Erlkönig's daughter
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| Original title | Erlkönig's daughter |
| Country of production | Germany |
| original language | German |
| Publishing year | 1914 |
| length | 46 minutes |
| Rod | |
| Director | Stellan Rye |
| script | Stellan Rye based on motifs in the "Volkslieder" collection published by Johann Gottfried Herder (1778/79) |
| production | German bioscop |
| camera | Guido Seeber |
| occupation | |
| |
Erlkönig's daughter is a medium-length German silent film fantasy by Stellan Rye from 1914.
action
The story takes place as a flashback as one recounts the tragic life and death of Baron Paul Bille.
The starting point is the young man who, in a fit of melancholy, ended his life a few days before his own wedding. Last late summer, Comtess Ebba, the bride, had already arrived at the castle of the wedding ends, where the preparations were in full swing. The lord of the castle, Paul's father, and wife had asked into the music room on a mild evening, where Ebba was playing the piano. Her playing enchanted the audience, and at the end of her musical presentation she also played a piece called “Der Erlkönig”. Paul, who is inherently melancholy, allowed himself to be "carried away" by Ebba's music game into the mind of dancing elves. This confusing dance of elves made him stumble out of the music room into the open air. Staggering, he made his way through a grove of birch trees to the nearby pond. The young baron said that shimmering, dancing and whirring fantasy creatures haunted him. Like a magical call, he hurried to the pond the next night too, where he thought he saw fairies. Leaning against a tree in the moonlight, he saw a veiled structure sprung from his imagination dancing in front of him with the greatest of ease, even more beautiful than the evening before. When he stretched out his hand to the elf, the elf did not withdraw; when he tried to kiss her, the wandering beautiful creature also allowed this. Foggy and confused, Baron Bille swore to the dancing magical creature, Erlkönig's daughter, never to marry.
The wedding day was getting closer and closer, and more and more Paul felt the urge to move away from his bride and to the elf. In his mind's eye he only saw her, Erlkönig's daughter. Torn between the duty of the promised marriage and the oath that the elf demanded, the young baron began to develop panic fear. Beads of sweat ran from his forehead as he made his way back to his parents' castle. In a feverish state, he finally endured the wedding ceremony. Ebba became his overjoyed wife. When they both set off for the wedding dance, Erlkönig's daughter, invisible to everyone else, pushed herself between them like a phantom and clung to Paul's chest. She whirled him with her psychic power so that he almost lost consciousness, breathless. The spirits had already gained so much power over the young husband that he could no longer evade their calls, which led him outside onto the high terrace of the castle. In his madness, Paul reached for his fairy imagination, wanted to hug, caress and kiss her, then she vanished into nothing. He reached out greedily for her ... and lost his balance in the process. With a bloodcurdling scream, he fell over the vine-covered parapet and broke his neck in the process.
Every evening, when the summer mists rise over the castle pond, a fantastic elven creature glides over water and meadows, swinging and dancing to the wild rhythm of a seductive siren. The Spreewalds then say: “This is Erlkönig's daughter. Beware! Otherwise you will fare like poor Baron Paul! "
Production notes
Erlkönig's daughter , sometimes incorrectly spelled in the plural, was created in the spring of 1914 in the Bioscop studio in Neubabelsberg . The three-act film with a length of 845 meters passed the film censorship on June 18, 1914 and was premiered in the same month. Erlkönig's daughter appeared in Austria-Hungary on February 12, 1915.
According to tradition, the film, which is now lost, was based entirely on the playful, dance-like element. Probably for this reason, the professional dancer Grete Wiesenthal , with whom director Rye had already worked twice in the year before, was hired for the main role . In the oriental drama Kadra Sâfa she embodied the title role, in The Golden Fly she played a dancer.
Like Heide Schönemann in her book Paul Wegener , published in 2003 . Early Modernism in the film on page 39 writes that Erlkönig's daughter with his scenes of the dancing elves “on a meadow in the wind, between the white trunks of a birch forest, on the shimmering water surface” may have influenced Paul Wegener's 1916 fairy tale film Rübezahl's Wedding .
criticism
“Stellan Rye made up the plot pretty freely and has nothing to do with the Erlkönig's poetry itself. Except for the dreams of the lunatic, it is quite everyday, shows charming family pictures in a country castle where father, mother, son and bride live. Beautiful piano room recordings, then those in the playroom and in the wedding ballroom, are kept entirely within the framework of the noblest custom. The romantic and mysterious work of the elf has a fantastic background in magnificent birch groves in the moonlight and pond landscapes in the evening mist, in which the dance appearance is artistically copied. The scene in the Schifferspelunke and at the ferry increases the tension. "
"Even before Paul Wegener made his wonderful fairy-tale films, Stellan Rye, the highly talented director of the film" The Student of Prague ", devotedly devised and created" Erlenkönig's Daughter "in 1915, a work that embraces old Nordic and German sagas moved into modern times, everything full of delicate poetry, full of grace. Unfortunately, the cinema audience at that time was far from appreciating this world of fairy tales and the supernatural, not a divine spark jumped from the screen to the viewer, not even from the delightful images of nature in which the action took place, not even from the large, speaking, melancholy art Grete Wiesenthal, who danced the elf. "