Angels in purgatory
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| Original title | Angels in purgatory |
| Country of production | GDR |
| original language | German |
| Publishing year | 1965 |
| length | 77 minutes |
| Rod | |
| Director | Herrmann Zschoche |
| script |
Edith Gorrish Walter Gorrish |
| production | DEFA , KAG "60" |
| music | Georg Katzer |
| camera | Günter Ost |
| cut | Brigitte Krex |
| occupation | |
| |
Angels in Purgatory is a DEFA feature film by Herrmann Zschoche from 1965 .
action
November 1918 in the Ruhr area. The starving people are tired of the war. Achim Wolters, a godly subject of his majesty, belongs to a sworn community of 13-year-olds. In a joint action, the children steal potatoes at the market in order to receive Achim's father, who is a stoker on a minesweeper and is on vacation, with a good meal. On the run from the police, they hide their valuable stolen property in a nearby dump . The war-disabled carpenter Stelzebein also gives them an alibi, although he himself has to fear the police. Because he hid the weapons smuggled home by soldiers and the ammunition needed to support the expected revolution on the same dump.
But the father stays away. A spy extradited the sailors at the train station because of critical statements made by the police. During his search, the police also found smuggled ammunition, which he had hidden in a pair of boots intended for his son. Achim hears from the pastor about the arrest and on his advice prays for the father's release, but when the three additionally lit sacrificial candles do not bring his father back, he is very disappointed. And yet the god-fearing boy does not believe the carpenter Stelzebein, who thinks you can only help yourself. Only when Achim witnessed the harassment against his father in prison and also saw how brutal the imperial police were against the women from the ammunition factory did he and his friends take the side of Stelzebein. Together they fetch a machine gun from the dump and, together with other demonstrators, free the prisoners from prison. The revolution begins.
production
Angels in Purgatory was filmed in black and white by the Artistic Working Group "60" under the working title Der Bote Lenins and had its premiere on April 4, 1965 in the Babylon cinema in Berlin .
criticism
The film, which was incomprehensibly shown in a children's performance, made a strong impression on Peter Lux from New Germany : “What five working-class children - in the conflict between hunger and moral imperative, historical reality and schoolmaster's ability, naive belief and healthy class instinct - in the first November days of the year 1918 experience how they begin to ask questions about the nature of things and to answer questions of life in a hands-on manner, that is artistically set in the picture according to a script by Edith and Walter Gorrish. The director Herrmann Zschoches is especially to be thanked for the excellent guidance of the children acting in the main roles. "
HU wrote in the Neue Zeit : “The talented young director Herrmann Zschoche, together with the cameraman Günter Ost, designed the (se) conception of the authors visually very emphatically, in pictures in which the gray sadness of cloudy autumn days, the gray gloom of the war misery in Home and the gray poverty of a suburban area become too depressing mood and in which the objects often have a meaningful symbolic value. "
literature
- F.-B. Habel : The great lexicon of DEFA feature films . Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf, Berlin 2000, ISBN 3-89602-349-7 , pp. 142-143 .
Web links
- Angel in purgatory in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Angels in purgatory at filmportal.de
- Angels in purgatory at the DEFA Foundation