Rapunzel or The Magic of Tears

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Movie
Original title Rapunzel or The Magic of Tears
Country of production GDR
original language German
Publishing year 1988
length 84 minutes
Rod
Director Ursula Schmenger
script Siegfried Hartmann
as Wolfgang Lindner
music Jürgen Wilbrandt
camera Siegfried Mogel
cut Renate Bade
occupation

Rapunzel or The Magic of Tears is a DEFA fairy tale film directed by Ursula Schmenger from 1988. The film was first broadcast on December 26, 1988 on DFF 1 . After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the film was shown on TV on December 25, 1990 on ARD .

action

Rapunzel lives in a lonely tower , guarded by a sorceress who brought her to her after she was born and who never wants to leave. It is only through the long blond hair that it is possible to climb the tower and visit Rapunzel. Although the thorns keep growing back, one day a prince gains entry after hearing their lovely song. The love of the two is awakened and the prince wants to free Rapunzel from her grip by the sorceress.

The king, the prince's father, follows his son's dreaminess with suspicion and has him stalked on his lonely rides through the wild forest, as he has long been planning his marriage to the rich princess of the neighboring kingdom. But before the prince's secret of love becomes clear to the king, the jealous sorceress anticipates the matter. In anger she punishes Rapunzel with silence, cuts her hair and throws the climbing prince down from the high tower.

The prince loses his sight when he falls, the tower finally becomes a prison for Rapunzel, as the king has the window walled up so that the prince forgets her. With the help of her wondrous spindle, however, Rapunzel is able to free herself. According to the will of the hard-hearted king, the long-decided wedding is being prepared in the castle. Fearing the ugliness of the princess, the bride's mother forces a beautiful maid to go to church with the prince instead of her daughter.

The maid is Rapunzel. At this point in the film, the classic fairy tale motif of the true and the false bride is inserted into the Grimm's Rapunzel fairy tale and the two tower fairy tales Rapunzel and Jungfrau Maleen are connected: On the way to the wedding, Rapunzel, like Jungfrau Maleen, speaks to the nettle bush, the Pontoon and the church door. The blind prince cannot see that it is not the wicked ugly bride at his side, but his beloved Rapunzel. But he hears the lovely voice and also that it speaks to objects. When he asks the ugly princess for her words on the way, the pitfall of the wicked as well as the ugly princess turns out to be her own undoing.

It becomes apparent that the prince was married to someone else. Rapunzel appears, wets the prince's eyes with tears, he can see again and the newlyweds can hurry towards a happy life. The sorceress, who - unlike in the fairy tale - sees her selfishness in the end in this interpretation, gives both of them her blessing and even shows them the way to Rapunzel's biological parents. Eventually she turns into a rose bush.

material

The film was created as an artistic and meaningful structure from the two fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm Rapunzel and Jungfrau Maleen . Both fairy tales revolve around the motif of the tower. The problems, which are often incomprehensible in fairy tales, arise from the motif of the true and the false bride and leave an irritating forgetfulness of the prince in the dark, are here explained very well by the prince's eye-blindness. In addition, the film works with beautiful images of nature of the forest and emotionally comprehensible contexts of action. The image settings of the forest and Rapunzel tower are inspired by images by Caspar David Friedrich . Particularly noteworthy is the acting performance of Sylvia Wolff as Rapunzel.

Locations

The rock gorge was shot on the Brocken , the scenes at the court at Reinhardsbrunn Castle in Thuringia. The wedding scene took place in and around the church in Mildenau. The organ that can be seen here is a work by the Rochlitz company Reinhard Schmeisser from 1951.

Reviews

The lexicon of international film found the film to be a "television production that supplements the Grimm fairy tale with motifs from" Jungfer Malen ", resulting in a lavishly furnished story rich in external events based on conventional patterns, which lacks poetry. " For Cinema magazine, too , the end result was "a little stiff."

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. superillu.de ( Memento of the original from September 24, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.superillu.de
  2. Rapunzel or The Magic of Tears. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed March 2, 2017 .Template: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used 
  3. cinema.de