Rotation (film)

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Movie
Original title rotation
Rotation Logo 001.svg
Country of production Germany
original language German
Publishing year 1949
length 84 minutes
Age rating FSK 12
Rod
Director Wolfgang Staudte
script Erwin Klein , Fritz Staudte , Wolfgang Staudte
production DEFA
( Herbert Uhlich )
music HW Wiemann
camera Bruno Mondi
cut Lilian Seng
occupation

Rotation is a film that looks back and tells the life of a German worker from 1920 to 1945.

action

Hans Behnke is a trained printer and, after difficult years of unemployment and starvation for his family, works for a large publishing house. Politically disinterested, he tried to keep his job even after the National Socialists came to power . Nevertheless, at the request of his brother-in-law, who later died in the concentration camp , he repairs a printing press that prints anti-fascist leaflets, of which he naively takes a few copies home. His son Hellmuth, a fanatical Hitler Youth , discovers them and denounces him.

Behnke is arrested by the Gestapo , tortured and taken to Moabit prison . There, together with the other prisoners, he escaped being shot by the SS during the last days of the war . The invading Russian troops save him and the others from execution. Returning to the half-destroyed apartment, he no longer finds his wife Lotte, she has died. Hellmuth is in captivity. One day he stands at the door, his father forgives him.

production

The film was shot in the Althoff studio Babelsberg from September 29, 1948 . After the completion of the shooting, there were protracted arguments between DEFA and director Wolfgang Staudte . A scene showing the invasion of the nations at the 1936 Olympics and then the swastika on the boy's jacket has been removed. When the father burned the uniform of the boy returning home from captivity, he originally said the words: “That was the last uniform you ever wore.” This scene was found to be counterproductive in connection with the establishment of the People's Police . At first the scene was allowed to stay, but the text was not spoken, and eventually the entire scene was removed. Staudte then left DEFA and worked in the West for over a year.

Rotation premiered on September 16, 1949 at the Babylon cinema in Berlin and at the opening of DEFA's first own film theater on Kastanienallee (also in Berlin). The start on GDR television was on April 30, 1954 in the DFF . It was first broadcast on ARD on May 13, 1958.

Remarks

Wolfgang Staudte reflects on a problem not only of the Third Reich : wanting to “live apolitically in a political space”. Without great pathos and superficial didactics , with a sensitive feeling for the everyday milieu and supported by committed actors, the film shows the dangers that the apolitical petty bourgeois can conjure up and to which he is exposed. An impressive, well-founded, objective picture of time.

Reviews

“Staudte's film is a realistic-critical analysis of the apolitical, petty-bourgeois opportunist and fellow traveler without whom National Socialism would not have had a chance in Germany. An impressive, committed time picture. "

- Lexicon of International Films

Awards

1954: Award at the Locarno International Film Festival

literature

  • F.-B. Habel : The great lexicon of DEFA feature films . Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf, Berlin 2000, ISBN 3-89602-349-7 , pp. 493-495 .
  • Knut Hickenthier: Rotation. In: Thomas Koebner (Ed.): Filmklassiker , 2, 1947–1964. Reclam, Stuttgart 1995, ISBN 3-15-009417-8 , pp. 73-76
  • Jens Thiele: Lessons from the past: "Rotation", 1949. Fischer Filmgeschichte, 3, 1945 - 1960. Ed. Werner Faulstich , Helmut Korte. Fischer TB, Frankfurt 1990, pp. 126-147

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ CineGraph - Lexicon for German-language film - Wolfgang Staudte
  2. ↑ F.-B. Habel: Cut up films. Censorship in the film . Gustav Kiepenheuer Verlag, Leipzig 2003, ISBN 3-37801069-X , p. 84 f ..