Emilia Galotti (1958)

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Movie
Original title Emilia Galotti
Country of production GDR
original language German
Publishing year 1958
length 98 minutes
Age rating FSK 12
Rod
Director Martin Hellberg
script Martin Hellberg
production DEFA
music Ernst Roters
camera Günter Eisinger
cut Lieselotte Johl
occupation

Emilia Galotti is a German film adaptation of DEFA by Martin Hellberg from 1958. It is based on the play Emilia Galotti by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing . Emilia Galotti had its premiere on March 14, 1958 in the Babylon cinema in Berlin .

action

At a ball, the Prince of Guastalla Hettore Gonzaga, long tired of his lover Countess Orsina, sees the young Emilia Galotti, daughter of Colonel Odoardo Galotti, for the first time. He desires her from the very first moment, but can only speak to her for a short time at the ball when Countess Orsina announces herself. A short time later he saw her portrait at the painter Conti and bought the portrait from him. Again and again he looks at the portrait in a secluded place and finally decides to take action. At that moment, his chamberlain, Marinelli, informed him that Count Appiani was planning to marry in close circle the next day. The bride is said to be Emilia Galotti. Hettore Gonzaga instructs Marinelli to prevent the wedding by all means. At first Marinelli wants to send the count out of the country with an order at the prince's behest, but the count refuses to do so with reference to his wedding. Hettore Gonzaga, in turn, secretly seeks out Emilia Galotti in the church the next morning and harasses her. Emilia returns to her mother Claudia in horror and tells her about it. Both decide not to tell the father about the prince's behavior. Count Appiani also appears confused at the Galottis and tells Claudia about Marinelli's offer. He advises his master to go to his pleasure palace .

On the wedding day, Marinelli has the bride and groom's carriage ambushed by robbers not far from the princely pleasure palace. While Emilia Galotti flees in panic from the carriage and is brought to the prince's summer palace by an employee of the prince, the robbers shoot Count Appiani. A messenger rides off to tell Odoardo about the attack, while the mother and her entourage make their way to the count's castle. There Emilia reacts in disbelief and horrified when she realizes whose lock she is in. The prince leads them into the upper rooms, but Claudia can soon gain entry loudly. The Countess Orsina, who also appears a short time later, is turned down by Marinelli and unceremoniously complimented by Hettore Gonzaga. There, the rejected Orsina meets Odoardo, who has just arrived, to whom she reports, among other things, that Appiani is dead and that the prince spoke confidentially with Emilia in the church that morning. She gives him her dagger, which he hides in his robe. Claudia rushed over to confirm Orsina's words and went to organize a carriage for the family to leave. Before Hettore Gonzaga, Odoardo states that he is allowed to speak to his daughter, who, according to the prince's will, should stay with a befriended, vicious couple. At Emilia's request, Odoardo stabs his daughter to death in order to save her from the shame of the prince's seduction. Hettore Gonzaga now curses Marinelli, who had presented himself to him as a friend, but was actually a devil.

criticism

The contemporary criticism of the GDR wrote that Emilia Galotti “only turned out to be a mediocre film”, even if the drama could now be shown to people who had previously not been able to see it in the theater. Above all, Hellberg's deviation from the original was criticized, so the director remained "in his design below the bourgeois-revolutionary level of the classic original works". Other critics, however, praised the film precisely for its new point of view and wrote that the film "in some phases resembles an exciting crime story".

The BRD film service wrote in 1963 that the film “is a hybrid of the kind that was once very correctly said: it degrades theater and film. […] The processing goes little beyond half-daring approaches, which are mostly limited to shifting text passages. [...] the drama [is] taken abundantly as an opportunity to massively denounce earlier historical circumstances and their grievances, whereby the mentioned shifts in dialogue are quite sufficient for a tendentious coloring. "

The lexicon of international films described the feature film as a "filming of an insignificant theatrical performance by DEFA director Hellberg", which, however, does not correspond to the truth with regard to the character of the film as an independent feature film. The online version therefore no longer mentions the theatrical performance, but speaks of a “rather lengthy adaptation” and only finds “some of the performance” and the “sometimes expressive camera ideas” convincing.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Winfried Junge: The new times cannot be captured with old means. In: Forum. No. 13, 1958.
  2. ↑ Alexander Abusch in: Deutsche Filmkunst. No. 9, 1958.
  3. ↑ -rg: Lessing on the canvas. In: Courier. March 25, 1958.
  4. ^ Eh: Emilia Galotti. In: film service. No. 32, 1963.
  5. ↑ Klaus Brüne (Ed.): Lexicon of International Films . Volume 2. Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1990, p. 855.
  6. ↑ Emilia Galotti. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed August 20, 2017 .Template: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used