Witches (1954)

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Movie
Original title Witches
Country of production GDR
original language German
Publishing year 1954
length 100 minutes
Rod
Director Helmut Spieß
script Kurt Barthel
production DEFA
music Gerd Natschinski
camera Günter Eisinger
cut Friedel Welsandt
occupation

Hexen is a German film comedy by DEFA based on a screenplay by Kurt Barthel and directed by Helmut Spieß from 1954 .

action

In 1949, superstition prevails in Hunsdorf in Thuringia . New teacher Marianne Paul complains to the police station in the next town that adults and children alike are afraid of black cats and evil witches. In response to their complaint, the young sergeant-major Werner Kühlemann is transferred to Hunsdorf to ensure order. Werner does not know that pigs have been disappearing in the village for some time and that August Bast, who was stolen last, did not have the sow killed on the mayor's advice, as he usually did, but sent a complaint to the police about pig loss. The postman and brother of the mayor, Pfundstüten-Enderlein, has the habit of opening all letters from Hunsdorf via steam and only forwarding those that he likes. You can't figure him out because nobody enters his house. His mother-in-law lives with him and has become strange in old age. In the village, however, she is as well known as feared as a witch's guest.

Mayor Seidel-Großkopf has no qualms about using the witches' cast for his own purposes, to feed superstitions in the village. The last pig, for example, did not really disappear because August and Milda Bast's house was haunted by the evil eye, as was believed. Seidel-Großkopf, Schnapsbrenner Hinke-Seidel and others stole the pig in order to use it for their own purposes. However, since it was a spontaneous action by Hinke-Seidel, the pig cannot be transported away as usual. It is temporarily stored in Seidel-Großkopf's prison cell and immobilized with alcohol.

Werner Kühlemann is received with little enthusiasm. Milda Bast in particular is upset because Werner is billeted in her house. She recently vacated a chamber because August Bast withdrew to his street guards' house outside the village under protest. He can no longer bear the superstitions of his wife and the women of the village, who even do not shy away from quackery on his seriously ill granddaughter Barbara. She would have to be treated medically and take heart drops, among other things, but Milda prefers to rely on the strange treatment methods of Kurpfuscher Hilsenthaler Mann. Werner can hardly achieve anything either. He tries to convince August's grandson Peter that there are no witches, but constantly has to save a little black cat from him and the villagers. The mayor is also trying hard not to let any information from Hunsdorf leak out. When Werner at least wants to have Barbara admitted to the hospital, Seidel-Großkopf pretends that the phone is disturbed. Werner himself rides his bike to the hospital, but he lacks the medical report to get Barbara's admission.

In the meantime, various attempts to transport August's sow out of the village have failed. When Barbara is visited again by the Hilsenthal man, Werner arrests him for quacking and has him locked up. In the cell, too, the sow wakes up from her last drunkenness. Peter secretly looks into the cell and believes that the Hilsenthal man has turned into a pig. He tells Werner about it. Seidel-Großkopf secretly lets the sow run and the Hilsenthal man can also flee. Werner finds the sow with the help of the children, while Marianne Paul meets the quack in August's house and has him arrested a little later. At a council meeting, Seidel-Großkopf is about to declare August, who is becoming too stubborn, to be crazy and to have him deposed as a road warden when Werner is driving the pig into the meeting room. Seidel-Großkopf and his cronies flee, but are arrested by Werner shortly afterwards. In the house of the mayor and the postal worker you can find sausages, pork skins, black liquor and letters that have not been sent from the last 30 years. The case is solved. Milda and Peter and the rest of the villagers are largely cured of their superstitions and Barbara is now getting better and better.

production

The film was made in the Babelsberg studio , the exterior shots come from Luisenthal and the Black Forest . The buildings were created by Karl Schneider and Alfred Schulz, and Richard Brandt was in charge of production . Dorit Gründel created the costumes .

Hexen was the directorial debut of Helmut Spieß, who stepped in as director in 1953 for the originally planned Wolfgang Schleif . Schleif lived in West Berlin , but received his salary in East German marks . In turn, only he was allowed to shop in the GDR. Even during his long absence from filming, his wife was forbidden to purchase goods in the GDR because the authorities refused to give her a purchase certificate. Schleif felt compelled to resign directing the film Witches , which would have forced him to film, among other places, in the Thuringian Forest and thus far away from his family. Instead, he asked to direct a film that could be shot in Berlin. When he could no longer get a job from DEFA, he went permanently to the Federal Republic. DEFA producer Hans Rodenberg suspected in a letter to the State Committee explaining the facts that Schleif wanted to avoid the film Witches , which was described as contemporary , “in order not to obstruct work opportunities in the West”. Under Spiess' direction, the film was again partially rewritten and the previously dominant role of the SED was completely removed.

In the film, the actors speak Thuringian Saxon, which, according to the critics, “meets the highest standards in this respect”. Witches had its premiere on September 3, 1954 in the Babylon cinema in Berlin and was shown in GDR cinemas on the same day. On October 8, 1954, the film ran for the first time on DFF 1 on GDR television.

criticism

The contemporary critics called the film a hit, so the village characters are "brilliantly real in their principled lack of character [...], real also in their comedic intensification."

For the film-dienst , Hexen was a "stagically bumpy, but nevertheless entertaining and situational comedy film that comes up with an idiosyncratic dialect."

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Alfred Bauer: German feature film Almanach. Volume 2: 1946-1955 , p. 427
  2. ↑ Quoted from Ralf Schenk: In the middle of the Cold War 1950 to 1960 . In: Ralf Schenk (Red.), Filmmuseum Potsdam (Hrsg.): The second life of the film city Babelsberg. DEFA feature films 1946–1992 . Henschel, Berlin 1994, pp. 80-81.
  3. ↑ Ralf Schenk: In the middle of the Cold War 1950 to 1960 . In: Ralf Schenk (Red.), Filmmuseum Potsdam (Hrsg.): The second life of the film city Babelsberg. DEFA feature films 1946–1992 . Henschel, Berlin 1994, p. 86.
  4. ^ A b Carl Andrießen: "Witches" - a real DEFA film comedy . In: Weltbühne , No. 39, 1954, pp. 1238–1239.
  5. ↑ Witches. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed March 2, 2017 .Template: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used