The Hellstrom Chronicle

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Movie
German title The Hellstrom Chronicle
Original title The Hellstrom Chronicle
Country of production United States
original language English
Publishing year 1971
length 90 minutes
Age rating FSK 12
Rod
Director Walon Green
script David Seltzer
production David L. Wolper
music Lalo Schifrin
camera Helmuth Barth
Ken Middleham
Vilis Lapenieks
cut John Soh
occupation

The Hellstrom Chronicle (original title: The Hellstrom Chronicle ) is an American film from 1971. The trademark of this combination of documentary and science fiction film are the numerous slow-motion and macro shots of the insect world. Directed by Walon Green and written by David Seltzer . The Hellstrom Chronicle received the 1972 Oscar for Best Documentary .

action

The plot is led by a fictional scientist named Nils Hellstrom (played by Lawrence Pressman ), who wants to prove that only insects are predestined to win the struggle for survival against humanity. Hellstrom names adaptability, lack of emotions, subordination to the common good and numerical superiority as the main reasons. As evidence, he uses documentary material from the world of insects.

background

The Hellstrom Chronicle was presented out of competition at the Cannes International Film Festival in May 1971 . The film opened on June 28, 1971 in the USA and in German cinemas on November 12 of the same year .

The idea for the film came from producer David L. Wolper in 1966 when he was working with Walon Green on the National Geographic insect documentary The Hidden World of Insects . Composer Lalo Schifrin and cameraman Ken Middleham were also involved in this production.

The production of the film took two years, with eight camera teams in some cases. In addition to the USA, the film was also shot in Ethiopia , Uganda , Kenya , Japan and England .

The film was originally planned without a presenter. When the finished film had no real cohesion, the narrator was added by the author David Seltzer afterwards. First, they wanted to hire a real Scottish entomologist who put forward similar theses as Hellstrom, but he had to cancel the shoot because of a hepatitis infection.

David Seltzer was best known for writing Richard Donner's The Omen in 1976 . Before this film, Walon Green wrote the script for Sam Peckinpah's western classic The Wild Bunch - They knew no law and later, among other things, the scripts for RoboCop 2 , Eraser and some episodes of the television series Emergency Room . Ken Middleham also led the camera in the thematically similarly positioned Phase IV (1974).

For the numerous archive recordings used in the film, material from Heinz Sielmann was also used.

The main character Nils Hellstrom shows excerpts from the horror films When the Marabunta threatens and Formicula . In the course of the action, real film recordings of wandering ants are shown, which attack and kill even larger vertebrates such as chameleons, monitor lizards and snakes.

analysis

Georg Seeßlen wrote : “In addition to the rats, fish and frogs that threaten people in the disaster films , the insects [in the 1970s] also took on new manifestations based on the phobias of the genre . […] The latent fear of insects was expressed in the documentary “The Hellstrom Chronicle” […], which combined a remarkable recording technique with the not entirely rationalized message of the insects taking over the earth. «Phase IV» [...] translates this idea into a game. [...] Man, the conclusion could be drawn, has to subordinate himself again and again to nature and not nature to man. "

criticism

Vincent Canby of the New York Times wrote at the start of the film that the film apparently wanted to advertise sensible ecological policy, which was also to be approved. The performance of the cameramen involved is also outstanding. However, the narrator's comment and the standpoint represented are "sensationally bad and possibly misleading".

The lexicon of international film praised the technical aspects of the film, but criticized the thesis advocated in the film that “the total subordination of the individual and determined prey are ideal images of today's society” as questionable.

For Die Zeit , the insects served to illustrate a “reactionary survival philosophy”.

Aftermath

The film served as inspiration for the book Hellstrom's Hive (1973) by Frank Herbert , in which there is also a Nils Hellstrom who takes the same theses as the Hellstrom of the film. The book's Hellstrom heads a group consisting of tens of thousands of people who form a secret parallel society that lives separately in underground tunnels and tries to orient itself as closely as possible to the way of life of the insects.

Awards

Publications

In 2003, around 30 years after the film's premiere, Lalo Schifrin's film music was released on CD . In 2011, The Hellstrom Chronicle appeared in the USA on Blu-ray Disc and DVD .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b "The movie seems to be making a case for a sane ecological policy, which is all well and good, but it devotes most of its efforts to turning its subjects - driver ants, locusts, bees, moths, butterflies, Venus fly traps, and what not — into monsters of anthropomorphic dimension. [...] A number of cameramen contributed the individual sequences, utilizing stop-motion photography, telescopic lenses and microscopic lenses, and their work is superb. The narration and the point of view, however, are sensationally awful and, possibly, misleading. ”- Review in the New York Times on June 29, 1971, accessed on January 14, 2013.
  2. ^ The Hellstrom Chronicle. In: Festival de Cannes. Retrieved January 2, 2020 .
  3. ↑ a b The Hellstrom Chronicle in the Internet Movie Database .
  4. ↑ a b The Hellstrom Chronicle. In: Turner Classic Movies . Retrieved January 2, 2020 .
  5. ↑ a b The Hellstrom Chronicle. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed January 2, 2020 .  .Template: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used
  6. ↑ http://phinnweb.blogspot.de/2005/08/lalo-schifrin-hellstrom-chronicle.html
  7. ↑ a b Georg Seeßlen: Cinema of the Utopian. History and Mythology of Science Fiction Films. Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1980, pp. 244-246.
  8. ↑ FilmtipPrograms in the time no. 28 of 6 July 1973, accessed January 14, 2013.
  9. ↑ Hellström's Brut (original title: Hellstrom's Hive ), Library of Science Fiction Literature Volume 14, Heyne Verlag, Munich 1982, ISBN 3-453-30902-2 .
  10. ↑ Entry at festival-cannes.com