The yellow glow

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Movie
Original title The yellow glow
Country of production Germany
original language German
Publishing year 1918
length 60 minutes
Rod
Director Victor Janson ,
Eugen Illés
script Hanns Kräly ,
Hans Brennert
production Paul Davidson
for projection group "Union"
camera Eugene Illés
occupation

The Yellow Ticket is a German silent film melodrama by Victor Janson and Eugen Illés from 1918.

The historical basis of the film was the regulation in Tsarist Russia that the only Jewish women who were allowed to settle permanently in St. Petersburg had to have yellow identification cards. However, these were only given to prostitutes . The regulation was only abolished after the October Revolution .

content

A village somewhere in Poland : the widowed Jewish pawnbroker Scholem Raab is cared for by his daughter Lea. Her teacher Ossip Storki, who is leaving the city to work as an educator abroad, visits the terminally ill Scholem again, who gives him a secret document: Lea is not really his daughter. Years ago, a Russian woman collapsed with a baby in front of Scholem's house, and Scholem and his wife took them in. The next day the woman was gone and Scholem was raising the child.

After Scholem's death, Lea goes to St. Petersburg to study medicine. Since she does not have a residence permit, she cannot get an apartment in the city. At the local police station she registers for a “yellow ticket” and waits with a group of prostitutes for her papers, which are given to her after a long wait. When she sinks down exhausted on the street, young Vera, whom she has already seen at the police station, helps her. She gets her a room with a woman who also runs a “ballroom” that is actually more like a house of joy. The woman suggests that Leah now and then attend some of the celebrations she has organized.

When Lea unpacks her things, she also finds a book that Ossip Storki had given her before he left. It once belonged to his non-Jewish sister Sofia - in the book Leah finds her identity papers between the pages. Lea enrolls as Sofia Storki at the university, where she listens to medical lectures from Professor Zhukovsky and soon ranks among the best students. She begins a relationship with the student Dimitri as Sofia Storki, as whom she even receives a prize from Professor Schukowski, while as a Jew Leah she has to work as an amusement lady for her landlady.

Her double life is revealed when the student Astanov, whom she rejected at one of her landlady's celebrations, takes revenge on her: he brings Dimitri to a celebration in the ballroom, where he sees Lea in the company of men. He portrays Lea as a liar and a hypocrite, whereupon she tries to commit suicide .

Ossip Storki found out about the award ceremony for “Sofia Storki” in the newspaper. Since his sister has long since passed away, Osip travels to St. Petersburg to find out the identity of the fake Sofia. He arrives at Professor Schukowski, on whose desk there is a photograph of a young woman who looks so confusingly similar to Lea. It is Schukowski's former great love Lydia. She became pregnant by him and although Zhukovsky wanted to marry her, his father destroyed the relationship. The only thing Zhukovsky knew was that Lydia had left town with her baby. It becomes clear that Lea is actually Zhukovsky's biological daughter. The seriously injured Lea is found on the street and taken to the hospital, where Schukowski saves her life with an operation. At the bedside, Dimitri finally returns to Leah, reconciled.

production

The yellow note was partly shot in the Jewish Nalewki district in Warsaw at the end of the First World War . Poland was still occupied by German troops at the time. Other parts were created in the Ufa Union studios in Berlin-Tempelhof.

The yellow note was originally conceived as a propaganda film against the Russian Empire . However, the film did not premiere until November 22, 1918, when the tsarist empire had already fallen. Today the yellow note is "the early example of a film with a student woman as a heroine and at the same time the amazing case of a German propaganda film with a philosemitic message."

criticism

Contemporary critics rated The Yellow Shine as "a strange story, [which] stands far above the average cinematic drama, logically, psychologically and episodically justified and introduced in the smallest detail, and thus [is] credibly close to life for the discerning viewer."

The more recent criticism sees the propaganda element in The Yellow Note on the one hand - "while Russia appears as a refuge of backwardness and state-mandated anti-Semitism, on the other hand Germany should stand for religious tolerance, culture and progress" - but also the historical value: The In the opening scenes, the film shows the Jewish quarter in Warsaw before it was destroyed by the National Socialists. In addition to the precise description of the milieu, the "audience-effective [...] melodramatic [...] staging and above all [the] excellent actors [...] who come from the ensemble around Ernst Lubitsch " were praised . The theatrical portrayal of Pola Negri was emphasized , which was not yet fixed on the type of vamp .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Cf. Nelly Las: Jewish Prostitution and Trafficking in Women. In: Nelly Las: White Slavery. On Jewish Women's Archive. Retrieved March 6, 2014.
  2. ↑ a b c The yellow note. On dhm.de
  3. ↑ The yellow note. In: The film. Vol. 3, November 30, 1918, ZDB -ID 575768-x .
  4. ^ Siegbert Salomon Prawer : Between two worlds. The Jewish presence in German and Austrian film, 1910–1933 (= Film Europa. Vol. 3). Berghahn Books, New York NY et al. 2005, ISBN 1-84545-074-4 , p. 19.