The silent Don (1957, part 2)
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | The silent Don |
| Original title | Russian Тихий Дон , Tichi Don , English transcription Tikhiy Don |
| Country of production | Soviet Union |
| original language | Russian |
| Publishing year | 1957 |
| length | Part II: 110 minutes |
| Rod | |
| Director | Sergei Gerasimov |
| script | Sergei Gerasimov |
| production | Gorky Film Studio Moscow |
| music | Yuri Levitin |
| camera | Vladimir Rapoport |
| cut | Nina Vasilyeva |
| occupation | |
| |
The silent Don (original title: Russian Тихий Дон , Tichi Don ) is a three-part Soviet film by Sergei Gerasimow from 1957 to 1958. The director also wrote the script. It is based on the novel of the same name by Mikhail Scholokhov . The present article deals with the second part, which premiered in the Federal Republic of Germany on October 8, 1968 in the program of the First German Television ( ARD ).
action
In the first part of the cycle, Gerasimow drew the idyll on the Don, rural life in the village of Tatarsk with joy and sorrow, love and enmity, birth and death. But then the First World War broke out and the social restructuring announced itself in the person of the locksmith Stockmann, whom the police arrested as a social-democratic agitator.
Trench warfare at the front , hunger at home - that is the situation in 1916. New fronts are formed, the White Army and the Red Army collide. The storming of the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg marks the beginning of the October Revolution . Grischa Melechov, who left Axinja, who ran away with him, and returned to his wife Natalja, joins the Bolsheviks . However, when he has to watch how defenseless prisoners are slaughtered down to the last man, he leaves the troop and returns home to Tatarsk. Here he witnessed how Podtjolkow and the survivors of the detachment, to which he himself belonged until recently, were executed, in front of women and children.
Together with his brother Pyotr, Grischa is now fighting in the ranks of the Don Cossack Army, but the fortunes of war are against them. The Reds occupy Tatarsk, and Misha Koschewoi and Stockmann, the locksmith, who has meanwhile advanced to the Bolshevik Commissioner, are now in charge of the village. Grischa and Pyotr can only flee, back to the fighting Cossack troops. And then the terrible thing happens: Misha Kochewoi, whom little Dunjascha Melechow loves, shoots her brother Pyotr. The front between white and red, which cuts all of Russia, now also runs through the middle of the village of Tatarsk.
Continuation: The Silent Don (Part 3)
Reviews
The lexicon of international film draws the following conclusion on all three parts: "Far from all black and white painting, the film avoids almost as much as the novel" the idealization of the victorious Bolsheviks through the unvarnished exposure of the moral and character weaknesses also and especially of the communists "(Kindler's literature Dictionary). The six-hour film, which was staged with enormous effort, is most convincing in the excellently designed, dialogue-free exterior shots. "
The Protestant film observer also expresses his praise : “The fate of the Cossack Grischa Melechow depicts a turbulent time, a time of social upheaval. Not the conventional design, but the extraordinary subject and the director's, down to the smallest details, astonishingly objective view as well as the excellent presentation make the film interesting and worth seeing for all viewers over 18 years of age. "
“In 1955-57 Sergei Gerassimow realized the monumental Cossack novel 'The Silent Don' by Scholokhov, an epic one - in the GDR the film was shown as a three-part series with a total duration of 336 minutes, in the Federal Republic only the first part was released brought, parts 2 and 3 found their performance a decade later on the ARD - and extremely ambitious work. Gerassimov's trilogy depicts the fate of a Cossack during the late phase of the declining tsarist empire up to the final victory of Bolshevism in powerful images and fascinating attention to detail. In doing so, the director avoided bold, pro-communist pandering, instead portraying his protagonist as a wanderer between two worlds and their systems forced upon him by history. The new system is not glorified either, in Gerassimov's epic weakness of character and amorality, as in the novel, is not eliminated by the 'new socialist man'. "
Web links
- Quiet Flows the Don in the Internet Movie Database (English)
Individual evidence
- ^ A b Evangelischer Filmbeobachter , Evangelischer Presseverband München, Review No. 486/1968, pp. 489–490.
- ↑ Lexicon of international films , rororo-Taschenbuch No. 6322 (1988), p. 3606
- ↑ Kay Less : The film's great personal dictionary . The actors, directors, cameramen, producers, composers, screenwriters, film architects, outfitters, costume designers, editors, sound engineers, make-up artists and special effects designers of the 20th century. Volume 3: F - H. Barry Fitzgerald - Ernst Hofbauer. Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf, Berlin 2001, ISBN 3-89602-340-3 , p. 232.