Beacon (1954)

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Movie
Original title beacon
Country of production GDR
Sweden
original language German
Publishing year 1954
length 95 minutes
Rod
Director Wolfgang Staudte
script Wolfgang Staudte
Werner Jörg Lüddecke
Marieluise Steinhauer (Dramaturgy)
production DEFA , Potsdam-Babelsberg
Pandora-Film, Stockholm
music Herbert Windt
camera Robert Baberske
cut Ruth Moegelin
occupation

Leuchtfeuer is a German-Swedish feature film by Wolfgang Staudte from 1954.

action

On an inhospitable island in the Atlantic Ocean, the inhabitants are dependent on outside help. A ship regularly comes to the island to provide the residents with food and everyday goods. When winter approaches and the storms come, the ship suddenly stops. People are starting to starve, and especially mothers with their newborns suffer from the cold and food shortages. The lighthouse keeper can only prevail with difficulty against a resident of the island who wants to slaughter the last remaining cow for the meat. She should continue to give milk to the toddlers. An attempt by the fishermen to catch at least some fish in the raging sea fails. Flotsam can hardly be found in winter either. Food that washes ashore is spoiled. The lighthouse keeper, on the other hand, insists on keeping the tower's fire burning, thus turning the islanders against him: If the beacon didn't burn, one of the ships passing the island might crash on the cliffs. So food would wash up.

When the need becomes too great, two islanders embark on an adventurous journey to the mainland. They have the islanders' belongings with them, which they want to turn into money and then back into food. However, selling it proves to be difficult. Shortly before Christmas they barely made enough to cover their travel expenses. They are stored next to a large food freighter that needs to be repaired and therefore cannot leak. When the crew of the freighter heard of the fate of the islanders, the sailors made an agreement with their boss: the crew worked 24 hours a day to get the freighter afloat. In return, the islanders' small cutter is fully loaded with food. The boss agrees and a short time later the loaded cutter can cast off for the island.

On the island, the radical residents have now gained the upper hand. After the last cow has died of weakness, the residents accuse the lighthouse keeper of cowardice, who extinguishes the beacon in the face of the residents' aggressive demeanor, which makes him increasingly fear for his life. A little later a large passenger steamer runs into the cliffs. People, including many children, can be saved. The residents get scruples and now want to protect the lighthouse keeper. He should simply claim that the tower light was broken. Nobody will betray him. The lighthouse keeper, however, pleads guilty to having switched off the lights because he was after food washed up. He will be arrested. In the dark, the islanders' cutter also crashes on the cliffs - the crew is believed to be killed. On the uninhabited side of the island, the food washes up on the beach, where nobody notices it.

production

In 1949, Wolfgang Staudte had completed the script for Leuchtfeuer together with Werner Jörg Lüddecke . The plan was to produce the film for all of Germany. In addition to the DEFA of the GDR, the West German real film from Hamburg should also be involved in Leuchtfeuer . However, the producer of Real-Film Erich Mehl received no permission for the cooperation from the Federal Ministry of Economics “for fundamental considerations”. Mehl then brokered collaboration with the small Swedish production company Pandora-Film.

The film was shot from March to May 1954. The main scenes of the film could be shot in the Swedish Pater-Noster archipelago, including on Marstrand . The other exterior shots were made on Rügen . The film was produced in the Babelsberg studio .

Leuchtfeuer premiered on December 3, 1954 in the Babylon cinema in Berlin and in the Defa-Filmtheater Kastanienallee and was shown in GDR cinemas the following day. In 1955, Leuchtfeuer was shown in Bulgarian cinemas as part of the “Week of German Films”. The film was not shown in Sweden. Leuchtfeuer was the last DEFA film that Staudte completed as a director.

criticism

The GDR's contemporary criticism praised the film: “In this Staudte film, all, but really all, essential thoughts of the film theme are dissolved in the plot and become completely evident from the plot. [...] every shape of the film, every motif serves to clarify a difficult, intellectual problem without any hint of construction. Need and self-defense, inadequacy or crime, right or wrong. "

The West German critics also received the film positively: The film was praised as "free of any politics"; He shows "in contrast to the majority of the other Defa production a remarkable technical and artistic level," said Der Kurier . The Frankfurter Film-Woche found: "If the Defa continues on this path, then [...] 'beacon' should be the first flashing light through the lowered film curtain."

For film-dienst , Leuchtfeuer was “an expressive film of above-average artistic quality”, for Ralf Schenk, on the other hand, it was a “strange, clumsy film floating in a vacuum”.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Quoted from: A blinking light through the curtain . In: Der Spiegel , No. 3, 1955, p. 36.
  2. ↑ Wolfgang Staudte - actor, director . In: CineGraph - Lexicon for German-Language Film , Lg. 20, F 12 f.
  3. ↑ Dr. Alfred Bauer: German feature film Almanach. Volume 2: 1946-1955 , p. 441
  4. ↑ Carl Andrießen: Staudte's "Beacon" . In: Weltbühne , No. 49, 1954, pp. 1544ff.
  5. ↑ a b quote after: A flashing light through the curtain . In: Der Spiegel , No. 3, 1955, p. 37.
  6. ↑ Beacon. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed March 2, 2017 .Template: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used 
  7. ↑ 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. 101.