No Man's Land (1931)

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Movie
Original title no mans land
Country of production Germany
original language German
Publishing year 1931
length 93 minutes
Rod
Director Victor Trivas
script Victor Trivas
production Anton Resch for the Resco film production
music Hanns Eisler
Kurt Schröder (musical direction)
camera Alexander von Lagorio
Georg Stilianudes
cut Walther Stern
Leberecht von Guaita
occupation

No Man's Land is a 1931 anti-war film directed by Victor Trivas .

action

The film, designed as an allegory of the futility of war, tells the fate of five men from five different countries. The story is introduced with scenes from the private and professional life of the characters involved: a German carpenter, a British officer, a French factory worker, a black variety dancer and a Jewish tailor. They are all of different origins and as private people have little in common.

During the First World War , all five scattered men found themselves in a shelter in the no man's land between the fronts: while the war was raging around them and grenades were falling to their left and right, the five men, whose fate of enemies allies in the struggle for the naked, approached Survival has gradually made one another. One of them, the Jewish tailor, lost the language after a shock caused by the war. The African soldier serves as an interpreter for the men.

Soon people will agree on the absurdity of war, regardless of national chauvinisms , religions and skin colors. Their shelter, the trenches, which they built as the last refuge against fire from friends and foes, becomes a tiny oasis of peace that they only leave when they hear the news of the armistice. Symbolic for the removal of all that separates the peoples is a wire entanglement between the combatants, which they finally remove - a gesture for the new beginning of the hostile peoples.

production

The film is considered to be one of the most important German anti-war films. The work was produced by a small German film company in France (Bal Musette) and in London (the big street scenes). Leonhard Frank and Trivas provided the idea for no man's land .

Director Trivas defined his intention as follows: “In No Man's Land, it was not about exposing the horrors of war, but rather its cruel futility. When enemies, escaped from the atmosphere of mass madness, meet on a piece of earth between the fronts, then they will also find the common language of simple human feelings. That would be the most revealing denunciation of the war. "

No man's land was premiered on December 10, 1931 in Berlin's Terra-Lichtspiele.

Due to its strong pacifist tendency, the film was massively attacked by the German national and National Socialist sides from the beginning. Immediately after Adolf Hitler came to power on April 22, 1933, the film was banned by the Nazi film inspection agency. The National Socialists tried to get hold of all copies in the Reich in order to destroy them afterwards.

19 days before the ban in Germany, on April 3, 1933, the film was shown for the first time in the USA under the title Hell on Earth .

The actors Ernst Busch and Louis Douglas also provide the singing numbers, including Der heimliche Aufmarsch .

Reviews

Both contemporary and post-war criticism devoted the greatest attention to this unusual film.

Felix Scherret wrote in the evening edition of Vorwärts : “A war film that sees the topic from a new perspective. The decisive factor here is not the plot, but the transfer of the idea into the pictorial, a process that the director Trivas completely succeeded in. [...] The technique of fast fading and montage, which the silent Russian film mastered, has been transferred here to the sound film. Trivas puts the main emphasis on the picture. Word, noise and music serve only as background and interpretation. The film is primarily film and unphotographed theater. However, Trivas has not yet achieved the ultimate artistic cohesion, since at the end he becomes broadly naturalistic and slows down in pace. "

Ludwig Marcuse referred in the Vossische Zeitung to the similarity of the basic constellation to GW Pabst's film Comradeship : “This film could also be called Comradeship . Like the mine film Kameradschaft , this film is also a glorification of the natural solidarity of artificially separated groups of people. And this film, too, shows less the causes of the separation than the distant image of the union that is so close in the film. […] But the opportunity that was given here to depict the separations and convincingly undo them - this opportunity was not satisfied in a single small episode. But it is not enough to show the ideal of unity; one must first let the mighty forces of the hatred planted in the individual march in order to defeat them. "

Heinz Lüdecke judged in the communist newspaper Die Rote Fahne from the anti-capitalist and class struggle perspective: “You have to apply a different standard to this latest anti-war film than to the usual“ pacifist ”films. The authors of No Man's Land have undoubtedly gone one step further, which at times brings them so close to the revolutionary solution to the war question that we are justified in asking them to do “a good job”. But that has not been achieved: one learns nothing about the causes of the imperialist war, and one misses any reference to current events, to the arms race leading to a new war, to the disarmament lie. Perhaps out of consideration for censorship or for other tactical considerations, the film has become more obscure than the authors themselves would have liked. However, we can only stick to the finished film and the effect it has. According to this, a very inadequate, because only emotional rejection of the war can be determined, which - in contrast to many other war films - allows both a pacifist and a revolutionary interpretation. "

Jerzy Toeplitz writes in his story of the film: “ No man's land is a pacifist work, but it differs from the series of war films that Pabst and der Pabst and the West Front 1918 saw both in the way it understands the subject and in the recording technology Editing of Remarque's novel was initiated. ”Trivas“ does not show a panorama, but a synthesis of the war, not a concrete but an abstract war. The characters in the film are not individuals, but symbols, so the individual tragedies are only slightly sketched and serve as the background for the drama. "

In Reclam's film guide it is said: “The wire entanglement here becomes a symbol of the warlike, of the divisive; the sparse act is really only of evidence. It is intended to show how quickly human understanding arises when one understands mutual expectations and needs. However, the film not only wants to appeal to the feeling, but also to the insight. "

Bucher's Encyclopedia of Film makes reference to the two levels of film: “When the two parts are compared, the film sometimes appears a little too intrusive and unambiguous; On the other hand, however, Trivas has again set accents in the figure of the "Unknown Soldier", who lost his language through a shock, which strongly emphasize the credibility of the work and allow the message of the film to have an impact even today. "

In Kay Weniger 's 'In life, more is taken from you than is given', the biography of Trivas reads: “His second production, the uncompromising anti-war film“ No Man's Land ”, whose strictly pacifist message spreads the public in two camps , made him famous Admirers and hateful despisers split. "

The Lexicon of International Films writes: "As a contemporary document and film historical material of lasting interest."

literature

  • Wolfgang Gersch No man's land . In Günther Dahlke, Günther Karl (Hrsg.): German feature films from the beginnings to 1933. A film guide. Henschel Verlag, 2nd edition, Berlin 1993, p. 286 f. ISBN 3-89487-009-5

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Quoted from Jerzy Toeplitz: Geschichte des Films, Volume 2, 1928–1933, p. 219, Ostberlin 1976
  2. ↑ Kay Less : The film's great personal dictionary . The actors, directors, cameramen, producers, composers, screenwriters, film architects, outfitters, costume designers, editors, sound engineers, make-up artists and special effects designers of the 20th century. Volume 8: T - Z. David Tomlinson - Theo Zwierski. Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf, Berlin 2001, ISBN 3-89602-340-3 , p. 56.
  3. ↑ Forward December 10, 1931
  4. ^ Vossische Zeitung (morning edition) of December 11, 1931
  5. ↑ Die Rote Fahne of December 20, 1931, p. 15
  6. ↑ History of the Film, Volume 2, p. 219
  7. ↑ like 6
  8. ↑ Reclams Filmführer, by Dieter Krusche, collaboration: Jürgen Labenski. P. 434. Stuttgart 1973.
  9. ↑ Bucher's Encyclopedia of Films, Verlag CJ Bucher, Lucerne and Frankfurt / M. 1977, p. 552.
  10. ↑ Kay Less : "In life, more is taken from you than given ...". Lexicon of filmmakers who emigrated from Germany and Austria between 1933 and 1945. A general overview. ACABUS Verlag, Hamburg 2011, ISBN 978-3-86282-049-8 , p. 510.
  11. ↑ Klaus Brüne (Red.): Lexikon des Internationale Films, Volume 6, S. 2783. Reinbek near Hamburg 1987