Girls in Uniform (1931)

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Movie
Original title Girl in uniform
Girls in Uniform 1931 Logo 001.svg
Country of production Germany
original language German
Publishing year 1931
length 98 minutes
Age rating FSK 12
Rod
Director Leontine Sagan
Artistic Director:
Carl Froelich
script Christa Winsloe and FD Andam , based on the play "Yesterday and Today" by Christa Winsloe
production Carl Froelich
music Hansom Milde-Meissner
camera Reimar Kuntze
Franz Weihmayr
cut Oswald Hafenrichter
occupation

Girls in Uniform is a German feature film from 1931 based on the play Ritter Nérestan (1930, alternative title Gestern und heute , 1931) by Christa Winsloe .

action

Fourteen-year-old Manuela von Meinhardis, daughter of an officer whose mother has already died, is sent by her aunt to a pen for higher daughters in Potsdam. Although the film is set at the beginning of the 1930s, the style of upbringing in this boarding school is still characterized by Prussian drill and the lack of human closeness. In the opinion of the superior, the soldiers 'daughters from good families should be raised there to be soldiers' mothers. If it is discovered that the students complain to their parents in letters about the small portions of food, they will be punished.

The effects of the strict upbringing on the sensitive Manuela and the other students are devastating. Manuela has difficulties adapting to the circumstances, although she quickly finds friends. Warmth and understanding in the teaching staff only come from the young teacher Fräulein von Bernburg, with whom Manuela falls deeply in love. When Miss von Bernburg gives her one of her own undershirts to replace her tattered clothes, Manuela is intoxicated. The disaster is looming when Manuela publicly explains how much she loves the teacher after a successful school theater performance by Don Karlos - happy about her stage success and drunk from secretly adulterated punch. The consequences are terrible, the superior sees Manuela as a moral danger to her students and has them locked in an isolation room. Matron also wants to throw Manuela out of the pen, but gives up when she finds out that the influential protector of the school, a princess, was once friends with Manuela's mother.

The matron forbids Fraulein von Bernburg, whose upbringing style is more friendly when dealing with the students, she blames all contact with Manuela. Despite the ban, Miss von Bernberg brings Manuela to her room and explains that she is no longer allowed to have contact with her. When the superior finds out that Fraulein von Bernberg has disregarded her prohibition, she dismisses the teacher. Fraulein von Bernberg explains that she cannot stay in such a boarding school anyway. Meanwhile Manuela tries desperate that she is now apparently also being let down by the beloved teacher, to fall from the top landing of the staircase to her death. Through the courageous intervention of all classmates, the accident can be prevented at the last moment. The superior, who is now openly wronged, walks slowly and thoughtfully down the stairs through her crowd of students.

Production history

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Girls in Uniform is the first film in German film history to be co-produced by the filmmakers involved. The Berlin company Deutsche Film-Gemeinschaft was founded especially for this film and then dissolved again.

It is disputed what part the “ artistic director ” Carl Froelich played in the creation of the film. It is undisputed, however, that Leontine Sagan understood much more about acting than about film - a medium with which she had no experience at all until then - while Froelich already looked back on 28 years of professional experience and was an old master in dealing with cinematic means of representation was well versed. In her two later films, too, Leontine Sagan has always worked with a co-director. Her personal artistic signature is particularly noticeable in the leadership of the actresses, who, in addition to the strict composition, determine the actual quality and thus the effect of this film. Instead of strong effects, the carefully and differently staged feelings of the young girls are in the foreground. The exclusively female cast in the film is unusual, and for the time just as unusual is the collaboration between two women in the key roles of director and screenplay.

The leading actresses Hertha Thiele and Dorothea Wieck stood together again in front of the camera in 1933 for Frank Wysbar's film Anna and Elisabeth . Although they were born in the same year (1908), in the film they play women of different ages. Even Erika Mann 's girls in uniform in a supporting role as the for the play Don Carlos to see and teacher responsible hear.

Part of the film was shot in the Great Military Orphanage in Potsdam, including the scene of Manuela's suicide attempt in the stairwell.

reception

Contemporary reception

When it was first submitted to the film inspection agency on October 1, 1931, the film (2682-m version) was banned from young people. This decision was confirmed on April 8, 1932 for a version shortened to 2,480 m.

The film was released internationally and was very successful, especially in Japan and the USA , but also in France , Great Britain and Mexico . By the beginning of 1934 he had earned 6 million Reichsmarks. The production cost was only RM 55,000. The 23-year-old Hertha Thiele briefly became a star through this film appearance. Due to her intense portrayal, Dorothea Wieck got a contract with the US production company Paramount and shot two films, which were not very successful.

In 1933, Irving Thalberg , head of production at MGM , was so impressed by the sensitive portrayal of the subject that he agreed to a correspondingly subtle display of female affection in the prestigious production of Queen Christine , Greta Garbo's first film in over a year and a half. Garbo kisses her maid directly on the mouth in the film and makes no secret of the nature of their relationship.

While girls in uniform were extensively celebrated in many countries because of their artistic quality and as a plea for humanity, the film critic Harry Alan Potamkin complained that there was no indication in the entire film that authoritarian behavior could be overcome by democratic behavior. The only hope of stopping the arbitrary discipline emanating from the prison superintendent is directed towards the princess and benefactress of the institute, who appears at the end of the film (to attend the school theater performance), but has not noticed the grievances. The principle of authority remains unshaken.

During the time of National Socialism , girls in uniform were banned and only allowed to perform abroad. The lesbian theme probably weighed less heavily in this ban than portraying Prussian ruthlessness and criticizing authority and discipline.

Rediscovery and today's reception

During the FSK exam on December 8, 1949, the film (2417-meter version) was approved without restrictions. After it was only unofficially distributed in the FRG, for example as a video, and shown in women's centers, the public revival did not follow until 1977, when some West German broadcasters decided to broadcast the film in their third programs.

The rediscovery of the film also happened internationally, for example at film festivals, the lesbian magazine Dyke named girls in uniform, for example, the first ever lesbian film production. In the lesbian scene, girls in uniform still have the status of a cult film .

Later adaptations and comparison

The remake of the same name from 1958 (director: Géza von Radványi ), starring Romy Schneider , Lilli Palmer and Therese Giehse among others , is toned down in contrast to the original, both politically in terms of criticism of Prussia as well as in the relationship of the two main characters. In this film, too, Schneider sees Manuela von Meinhardis in Elisabeth von Bernburg (Lilli Palmer) as a kind of ally amid harsh boarding school rules, with whom she falls in love and who also shows her strong affection. While Thiele and Wieck were of the same age, Palmer and Schneider have an age difference of 24 years, which makes the relationship less homoerotic, but more like a mother-daughter relationship.

In the original film from 1931, Manuela is kissed on the mouth by Miss von Bernburg, in the same scene from 1958 "only" on the forehead: After Manuela (Thiele) has wrapped her arms around the surprised Miss von Bernburg (Wieck), it comes to a longer eye contact, whereupon Miss. Bernburg kisses Manuela on the mouth. The girl sinks back into her bed happily while the teacher regains her composure and walks on. In the second film from 1958, this scene - including a kiss on the mouth - is completely omitted and only the first night described in the book is shown: the teacher’s behavior, which was even more active in 1931, turns into a friendly persuasion and a subsequent tender kiss on the forehead in 1958, who only trembles Manuela (Schneider), although Miss von Bernburg (Palmer) seems to be a little irritated and finds it difficult to break away from her student. The climax of their affection is a scene in a classroom in which the teacher shows her discouraged student how to really play a Romeo. In the school "Romeo and Juliet" should be performed, embodied a. a. from Manuela. Manuela goes out of her mind and kisses her teacher on the mouth, who first returns the kiss, but then quickly puts her student at a distance, as Manuela's classmates enter the classroom immediately afterwards. From this point on, Manuela is sure that the teacher loves her too. However, nothing should leak out. This fails, Manuela tries to commit suicide, is saved, stays at the school, but without Miss von Bernburg, who leaves the school as the best solution for everyone. In the original book by Christa Winsloe, Manuela kills herself out of desperation.

Further remakes were made in Mexico as Muchachas de uniforme (1951) directed by Alfredo B. Crevenna and in Japan as Onna no sono (1954) directed by Keisuke Kinoshita .

The film Lost and Delirious ( Léa Pool , Canada 2001) takes up a number of motifs from the film Girls in Uniform , but is based on its own text. The action also takes place in a girls' boarding school, but in Lost and Delirious two students fall in love with each other and not one student with their teacher, as is the case with girls in uniform .

A more recent example of a film that uses the motif of the student falling in love with her teacher is Loving Annabelle (Director: Katherine Brooks , Production: USA, 2006). According to the director and screenwriter, the idea behind Loving Annabelle is remotely based on girls in uniform .

Awards

  • Venice Film Festival, audience award for the technically best film (1932)
  • Kinema Junpo Award (Tokyo) for Best Foreign Language Film (1934)

References and comments

  1. ^ Certificate of release for girls in uniform . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry , March 2008 (PDF; test number: 60 0VD V / DVD / UMD).
  2. ↑ So the dates in: Klaus Johann: Limit and Halt: The individual in the "House of Rules". To German-language boarding school literature. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter 2003. (= contributions to recent literary history. 201.) P. 492.
  3. ↑ Cf. on this Bandmann and Hembus: Klassiker des Deutschen Tonfilms , page 46/47. There it says: "... the Leontine Sagan film is a dedicated piece of time (" Zeit: Heute "says the program booklet from 1931), an examination of discipline, submission, patriotism and the frustrations and destructive forces that grow from them, produced and brought to the cinema at the time of the new, unholy alliance of aristocratic-conservative Prussia with Nazism, which was striving for power, an alliance whose figurehead is Franz von Papen. " In addition, one of the girls has a photo in his locker of the film actor Hans Albers , who only achieved his breakthrough as a film star with The Night Belongs to Us in 1929 .
  4. ↑ Stefan Volk: Lesbian cult film "Girls in Uniform": When the schoolgirl kissed her teacher . In: Spiegel Online . August 28, 2018 ( spiegel.de [accessed January 16, 2019]).
  5. ↑ Stefan Volk: Lesbian cult film "Girls in Uniform": When the schoolgirl kissed her teacher . In: Spiegel Online . August 28, 2018 ( spiegel.de [accessed January 16, 2019]).
  6. ↑ See Sabine Puhlfürst: Christa Winsloes Mädchen in Uniform. Play - film adaptation - novel version . In: Invertito. Yearbook for the History of Homosexualities. Ed. Association of Homosexuality and History e. V., 2nd year 2000, The Weimar Republic 1919-1933.

literature

  • Christa Winsloe : Yesterday and Today ( Knight Nérestan ). Play in 3 acts and 12 pictures. [Not for sale stage manuscript.] G. Marton and A. Marton, Vienna et al. 1930.
  • Christa Winsloe: The girl Manuela. The novel about girls in uniform. EP Tal & Co. Verlag, Leipzig 1933.
  • Joe Hembus , Christa Bandmann: Classics of the German sound film 1930-1960 (= Ein Goldmann-Taschenbuch. Goldmann Magnum. Citadel-Filmbücher 10207). Goldmann, Munich 1980, ISBN 3-442-10207-3 , pp. 46-47.
  • Siegfried Kracauer : From Caligari to Hitler. A psychological history of German film (= Suhrkamp-Taschenbuch Wissenschaft, Volume 479). Translated by Ruth Baumgarten and Karsten Witte . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1984, ISBN 3-518-28079-1 , pp. 237-242, 515-518 u. 523f.
  • Friedrich Koch : School in the cinema. Authority and education. From the “Blue Angel” to the “Feuerzangenbowle”. Beltz, Weinheim et al. 1987, ISBN 3-407-34009-5 .
  • Fred Gehler girls in uniform . In Günther Dahlke, Günther Karl (Hrsg.): German feature films from the beginnings to 1933. A film guide. Henschel Verlag, 2nd edition, Berlin 1993, pp. 278 ff. ISBN 3-89487-009-5
  • Klaus Johann: Limit and stop. The individual in the “House of Rules”. On German-language boarding school literature (= contributions to recent literary history, volume 201). Universitätsverlag Winter, Heidelberg 2003, ISBN 3-8253-1599-1 , pp. 492-495 (dissertation Uni Münster 2002, 727 pages).
  • Michael Eckardt: Leontine Sagan's film debut "Girls in Uniform" in the verdict of the South African press ; Acta Germanica 45 (2017), 90-104, ISSN 0065-1273.

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