Duel - Enemy at the Gates
Duel - Enemy at the Gates (Original title: Enemy at the Gates) is a dramatic war film from 2001 by Jean-Jacques Annaud . He also wrote the script with Alain Godard . The film deals with the duel between two snipers during the Battle of Stalingrad from September 13, 1942 to February 2, 1943. It is based on the 1973 book Enemy at the Gates: The Battle for Stalingrad by William Craig. The Soviet sniper Vasily Saizew (1915–1991) is said to have killed up to 300 enemy soldiers and officers.
action
Stalingrad in autumn 1942: Under the command of the General of the Panzer Troop Friedrich Paulus , the German 6th Army took almost all of Stalingrad. To defend the city that bears Stalin's name against the Wehrmacht , thousands of Soviet citizens are called to arms, including the young shepherd Vasily Saizew. At the beginning of the film, he and many others are brought across the Volga in small boats on September 20, 1942 , where they are attacked by German Stukas and numerous Red Army soldiers have already been killed. Those who want to jump to safety in the Volga before the Stuka attack are shot by political commissars of the Red Army . Arrived on the bank, only every second man receives a rifle, Saizew goes empty-handed and only receives a little reserve ammunition. Then they are relentlessly thrown against the German lines of defense, regardless of any losses. The attack fails, retreating Russian soldiers are in turn gunned down by political commissars with machine guns as traitors.
Saizew remains lying in no man's land and hides among the dead in a well, where some time later Political Commissar Danilov, whose propaganda vehicle had been switched off by artillery, also fled some time later. Danilov does not notice Saizew at first and tries to shoot several enemy soldiers who appeared at the other end of the square, but he has to give up before the first shot because it is impossible for him to aim calmly. Saizew, who has meanwhile made himself noticeable, takes over the weapon and shoots the enemy soldiers one after the other under the acoustic cover of nearby artillery strikes, without the Germans, who think they are safe, noticing immediately. Thanks to Danilov's intercession, Saizew is promoted to a sniper and his propaganda makes him a war hero.
As more and more German officers and soldiers fell victim to the Soviet sniper and his fellow combatants, the highly decorated Major König was dispatched to Stalingrad on October 21, 1942 to kill Saizew. The two snipers repeatedly get into nerve-wracking duels in which the advantages change again and again and both barely escape death several times. Since Major Koenig proves to be the better sniper in direct comparison, Danilov tries, with the help of the young Russian Sascha Filipow, to give Saizew an advantage over his opponent. Sascha presents himself as a supposed defector and does simple auxiliary services for the Germans, but at the same time provides Danilov with information. A dangerous double game, as Major König sees through the boy very quickly and deliberately drops information that should lure Saizew into situations determined by König.
Between the fights, a relationship slowly develops between Saizew and the young soldier Tanya Chernova, which puts the friendship between Danilov and Saizew to the test, as he too has an interest in the young woman. After the death of her parents, Tanja switches from radio reconnaissance to snipers, where she and Saizew fall in love.
Finally, there is a final confrontation: The German high command (actually the headquarters of the 6th Army) is convinced that Saizew has fallen because his army payroll is found among the spoils of a soldier who looted a field full of corpses - but Saizew has found himself there just posed dead. Major König is to be flown back - but he assumes that Saizew is still alive and wants to finally bring him down on his last day in Stalingrad. To do this, he hangs up young Sascha, whom he has now been able to prove that he has betrayed him, visible from afar as bait to lure the snipers out of their hiding place. Saizew can only with difficulty prevent Tanya, who cannot see through the King’s plan, from leaving the hiding place. He sends Tanya back to Danilov. During the evacuation of Sascha's mother, she was hit by a shrapnel and apparently killed in front of Danilov's eyes. In fact, she is only badly wounded and taken to the hospital by Sasha's mother on the other side of the Volga .
Convinced that Tanya is dead, Danilov sets out to see Saizew. The event showed him how selfish he was towards Saizew. After telling Saizew everything, he deliberately surrenders himself to the fire of the king in order to show Saizew his position and is promptly shot by the major. Convinced that Saizew has finally caught, König goes to the place of the corpse. He is caught and shot by Saizew.
Two months later on February 3, 1943: The battle for Stalingrad is over after 180 days; Saizew finds Tanya in the hospital and sits down by her sick bed. Finally, a text is faded in, from which it can be seen that Saizew has been awarded the Order of Lenin several times and was named Hero of the Soviet Union in 1943 .
background
- The shooting lasted from January to May 2000. The film was shot entirely in Germany, mainly in Brandenburg . Shooting locations included the Babelsberg film studio , the Krampnitz cavalry school near Potsdam, the disused chemical plant - formerly part of the VEB Chemiewerk Coswig - in Rüdersdorf near Berlin and the disused open-cast mining area Greifenhain / Pritzen near Cottbus .
- The railway vehicles that can be seen in several station scenes (including the steam locomotive 41 1303) were, partly still with the film painting, on the open-air site of the association “Hei Na Ganzlin e. V. “at the train station in Röbel . The saloon car 10208 , originally built for the General Director of the Deutsche Reichsbahn , Julius Dorpmüller , was returned to its original state for the filming and is now exhibited in the DB Museum Koblenz .
- The world premiere took place on February 7, 2001 in Berlin, where it was shown as an opening film outside of the official competition as part of the 2001 Berlinale . It was released on March 15, 2001 in Germany and on March 16, 2001 in the USA.
- The cost of producing the film was $ 74 million, according to Jean-Jacques Annaud.
- The film grossed around 97 million US dollars in cinemas worldwide, including around 51 million US dollars in the USA and around 0.6 million US dollars in Germany.
Difference between feature film and story
A Major Erwin König is not documented in any German source. The Wehrmacht never sent a sniper to Stalingrad to kill Saizew. However, in the memoirs of the Russian general Vasily Tschuikow on the defense of Stalingrad there is a report on the duels of the Soviet and German snipers, in which Tschuikow describes that on the German side the "top sniper instructor", a major, was killed.
In his book Die Stalingrad Protocols, Jochen Hellbeck criticizes the film depiction of the mass shooting of retreating Russian soldiers. He remarks: “More recent source publications, however, show that in the period from August 1 to October 15, 1942, the most critical phase of the battle for the Red Army, on the Stalingrad Front, ... [only] 278 Soviet soldiers from the Special detachments of the Soviet secret police ( NKVD ) were shot. ” In addition, interviews with participants in the battle, including an interview with Vasily Saizew himself, support the low figures. Hellbeck describes the image produced in the film as unrealistic.
When the film was shown to Russian Stalingrad veterans, they were so upset by what they thought was the offensive portrayal of the Red Army that they demanded that the film be banned in Russia. In particular, the representation of the Russian soldiers celebrating and dancing in the evening was criticized. "As a soldier you were only looking for two things: food and some sleep," said the veterans.
Difference between a film and a book
The duel between Saizew and King takes up only a very small part of the book. Its plot ranges from the first German attacks on the Soviet Union to the experiences of the German and Italian prisoners of war.
If the battles for Stalingrad are shown from the Russian side in the film, they are drawn in the underlying factual novel from the perspective of the Russian soldiers and civilians as well as the perspective of the Germans and Italians involved.
Reviews
Critics criticized the reduction of the cruelest battle of the war with hundreds of thousands of dead to a cat-and-mouse game between two people, including a love story with a happy ending, the uncritical transfiguration of a sniper who kills people in ambush, to a hero as well as completely in the Background from the battle of Stalingrad to a mere backdrop for a film that only wants to entertain with action, love, tension and the duel of two heroes like from a western at the expense of a serious subject.
However, the director Jean-Jacques Annaud pretended that the film was “ sending a signal against the trivialization of war by video games and action films ” and emphasized “ I hope that our film shows one thing very clearly: War is never nice, killing is never funny. "
With " weak applause and even a few boos ", the film was extremely badly received by the premiere audience at the 2001 Berlinale. At the gala that followed, " too much heroism and a string of clichés " were criticized and the critics panned the film like no other festival entry. As a consequence, Annaud announced that she would no longer show any of his films at the Berlinale.
- JD Kucharzewski wrote on filmszene.de: "Enemy at the Gates" [is] not an anti-war film, but rather a battle epic ... [and] finally it turns into the opposite: instead of disturbing and shocking, the depiction of war remains despite its brutality strangely sterile, especially since the film degraded the dead to a mere backdrop for the duel between Vassili and King. […] Although it was probably not the director's intention, the cruelest battle of the Second World War […] degenerates into a pyrotechnic spectacle and an exciting gotcha game, in which countless extras are torn apart by bullets, but true heroes still survive. Despite some well-intentioned approaches, the hero myth is not dismantled. On the contrary: Annaud all too often makes use of the glorifying imagery of propaganda films, and when Vassili expresses the noble wish not to face the enemy as a hero, but as a simple soldier on the battlefield, even Joseph Goebbels would have moved to tears. ... and so it is up to the viewer whether he wants to see a relatively successful action flick with a serious context or a failed film about the horror of war in “Enemy at the Gates”.
- Flemming Schock wrote on filmspiegel.de: Sure, the film industry is an entertainment and not an educational machine. But Jean Jacques Annaud's irresponsible hero anthem [...] can only entertain painlessly those who do not relate the art of film to any conscience. [...] Then Annaud ("It's just a film") does the actually unbelievable when he gets rid of every cinematic conscience because Stalingrad, where thousands found an agonizing end every day, becomes the almost empty stage of a highnoon showdown adopted. Even if the western, itself a myth, may be dead, the irresponsible falsification of history is stretched so far that this work even suggests the impression that the outcome of the duel between these two Stalingrad cowboys depended on the outcome of the Second World War. Film-making freedom must also have its limits, but that, every historicity, the millions of dead in Stalingrad and, last but not least, the intelligence of the viewer offends “Enemy at the Gates” every second. Is it permissible to distort history like this, to trivialize the monstrous to the almost deserted pocket-sized town, where there is even room for a touch of ( sic ) campfire romance and a sex scene (!)?
- Martin Zucker wrote on allesfilm.com: That Vassili is made a hero is understandable from the narrative point of view . However, it is incomprehensible that it is not questioned whether someone is to be celebrated who shoots people from ambush. For in this Zaitsev and King are equal to one another. At least on the level between film and audience, this should be addressed. Instead, Sasha asks on behalf of everyone: "How many were there today?" At the beginning of the third millennium, especially in a war film, one can wish for a somewhat more critical examination of the subject.
Awards
The British Society of Cinematographers nominated the cameraman Robert Fraisse for the Best Cinematography Award 2001.
The German Film and Media Assessment (FBW) awarded the film the title “Valuable”.
Web links
- Duell - Enemy at the Gates in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Interview with Jean-Jacques Annaud on epilog.de
- David R. Stone, "Review of Enemy at the Gates" H-War, H-Net Reviews, June, 2002. (English review by historian David R. Stone, Kansas State University )
- Comparison of the cut versions FSK 12 Sat. 1 - FSK 16 by Duell - Enemy at the Gates at Schnittberichte.com
Individual evidence
- ↑ Age rating for duel - Enemy at the Gates . Youth Media Commission .
- ^ William Craig: Enemy at the Gates. The Battle for Stalingrad. Penguin Books. Harmondsworth 2000, ISBN 0-14-139017-4 , in particular pp. 121-130 (first edition 1973, New York: Readers Digest Press); German translation: Duell - Enemy at the Gates. Factual report. Heyne, Munich 2001, ISBN 3-453-19510-8 (first edition 1974. Munich, Vienna, Basel: Desch, under the title The Battle of Stalingrad: The Downfall of the 6th Army) .
- ↑ Berlinale: Stalingrad drama as the opening film
- ↑ Annaud on the production costs : "... In fact it was 74 million, and that is pretty little for such a lavish film ..."
- ↑ Financial data on boxofficemojo
- ↑ Jochen Hellbeck: The Stalingrad Protocols. Soviet eyewitnesses report from the battle. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2012, ISBN 978-3-10-030213-7 , p. 429.
- ↑ Jochen Hellbeck: The Stalingrad Protocols. Soviet eyewitnesses report from the battle. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2012, ISBN 978-3-10-030213-7 , p. 24.
- ↑ Jean-Jacques Annaud: "Killing is never funny"
- ↑ Berlinale opening: boos instead of celebrities
- ↑ Berlinale 2001 " ... Enemy at the Gates opened the festival and mercilessly failed the critics and audience "
- ↑ An interview with director Annaud
- ↑ Film review on filmszene.de
- ↑ Film review on filmspiegel.de
- ↑ movie review ( Memento of 7 July 2011 at the Internet Archive ) on allesfilm.com
- ^ Rating of the FBW von Duell - Enemy at the Gates