Miss butterfly

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Movie
Original title Miss butterfly
Country of production GDR
original language German
Publishing year 2005
length 118 minutes
Age rating FSK 0
Rod
Director Kurt Barthel
script Christa Wolf
Gerhard Wolf
Kurt Barthel
production DEFA , KAG "Heinrich Greif"
music Peter Rabenalt
camera Hans-Jürgen Sasse
Curt Neumann
cut Rita Hiller
occupation

Fräulein Schmetterling is a German feature film by Kurt Barthel , the rough cut of which was completed in early 1966. The unfinished film, which was considered a DEFA experiment , was banned in 1966 during the 11th plenum of the SED Central Committee . On the basis of the script, a film montage of the film scenes and sound fragments that had been preserved was created from 2002, which was premiered in 2005.

action

The 17-year-old Helene Raupe, who can fly in her imagination, lives with her six-year-old sister Asta in an old building district in Berlin. When her father, a tobacco merchant, dies, the father's shop is closed, although Helene had always run it together with her father. The old building district is threatened with demolition. An aunt from Potsdam promises to take care of the two sisters, but leaves for Potsdam after a short time. The sisters cannot live with her because her aunt is said to have little space. Helene now has to take care of her sister.

Although Helene imagines a life as a stewardess or model in her dreams, she is placed as a fish seller in the Berlin market hall by the district employee Himmelblau, but where she fails. When the store sells the scarce smoked eel, Helene is unable to cope with the influx of customers, makes mistakes in the accounting and is finally fired. Himmelblau now gives her to an Exquisit fashion store , where she alienates customers with her direct manner. She is fired again and dreams of a world of her own in which she is a successful saleswoman with many friendly and satisfied customers.

Child welfare worker Mrs. Ready appears at Helene's to inquire about the well-being of the sisters. She is horrified when she learns that the aunt doesn't take care of the girls and that Helene has lost her job for the second time. However, Helene finds a new job as a bus conductor and can thus avoid the threatened admission to the home. Helene finds a fatherly friend in bus driver Kubinke and she also enjoys her work. However, when it comes to an argument with a passenger who does not want to buy a ticket, Helene voluntarily gives up the work as a conductor. On her 18th birthday, Helene and her sister are invited by her aunt to a circus, where she is fascinated by a mime who catches the sun in his game. A little later she has to answer again in front of Frau Ready, who is dismissive of Helene. Frau Ready obliges Helene to resume her work as a bus conductor. Asta has to move to his aunt in Potsdam.

Helene has been assigned a new apartment. The excavators are now moving to the old building where Helene lived for a long time. When Helene visits her familiar surroundings one last time, she finds her sister Asta, who has run away from her aunt's household, in her old apartment. Both girls reflect on their situation and the right or wrong of the authorities around them. They leave the apartment and go to the circus, where they see the mimes on stage again. That evening he chooses Helene as his partner for a performance and together they recreate the events of the last few weeks, Helene's various work stations and the struggle with the bureaucracy. In the end, the mime gives Helene a sunflower and the girl feels liberated. Together with the mime, the sisters come out of the big top and distribute sunflowers to the sullen passers-by, who suddenly look friendly. The film ends with the off-screen statement: “That doesn't even exist”.

production

Rotation and prohibition until 1966

Christa Wolf, screenwriter of the film
Manfred Krug, whose subsequent film commentary was supposed to take the sharpness out of individual scenes

Fräulein Schmetterling is based on a screenplay by the married couple Christa and Gerhard Wolf, which director Kurt Barthel met in 1963 while working on The Divided Sky . Barthel wanted to make his directorial debut with Fräulein Schmetterling . Originally, the filmic implementation of the birth of a butterfly ("Helene Raupe") was planned, in which the artistic potential of a girl is discovered. In the process of working, the film finally became a portrayal of a girl's self-realization and the question of the extent to which this collides with the mechanisms of the state. The portrayal of the problems and thoughts of young people in the GDR was increasingly taken up by the film in the 1960s.

For the main character Christa and Gerhard Wolf had planned actress Jutta Hoffmann , who was working on the later prohibited film Karla at the time. So the role had to be re-cast and the Czech pantomime Melania Jakubisková was chosen for the role of Helene Raupe. Miss Butterfly was filmed from August 30th to December 8th, 1965. Among other things, a hidden camera was used, for example in the scenes at the fish market and in the Exquisit, where real customer dialogues were captured. The budget of the film, which, with its mixture of real, fantasy and documentary film scenes, was internally regarded as an “experimental film”, was more than 900,000 marks.

During the 11th plenary session of the Central Committee of the SED in mid-December 1965, a number of DEFA films were criticized and subsequently banned (→ basement film ) or even destroyed, including just don't think, I'm howling , I'm the rabbit , trace of the stones and year 45 . As a result, all DEFA films that had just been shot or were being made were subjected to a revision. Shortly after the 11th plenary session of the SED Central Committee, the studio made the first changes to the film that had not yet been shown. At the end of December, Manfred Krug made a comment written by Christa Wolf, which was intended to relativize and weaken certain scenes in the film, individual scenes with hidden cameras were removed and Ms. Ready was renamed Ms. Fenske.

The rough cut was shown to the cultural officials on February 4, 1966. As a result, work on the film was stopped. Proposals for changes to the film were supposed to be submitted in the following three months, but this never happened. In April 1966 the rough cut was shown again, as a result of which the film was finally banned. “The criticism is devastating: Miss Butterfly does not correspond to the GDR reality and does not shape the socialist image of man. All false and harmful ideological views criticized by the 11th plenum of the Central Committee of the SED are represented. The film is a gross falsification of life in the GDR ”. Director Kurt Barthel then shot his only feature film, Die Nacht im Grenzwald, and then switched to DEFA's documentary film studio.

Reconstruction and premiere

After the fall of the Wall , the forbidden cellar films were processed, some of which have now been reconstructed and had their premiere. Barthel sifted through the material on Fräulein Schmetterling , but decided against a reconstruction of the half-finished film, as the intentions of the film team could no longer be made comprehensible for the current audience. The reconstruction finally began in the summer of 2002 and was carried out by Ralf Schenk and Ingeborg Marszalek . It turned out that almost all recordings were available, but large parts of the soundtrack were missing. Since some of the actors in the film had already died, it was decided against a new full dubbing. Fräulein Schmetterling was also only reconstructed as material documentation, not as a feature film: “That meant finding and assembling the best possible, sound and visual settings. Scenes that existed from several perspectives were included in the documentation several times, and incomprehensible or missing dialogues were subtitled. […] The present version is therefore not a complete film, but a montage of the traditional shots based on the original script. ”The reconstruction of the film was completed in December 2004.

The reconstructed version had its premiere on June 16, 2005 in the Blow Up cinema in Berlin in the presence of director Kurt Barthel. In July 2005 it was also shown in the Babylon Mitte cinema in Berlin . In November 2005, Miss Butterfly was shown in a special screening at the 2nd Cinefest Hamburg; In 2007 the film was shown in the Kulturathaus Dresden. The performance of Miss Butterfly is limited to non-commercial events. "The performances are accompanied by introductions that deal with the special features of the finished version."

criticism

The Progress Film-Verleih called Fräulein Schmetterling "a poetic contemporary fairy tale about the attitude towards life of young people, a parable about the breakout of tightness and normality, about the dream of happiness."

"The present fragment, a combination of the fictional and the documentary, was reconstructed into an exciting, historically and aesthetically attractive work on the basis of the material handed down," said the lexicon of international films .

literature

  • F.-B. Habel : The great lexicon of DEFA feature films . Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf, Berlin 2000, ISBN 3-89602-349-7 , pp. 734-735 .
  • DEFA Foundation (Ed.): Information sheet on Miss Butterfly . Press release, June 2005 ( pdf ).

Radio

  • Thomas Gaevert : “The film is nihilistic!”. Miss Butterfly - Story of a Ban . Radio documentation Südwestrundfunk 2007, first broadcast: March 5, 2007, SWR2.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Ralf Schenk: On the story of the film Fräulein Schmetterling . In: DEFA Foundation (Hrsg.): Information sheet on Fräulein Schmetterling . June 2005, p. 8.
  2. ↑ Ralf Schenk: A conversation with the director Kurt Barthel . In: DEFA Foundation (Hrsg.): Information sheet on Fräulein Schmetterling . June 2005, p. 20.
  3. ↑ Ralf Schenk: On the story of the film Fräulein Schmetterling . In: DEFA Foundation (Hrsg.): Information sheet on Fräulein Schmetterling . June 2005, p. 15.
  4. ↑ Abandoned and unlisted films . In: Ralf Schenk (Red.), Filmmuseum Potsdam (Hrsg.): The second life of the film city Babelsberg. DEFA feature films 1946–1992 . Henschel, Berlin 1994, p. 541.
  5. ↑ Ralf Schenk: A conversation with the director Kurt Barthel . In: DEFA Foundation (Hrsg.): Information sheet on Fräulein Schmetterling . June 2005, p. 27.
  6. ↑ Ralf Schenk: Miss butterfly - problems of reconstruction . In: DEFA Foundation (Hrsg.): Information sheet on Fräulein Schmetterling . June 2005, p. 28.
  7. ↑ a b cf. 6th DEFA newsletter 2005
  8. ↑ See defa.de
  9. ↑ See 9th DEFA Newsletter 2005
  10. ↑ Cf. progress-film.de ( Memento from November 15, 2011 in the Internet Archive )
  11. ↑ Miss Butterfly. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed June 9, 2018 .Template: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used