Käthe Kollwitz - Pictures of a Life
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| Original title | Käthe Kollwitz - Pictures of a Life |
| Country of production | GDR |
| original language | German |
| Publishing year | 1987 |
| length | 96 minutes |
| Rod | |
| Director | Ralf Kirsten |
| script | Ralf Kirsten |
| production | DEFA , KAG "Babelsberg" |
| music | Peter Gotthardt |
| camera | Otto Hanisch |
| cut | Evelyn Carow |
| occupation | |
| |
Käthe Kollwitz - Pictures of a Life is a DEFA film directed by Ralf Kirsten in 1987 .
action
Reproducing an action is a bit complicated here because there is no chronological sequence. Even the director considers the term collage, which is alien to film, or the literary term of the essay to be appropriate. No dates are mentioned either. The film begins in the make-up artist's room at DEFA. The actress Jutta Wachowiak is externally prepared for the role of Käthe Kollwitz at the dressing table, while she tries to get closer to the task at hand. When the transformation seems satisfactory, the film character, who at that moment is Jutta Wachowiak and Käthe Kollwitz, says: “This is how it has to work”.
From the first year of the First World War, we can experience the New Year's Eve celebration with the family, until her death, shortly before the end of the last. It shows a domestic milieu in Weißenburger Straße, still very 19th century, with lots of plush and home-style, old-fashioned, idyllic and with a loyal maid Lina. Here she lives with her husband Karl, who runs a practice as a poor doctor. Kollwitz was almost 50 when her younger son Peter volunteered for the front and went to Flanders with maternal permission; two weeks later he falls. This is where the roots of Kollwitz's later unconditional pathos of peace lie. Her figures of the father and mother, who are now in a military cemetery in Flanders and on which she worked for seventeen years, are among the most sublime memorials for the preservation of peace, of an everlasting humanity. The film shows actress Jutta Wachowiak's visit to the cemetery, while an old Belgian who was there when the figures was set up explains the story of the flooding of the flat land for tactical reasons during the war. As a result of this measure, many German soldiers perished in the area below sea level.
After the war, Käthe Kollwitz was appointed professor and thus she became the first woman to be a member of the Prussian Academy of the Arts. She was also the first woman to be accepted into the Prussian order Pour le Mérite for science and the arts. Her studio was always open to friends. Several delegates from the Communist Youth International met here. After the Nazis came to power, she was soon on the index and was forced “voluntarily” to leave the academy. She was never a member of a party, but a member of the International Workers Aid and also signed the urgent appeal to build a unified workers front against National Socialism. Due to her political activities, of course, she called the Gestapo on the scene and her pictures from the academy exhibition were removed. She receives a poison from her husband, since you cannot fall into the hands of "them" alive.
Time and again is brought in by looking out of the window at the corner bar opposite: Poor people, the queue of women waiting in front of a soup kitchen in the famine years of the First World War, then roaring and noisy SA people, and finally the misery of deported Jews in darkened ones night street. Very little is hinted at about Käthe and Karl's marital problems, which probably existed. But there is an original scene that links Kollwitz's fame with the intimate relationship between her and her husband: They let themselves be locked in the museum at night, where their pictures now have a privileged place, an aged couple, very familiar with each other, Sitting on the steps of a pompous flight of steps, her head on his knees, resting and thinking about many years together: the structure of the film is determined by the fact that Kollwitz remembers what happened before, in essential moments.
Karl Kollwitz dies in 1940 and Käthe moves away from Berlin. Her house is destroyed by air raids, as Lina announced in a letter. After a stopover in Nordhausen, she spends her last few weeks completely alone in a house in Moritzburg . She died here shortly before the end of the Second World War.
production
Käthe Kollwitz - Pictures of a Life was shot on ORWO- Color by the artistic working group “Babelsberg” and had its premiere on April 23, 1987 in the Berlin Kino International . The first broadcast on the 2nd program of GDR television took place on August 28, 1988 and on ARD on September 12, 1988.
criticism
Detlef Friedrich found in the Berliner Zeitung that the scenario makes it very difficult for the leading actress to create a moving film character that also touches the audience. All in all, it remains quite cool, although a lot is tried in an admirably clever and sensitive manner. It was probably not the scriptwriter's and director's plan, including the private conflicts and hardships of Kollwitz, to let the whole individuality affect the viewer. I think that's a wrong decision. Horst Knietzsch said in New Germany : Not in every case a maximum has been achieved, especially in the dramatic profiling of the characters. But in many scenes I was deeply moved by the encounters with Kollwitz, her family, her friends and enemies, also through the music of Peter Gotthardt. Helmut Ullrich states in the daily newspaper Neue Zeit that there is a haunting embodiment of Kollwitz by Jutta Wachowiak and her husband by Fred Düren, in great portrait resemblance and in the feeling and understanding of the simple and modest, the calm, deliberate and firm nature that characterized both , in an unpathetic representation.
literature
- F.-B. Habel : The great lexicon of DEFA feature films . Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf, Berlin 2000, ISBN 3-89602-349-7 , pp. 302-303 .
Web links
- Käthe Kollwitz - Images of a life in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Käthe Kollwitz - Pictures of a Life at filmportal.de
- Käthe Kollwitz - Pictures of a Life at the DEFA Foundation