, it has absolutely nothing to do with reality," adds Dummer critically.

Production of the film

The director was Kaspar Heidelbach, who had already made a disaster film in 2003 with The Miracle of Lengede . According to producer Matthias Esche, the film cost just under eight million euros.

The film, in which 160 people worked behind and 60 actors in front of the camera, was shot in Germany as well as in Malta , Tenerife and on the open sea. Two ships were adapted. The Passat , a sister ship of the original Pamir , which is moored in Travemünde , was used as the location for the scenes below deck .

The exterior shots were taken from July to October 2005 on the four-masted barque Sedov , the sailing training ship of the former Soviet Ministry of Fisheries (built in 1921 as Magdalene Vinnen II - Germania shipyard, Kiel, operated by Norddeutscher Lloyd as Commodore Johnsen from 1936 ), which for this purpose has an extra 800 liters Paint was repainted: her hull was painted black, the underwater hull red and the water pass white. In addition, the Sedow's modern safety equipment was partly removed from life rafts and rubber dinghies (as far as compatible with the SOLAS safety regulations ), and partly hidden under wooden dummy lifeboats. The shooting began in July 2005 in Cuxhaven and was continued on a trip to the Canary Islands and during a stay there. For advertising reasons, the Sedov will continue to wear the colors of the Pamir in 2006 and 2007.

The sinking was staged in a film water tank in Malta. A 20-meter model of the entire ship (scale 1: 6) and a 40-meter-long model of a medium-sized section of the ship in the original scale were used.

Adoptions from other films

Some scenes were borrowed from other sailing ship films:

  • The first part shows an equator baptism with long fringed wigs and shaving brushes and foam, which also appears in the 1984 film Die Bounty with Mel Gibson and Anthony Hopkins with the same costumes and rituals .
  • In the second part, sailors catch a shark with a hook attached to a line on which a piece of meat is impaled. This occurs with the same method and with the same prey in the 1935 film Mutiny on the Bounty with Clark Gable and Charles Laughton.
  • There are also parallels to earlier films, insofar as the self-righteous and stubborn captain sends a cadet up a mast to discipline in bad weather, against which the first officer protests. The plot also appears with these details in two bounty films, namely the one from 1935 and the one from 1962 with Marlon Brando and Trevor Howard.

Film music

The film music was composed by the Cologne composer Arno Steffen , who also set the production Das Wunder von Lengede to music. The sound recordings took place from April 18 to 21, 2006 in the NDR Landesfunkhaus Hannover with the NDR Radiophilharmonie under the direction of Heinz Walter Florin , who was also responsible for the entire orchestration.

The casting off of the Pamir in the port of Hamburg (in the film Cuxhaven) is accompanied by a shanty choir who sings Kari waits for me . The piece was composed by Terry Gilkyson for the 1958 film Windjammer and in 1957 was not yet part of the repertoire of shanty choirs. The use of Kari waits for me is, on the one hand, a historical inaccuracy, but also refers to this Cinemiracle documentary , which was released the following year and which published the last moving images of the Pamir . In addition, the use of this song in the movie The Downfall of the Pamirs foretells the fate of the Pamirs , which sank in a hurricane called Carrie .

Reviews

"A (television) drama produced with great effort, in which stories of a thirst for adventure, a sense of duty and responsibility are embedded that reflect the German post-war era, with the script proceeding completely freely as to the people on board and their story (s) goes. In addition, the film does not play very fruitfully on the keyboard of the melodrama, whereby the great feelings come along on soap level. "

- Lexicon of international film

“Many of the exposure scenes are dense and seem authentic, some tend towards melodrama. […] A little less noticeable symbolism would have done it too. The scenes on board of life before sinking are all the more impressive. […] Even as a purely male film, the two-part TV series would have worked for the large audience with its number of award-winning popular figures. "

- Heike Hupertz: FAZ

"It is not that easy to undercut the level of German event movies, but the creators of the ARD two-parter" The Downfall of the Pamir "succeeded: The historical event wrecked despite the great equipment as a stupidly staged catastrophe shocker."

- Christian Buß : Spiegel Online

performance

The world premiere was on October 8, 2006 at the Hamburg Film Festival . The first broadcast followed on November 17, 2006 on Arte . Then, the two-parter was on 22 and 24 November 2006 at the First seen.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ According to a text by Wolfgang Schmidt, dpa . The paragraph (or the whole text) appeared word for word (or with the word “Koch” instead of “Kochsmaat”) and mostly completely or partially without citing the source in at least five online media, etc. a. at 3sat.online in a ship disaster: The ARD two- parter "Der Untergang der Pamir" (accessed May 16, 2009)
  2. ↑ The sinking of the Pamirs. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed August 29, 2017 .Template: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used 
  3. ↑ Heike Hupertz: A ship will sink. , FAZ , November 22, 2006, p. 42.
  4. ↑ Christian Buß : Gluckgluck, she was gone . , Spiegel Online , November 17, 2006.
  5. ^ The sinking of the Pamir at filmportal.de , accessed on July 16, 2012