The invisible enemy
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | The invisible enemy |
| Original title | The Silent Enemy |
| Country of production | United States |
| original language | English |
| Publishing year | 1930 |
| length | 2,290 m, 84 minutes |
| Rod | |
| Director | HP Carver |
| script |
W. Douglas Burden Richard Carver |
| production | Burden-Chanler Productions W. Douglas Burden William C. Chanler |
| music |
Massard Kur Zhene Karl Hajos W. Franke Harling Howard Jackson John Leipold Gene Lucas Charles Midgely Oscar Potoker Max Terr |
| camera | Marcel Le Picard |
| cut | Shirley C. Burden |
| occupation | |
| |
The Invisible Enemy (Original Title: The Silent Enemy ) is an ethnological documentary with a game plot that Harry P. Carver (1876-1952) shot between 1928 and 1930 about the life of Indians in northern Canada . Assistant director was Earl M. Welch . The screenplay was written by Richard Carver based on a story by W. Douglas Burden . The performers were laypeople . Horace D. Ashton , Frank M. Broda , William Casel and Otto Durkoltz were in front of the cameras . The chief cameraman was Marcel Le Picard . The team's animal expert was Dr. Alan Bachrach. The full-length film was produced by W. Douglas Burden and William C. Chanler on the initiative of the New York American Museum of Natural History .
The film follows the tradition of similar ethnographically interested film projects from the silent film era, such as Nanook of the North (1922) by Robert J. Flaherty , Grass (1925) and Chang (1927) by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack , to Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau's Taboo (1931).
action
The film's 'invisible enemy' refers to hunger , which threatened the survival of Canadian Ojibwa Indians every winter when there was too little game to hunt in the fall. When food for the tribe once again becomes scarce, Chetoga, the chief, has to choose between the advice of the hunter Baluk to turn north, where the large herds of caribou reindeer are, and the tacit recommendation of the medicine man Dagwan stay. He finally follows Baluk, but on the way north they suffer great hardship and the conflict between Baluk and Dagwan deepens. The fact that both are courting the chief's daughter makes things even more difficult. Dagwan tries again and again to persuade the chief to turn back. He blames Baluk for the failure of the expedition and even wants to have him sacrifice to the gods in order to appease them. Only when the longed-for herds are finally sighted does the tide turn: now Dagwan is abandoned and thus handed over to the 'invisible enemy', starvation.
background
It took a year to shoot in Temagami Forest Reserve, Ontario , Canada , another year of editing to turn the 25,000 feet of negative footage into the 8,000 feet that were eventually shown. Around 100 Indians were involved in the recordings. Production costs were around $ 200,000, or $ 3,056,519 in today's purchasing power.
The film was released in American cinemas on August 2, 1930. It made its debut in Paris on January 9, 1931, in Germany it was called "The Invisible Enemy". It has also been shown in Portugal and Brazil . Distribution company was Paramount Pictures Co.
The film, made on the threshold of the sound film era , was provided with an optical soundtrack according to the 'Movietone' system, which at the beginning contains a prologue spoken by Chief Yellow Robe. In addition, illustration music by various composers, including that of Karl Hajos (1889–1950), who immigrated to the USA in 1924 . Otherwise the film is silent and tells its story in subtitles by Julian Johnson .
The song “Rain Flower” was written by Sam Coslow and Newell Chase , the “Song of the Waters” by Massard Kur Zhene , the words for it were composed by Leo Robin .
The film contains one of the first recordings that were made with a zoom lens (transfocator).
reception
As great as the film's critical success was, it did not bring in its makers much. It was a box-office failure and, after it had only been shown briefly in the cinemas, was further evaluated in an abbreviated form and edited for educational purposes. Often it was even shown free of charge in churches and schools.
In 1973, The Silent Enemy was restored by film historian Kevin Brownlow and film restorer David Shepard and performed again at the American Film Institute in Washington, DC . It has now also appeared on DVD.
In 1997 Jürgen Labenski produced a German version for ZDF .
In the 2009 Canadian documentary Hollywood Indians (original title Reel Injun ) footage from The Silent Enemy was used.
The ARTE cultural channel broadcast the film on Tuesday, October 23, 2012 at 11:40 p.m. with a new musical accompaniment by Siegfried Friedrich. The restoration was carried out by Lobster Film, Paris.
Reviews
“The story of“ The Silent Enemy ”is reduced to the bare essentials. It's about bare survival and how easily a wrong decision can have fatal consequences for an entire ethnic group. The omnipresent fight against hunger, symbolized by a snarling wolf, is the serious topic against which the conflicts of the characters unfold. The physical suffering brings the Indians against each other and leads them to take draconian measures like the sacrifice of their own tribesmen - according to the criteria of western ethics. "The Silent Enemy", Although its plot is reminiscent of an ethnographic documentary, it was born out of a curiosity about a foreign culture and not out of commercial considerations. Its initiators, the New York Museum of Natural History, did not come from the film industry, and neither did the actors - The roles are exclusively played by First Nations who embody themselves and to standing in front of the camera for the first time. “The Silent Enemy” is a valuable testimony to a unique cooperation between “Indians and Whites”, which has a cinematic aesthetic, historiographical and documentary character at the same time. "(Review by moviepilot )
"The film 'The Silent Enemy', commissioned by the New York 'Museum of Natural History', is, similar to the famous 'Nanook, the Eskimo', a mixture of feature and documentary film. [...] The producers made an effort all about bringing the viewer as close as possible to the everyday life of the Ojibwe. Their hunting habits, their coexistence and their cultural rites are recorded as casually as possible and yet thoroughly examined. " (Arte, to be broadcast on October 23, 2012)
"The Silent Enemy is a serious attempt to depict Ojibwa Indians living below that same line in Quebec and northern Ontario before their lives were forever changed by Caucasian incursions. Given the film's respect for their tribal life and ways, it's perhaps the first revisionist Western, before the genre veered off into depicting Native Americans as target practice for cowboys and colonizing armies. " (Jack Carr for TCM)
"It follows in the tradition of Cooper and Schoedsack's Grass and Chang, creating a storyline and characters in a documentary setting, in this case the saga of the Ojibway Indian tribe. How the cameramen made tracking shots in the midst of a blinding snowstorm, or achieved steady point-of-view shots in a canoe, is beyond me. The climactic caribou run is one of the most astonishing sights I have ever witnessed on film - and director HP Carver and his crew had time enough to get coverage of this event from a variety of angles! " (Leonard Maltin)
literature
- Angela Aleiss: Making the White Man's Indian: Native Americans and Hollywood Movies. Greenwood Publishing Group, 2005, ISBN 0-275-98396-X , pp. 41-42.
- Richard Meran Barsam: Nonfiction Film. A Critical History (= Midland Book. Volume 706). revised edition. Indiana University Press, 1992, ISBN 0-253-20706-1 , p. 55.
- Carl Bennett: The Silent Enemy (1930) on Silent Era - The Progressive Silent Film List (silentera.com)
- Azrael Bigler: Review - The Silent Enemy. August 16, 2008 (azraelbigler.blogspot.de)
- Laura Browder : Slippery Characters - Ethnic Impersonators and American Identities. Cultural studies of the United States. Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2000, ISBN 0-8078-6060-3 , pp. 121, 123, 127, 130.
- Jack Carr: The Silent Enemy (1930) on Turner Classic Movies (tcm.com)
- William M. Drew: The Last Silent Picture Show - Silent Films on American Screens in the 1930s. Scarecrow Press, 2010, ISBN 978-0-8108-7681-1 , pp. 1-8.
- Gwen Florio: Wes Studi launches series on Native Americans in film. In: The Buffalo Post. May 1st 2010 (buffalopost.net)
- Susan Gardner : The Real Rosebud. - The Triumph of a Lakota Woman (review). From: The American Indian Quarterly, Volume 32, Number 3, Summer 2008, pp. 367-371. (muse.jhu.edu)
- Mordaunt Hall: The Silent Enemy 1930. Movie review. In: The New York Times. May 20, 1930 (nytimes.com)
- Doug Mackie: Heritage Perspectives - A Brief History of Impostors and a look at Long Lance in Temagami and Beyond. In: Past Forward Heritage. August 11, 2005. (pastforward.ca)
- Graham A. MacDonald: "When the Caribou Failed" - Ilia Tolstoy in the Barren Lands, 1928-1929. In: Manitoba History. Number 45, Spring / Summer 2003. (mhs.mb.ca)
- Andrew McIntosh: The Silent Enemy 1930. In: Canadian Film Encyclopedia. (legacy.tiff.net)
- Judge Barrie Maxwell: The Silent Enemy 'Reviewed. (rez.DVD Image Entertainment // 1930 // 84 Minutes // Not Rated) September 11th, 2001
- Gregg Mitman: Reel Nature - America's Romance with Wildlife on Film. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA 1999, pp. 39, 46-47.
- Jack Nilan: The Silent Enemy 1930. In: The best American Indian movies. (jacknilan.com)
- Benjamin Schrom: The Silent Enemy 1930 . 2008 essay at SF Silent Film Festival, San Francisco, Calif., USA. silentfilm.org
Web links
- The invisible enemy in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- The Invisible Enemy in the online film database
- The Invisible Enemy (1930) at archive.org, English OV, 56 min.
- Paramount movie poster for "The Silent Enemy"
- Flyer for the performance of 'The Silent Enemy' (1930) at the Polytechnic Cinema Theater, February 1931
- Large freestanding billboard (Indian) promoting "The Silent Enemy" on the sidewalk outside the State Theater, 220 East Main, 1930
Individual evidence
- ↑ cf. Songs from 'The Silent Enemy' at sweetsoundtrack.com sweetsoundtrack.com
- ↑ cf. imdb imdb.com
- ↑ cf. on this Drew p. 8 and Anmm. 20-24
- ↑ cf. tiff.net legacy.tiff.net
- ↑ cf. worldcat.org worldcat.org
- ↑ cf. programm.ard.de programm.ard.de , Review By John Charles , Friday, November 4, 2011 at byjohncharles.blogspot.de
- ↑ cf. imdb imdb.com
- ↑ cf. siegfriedfriedrich.com siegfriedfriedrich.com
- ↑ cf. ARTE archive link ( Memento of the original from February 27, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ cf. moviepilot.de moviepilot.de
- ↑ cf. historikerkraus.de historikerkraus.de
- ↑ cf. tcm.com tcm.com
- ↑ cf. nitrateville.com nitrateville.com
- ↑ Rosebud was the daughter of Chauncey Yellow Robe, a member of the Society of American Indians, who spoke the prologue to "The Silent Enemy".
