The border guard in the east
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| Original title | The border guard in the east |
| Country of production | Germany |
| original language | German |
| Publishing year | 1914 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Emil Albes |
| script | Luise Heilborn-Körbitz |
| production | German Bioscop, Berlin |
| occupation | |
| |
The Border Guard in the East is a propagandistic, German war silent film from 1914 by Emil Albes .
action
The action takes place at the beginning of the First World War on the Eastern Front. The main actors are a good-natured but principled and, if need be, a hard-core, East Prussian forester, his daughter and son-in-law. He is Pole and once promised his father-in-law that he would never fight Germany if it came to the crunch. When the first Russian patrols appear and try to seize the forester's house, there is a first military skirmish. But soon German soldiers rush in and chase the Russian soldiers to flight. Since the German soldiers have done their job, they quickly leave the forest.
But the Russian has only been waiting for this and at this moment does not return immediately. The first thing they do is arrest the Pole, who, from a political point of view, is one of their own and is therefore considered a traitor to the tsarist soldiers. That's why they want to shoot him. But his German wife intervenes and helps her Polish husband escape. But the Russians won't let her get away with that. They threaten to shoot their father if they don't bring the Poles back immediately. But the Pole remains true to his oath and informs the German soldiers about the return of the Russians. A German unit quickly horrifies the forester's house again and with one stroke of the hand frees the forester, whom the Russians are about to shoot, and his daughter.
Production notes
The border guard in the east , sometimes with the rustic and rabid secondary title Now let's thresh it , a saying of Kaiser Wilhelm II when declaring war in 1914, is a typical example of a cinematic snap shot as a direct reaction to the outbreak of the First World War . The three-act act, shot in the Bioscop studio in Neubabelsberg , was censored in September 1914 and premiered on September 15, 1914 in Berlin's Marble House .
Contemporary history
In 1935, from a National Socialist point of view, Oskar Kalbus tried to classify this film genre under the chapter heading “Feldgrauer Filmkitsch”, which experienced a real boom in the German Reich in 1914 and 1915 in particular. He writes:
“A certain trunk of experienced film manufacturers could not be frightened, however. First of all, they let their manifold relationships play out in order to be exempted from military service, because they felt called to offer the German people sensational hits "panem et circensis" in their quieter homeland, bearing in mind an ancient Roman experience : Relaxation and distraction, encouragement and encouragement. The cinema should now offer all of this. It was hoped that the general joy in the victories of our army would give rise to the desire for communication, for distracting experiences and, above all, for people to be gathered together in the “little man's theater”. In addition to the current film recordings from the theaters of war, the field-gray film kitsch - or the so-called "patriotic" film of 1914/15. "
criticism
“The war drama finds its most pronounced form because it is also most contemporary, in the drama…“ The Border Guard in the East ”. (...) In Germany, the play "Now we want to thresh them!" That is also the trend. (…) The old forester played by Mr. Albes is a brilliant figure of German honesty and a stiff neck; Mr. Schweiger's Russian officer is also a model of well-played racial peculiarity of the Russians: brutality and bestiality. "