The most beautiful
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| Original title | The most beautiful |
 | |
| Country of production | GDR |
| original language | German |
| Publishing year | 2002/1957 (shooting) |
| length | 86 minutes |
| Rod | |
| Director | Ernesto Remani |
| script |
Artur A. Kuhnert based on a play by Ilse Langner |
| production | Willi Teichmann |
| music | Manfred Nitschke |
| camera | Robert Baberske |
| cut | Ruth Moegelin |
| occupation | |
| |
Die Schönste is a feature film from 1957 and the only DEFA production that was made under the direction of Ernesto Remani . It was the first DEFA film to be completely banned by the state so that it could not be shown publicly during the GDR era . It is an early example of the so-called basement films . It was only after reunification that the film was reconstructed and premiered in 2002.
Contents of the original version
West Berlin in the 1950s: The neighbors Thomas Berndorf and Hannes Wille are good friends. Hannes is the son of a foreman and garage administrator, Thomas the son of the wealthy entrepreneur Alexander Berndorf. In his free time, Hannes earns money by cleaning Alexander Berndorf's Mercedes 300. When Thomas shows him his mother's photo in a magazine, Hannes claims that she is only so beautiful because of the necklace she is wearing in the picture. Thomas then challenges him to a wager : he wants to steal the necklace from his mother and at the same time Hannes is supposed to steal a brooch that he had laboriously saved from his mother . Then you would see which mother would be more beautiful without her jewelry.
In both households there are parties in the evenings. Hannes' father has been a foreman for 25 years and his colleagues visit him. Hannes manages to steal the brooch. Their disappearance causes perplexity and it is the father who reproaches his wife for not knowing how to appreciate her jewelry. Since both parents have never quarreled like this, Hannes puts the brooch back. She is found and the family blessing is restored.
Thomas only succeeds in taking the necklace after a while. A reception takes place in the house, which is primarily intended to encourage potential donors from Berndorf to finance a newly founded company. When Yvonne Berndorf is asked to put on the necklace at the request of the most important financier, Wiedemann, she cannot find it. The family crisis breaks out because Berndorf's potential financier finds out through a phone call that the necklace has not yet been paid for in full. He cancels the deal with Berndorf. The celebration ends abruptly and Thomas, who hears that the police are being called, flees to Hannes with Collier. In his panic, he throws the piece of jewelry into a car in Hannes' father's garage yard. When he realizes that the necklace has an existential meaning for the family, he wants to get it back, but the car has already been picked up by its owner in Hamburg . Thomas and Hannes now hitchhike across the border to Hamburg, where they find the car and the necklace and are driven back to Berlin from the fish market by a hamburger . It has become clear here how much the life of the Berndorfs was shaped by appearance. Alexander regards his wife and son only as a facade for a solid existence and has long since found a lover in Yvonne's girlfriend Susanne. The family's cars are picked up because everything was only bought on credit and when Yvonne offers to prostitute herself at the financier Wiedemann, Alexander doesn't stop her. However, it does not come to that because Thomas and Hannes return and have the necklace with them.
Alexander is immediately reputable again because of the collier that has appeared, since the financiers are now assuming a bluff by Alexander, which they have fallen for. He now enjoys a higher reputation than before and is the first to buy a new car.
Production of the original version up to the production of the last censored version
The most beautiful is loosely based on a stage play by Ilse Langner from 1949. From 1954, DEFA planned to film the material and hired the Braunschweig- born author A. Artur Kuhnert (1905–1958) for the script, who comes from Braunschweig and lives in the Federal Republic of Germany. . The aim of the film was to criticize “capitalist conditions” so that, in contrast to the literary model, the effects of the missing Collier on the reputation and thus the economic success of Berndorf were worked out. As an entertainment film aimed at international distribution, however, the portrayal of luxury was also not dispensed with, which was supposed to help "strip away the 'proletarian' stable smell of the studio as much as possible".
In the course of the “thaw” period after Stalin's death , the main film administration of the Ministry of Culture, which was responsible, among other things, for the acceptance of the films, relaxed its control: “From the second half of 1956, the DEFA studio management was able to take responsibility for itself and without prior notice -Control over which script was allowed to be produced. Unlike before, the finished films first had to be removed from the top. The most beautiful was the first DEFA production that went into the studio without explicit script approval from the head office. "
The shooting of the film Die Schönste ran from January 17, 1957 to April 6, 1957. The exterior shots in Hamburg and Berlin were shot by Ideal-Film Munich, the interior shots were shot in the Babelsberg film studios . In total, the production costs of the film amounted to 1.71 million marks.
At the beginning of the shooting, the control over the film production was tightened again, among other things in view of the Hungarian popular uprising . As early as March 1957, Hermann-Ernst Schauer , Head of the Film Production Department in the Film Headquarters, expressed concerns about film. After the first rough cut version of the film had been submitted and criticized by the film headquarters, the DEFA directorate demanded that individual passages be shortened. At the time, the acceptance committee considered director Remani “anything but a director that we could need. It is certain that he is not in the least on our ground, that he is not clear about what we want with our films. His staging is kept in a style that does not even correspond to the most mediocre, medium-sized entertainment films in the UFA character. It is characterized by superficiality, cheekiness and insignificance. "
After an information demonstration at the main film administration in August 1957, the end of the film was first cut. Despite follow-up shots by Ernesto Remanis in September and October 1957 - among other things, the ending was shot again so that Yvonne Berndorf is now leaving her husband - the film was rejected when it was re-examined in January 1958. Anton Ackermann , head of the main film administration at the Ministry of Culture, was present at the examination and wrote in April of the same year in the SED magazine Einheit :
“In recent years DEFA has again produced excellent anti-imperialist, anti-militarist and anti-fascist films [...] In contrast, the so-called 'socially critical' films or the films that were supposed to shine ' behind the scenes of the western economic miracle ' ( millions of Yvette , Rivals at the wheel , casino affair and the most beautiful ), stuck completely in the non-committal or even served to belittle and praise capitalist conditions with extensive 'people's community' ideology. This is particularly true of 'The Most Beautiful'. "
Remani was refused entry to the GDR in autumn 1957, so that he was excluded from further work on the film.
The last censored version
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| Original title | The most beautiful |
 | |
| Country of production | GDR |
| original language | German |
| Publishing year | 1959 (shooting) |
| length | 72 minutes |
| Rod | |
| Director | Walter Beck |
| script | Heinz Kahlau |
| music | Wolfgang Lesser |
| camera | Götz Neumann |
| occupation | |
| |
In the fall of 1958, after the unsuccessful cuts and re-shoots, Ernesto Remanis hired director Walter Beck and writer Heinz Kahlau internally for further post-shots and an adapted screenplay. Among other things, Kahlau wrote an "agitational framework" about two painters who introduce the story and comment on it in between in line with socialist ideology. In addition, Manfred Krug was hired, who sang the previously not included title Schade oh Schade, alles façade with the line "Schade, oh Schade, everything only appearance, every facade collapses once".
The censored version of the most beautiful has significant differences compared to the original version, which mainly show the efforts to upgrade the working class family and devalue the business family:
- In the framework story, two painters are supposed to paint a wall. One is Albert, Gustav Wille's brother, and is amused by how much life is a facade. The other is the simple-minded pit who finds superficial life beautiful to look at. Gustav's brother has wrapped his lunch in the side that shows Berndorf's wife with a necklace. He is just about to tell the story that the necklace brought with it when they both listen to a "rebellious" guitar singer sing a song about the facade of life. In later inserts, Albert Pit explains, among other things, that Alexander only owned the necklace for the facade in order to appear wealthy.
- In a scene not included in the original version, Yvonne lets the housekeeper Tilde know that she should cancel an appointment with Gustav Wille. He was supposed to repair her broken car radio and complained to his brother Albert - one of the painters in the framework deal - that he had now waited for Yvonne more than an hour after his actual working hours. He says that since she was in the magazine, she thinks she can do anything.
- In the original version, the disappearance of Martha Willes' brooch leads to the first argument between the couple. Gustav Wille accuses his wife of not having taken enough care of the expensive jewelry and of not properly appreciating it. In the scene, both of them prepare a punch at the kitchen table, on which there are tropical fruits , among other things . Since the parents have never quarreled, Hannes secretly puts the jewelry back. In the censored version, Willes's disappearance of jewelry is humorous. During the kitchen scene, Martha Wille wears a headscarf and there is bread on the table. Both spouses later find out that Martha Wille actually doesn't need the brooch because Martha likes her husband better without it.
- A scene from the censorship version, which is not included in the original, shows the guests who flee the celebration at Berndorfs and describe the occurrence as a scandal .
- In contrast to the original version, the censorship version lacks the scene in which the two boys outsmart the guards of the GDR on the border with the FRG and flee across the border.
- In a scene shot by Walter Beck after the boys had fled, Martha Wille appears at Yvonne Berndorf's and accuses her of not being a good mother. While Yvonne never has time for the boy, the father is always out on business. Martha suggests that the boy feels neglected and that is why he is so often with Willes. Yvonne confesses that she has never thought about it.
- In the censorship version, Yvonne Berndorf leaves her husband with her son, because he only regards her as an object of prestige .
Prohibited in 1959 and reconstruction until 2007
The new film, now cut to 72 minutes, was re-submitted for viewing at the beginning of 1959 to the Film Headquarters, which turned it down on March 17, 1959. After viewing the film for the last time in August 1961 and confirming the ban, Die Schönste became the first DEFA film to be completely banned.
After the political change , the DEFA Foundation, founded in 1999, took on the film and restored both the original and the last censored version of the film in two years. The total reconstruction of the original and censored versions cost 35,000 euros. The reconstructed film was premiered on May 24, 2002 in the Berlin Filmkunsthaus Babylon; both versions ran on September 24, 2007 for the first time on MDR television .
DVD release
In 2009, both versions of this DEFA production were published by Icestorm Entertainment GmbH as a double DVD edition.
criticism
After the world premiere in 2002, the critics rated Die Schönste as a “bizarre trash treasure”. Due to its biographical and cultural-historical contexts, it has a meaning that goes far beyond its actual intentions. "In Tagesspiegel, Silvia Hallensleben described Die Schönste as" refreshing stand-up banter ... cast in the form of a sentimental family drama ", in which" the bellied rascality [is] caricatured so badly that it still makes sense and fun today ”. For the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , Die Schönste is “an entertainment film with a slightly socially critical impact”.
For Günter Agde from the newspaper Die Welt , Die Schönste was “a social piece with genre-related ingredients: intrigues, flirting, salon babble, car trips from Berlin (across the border that was still open at the time) to Hamburg and back. Also a bit of a chase and, of course, a happy ending with an elegiac edge. "Remani said the film was" safe in its craft and fluent, without airs, top-class cast, an entertaining genre film as it was back then in every cinema repertoire as program feed needed. "
Web links
- The best thing in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- The most beautiful at filmportal.de
- The most beautiful at the DEFA Foundation
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b Ralf Schenk: On the history of the film . Booklet of the DVD Die Schönste , p. 6.
- ↑ Ralf Schenk: On the history of the film . Booklet of the DVD Die Schönste , p. 7.
- ^ Anne Pfeuffer, member of the acceptance commission on July 12, 1957. According to Habel, p. 515.
- ^ Anton Ackermann: On partiality in film art . In: Central Committee of the SED (Ed.): Unity. Journal of Theory and Practice of Scientific Socialism . 13th year, issue 4, April 1958, pp. 527-538, here p. 536.
- ↑ Lt. progress-film.de ( Memento from September 8, 2012 in the web archive archive.today ), the length of the censorship version is often incorrectly stated as 58 minutes.
- ↑ F.-B. Habel : The great lexicon of DEFA feature films . Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf, Berlin 2000, ISBN 3-89602-349-7 , pp. 515 .
- ↑ a b Silvia Hallensleben: Fruit from over there late . In: Der Tagesspiegel , May 24, 2002. Online
- ↑ "The Most Beautiful" - Premiere for Original and "Fake": TV premiere for a DEFA film with a special story . MDR program information dated September 24, 2007
- ↑ The most beautiful . In: amazon.de . August 30, 2016. Retrieved August 30, 2016.
- ^ Claus Löser in: tip-Magazin, Berlin, 11, 2002.
- ↑ Lutz Pehnert: The west flashes golden . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , May 24, 2002.
- ^ A b Günter Agde: Critique of Capitalism on the Ku'damm. A DEFA feature film new in the cinema: How “The Most Beautiful” was censored and reconstructed . In: Die Welt , May 24, 2002, p. 26.