Silent Screams (1982)

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Movie
Original title Silent screams
Country of production Germany
original language German
Publishing year 1982
length 26 minutes
Age rating FSK 6
Rod
Director Hartmut Kaminski ,
Elke Jonigkeit
script Hartmut Kaminski
production Hartmut Kaminski
music Henning Christiansen
camera Serge Roman ,
Hartmut Kaminski
Dirk-Olaf Schmidt
cut Hartmut Kaminski,
Elke Jonigkeit
occupation

Silent Screams is a film about the inscriptions on the walls of the Warsaw Gestapo cellar, in which the will of the Polish underground movements was to be broken through interrogation and torture.

action

The film is part of a media package (film, exhibition, book) and brings the wall inscriptions of the Warsaw Gestapo cellar in Aleja Szucha 25 to the public. This seems particularly important in a media landscape that, characterized by overstimulation, likes to suppress an intensive preoccupation with the social problem of 'Hitler fascism'.

The "Stumme Schreie" media package helps to visualize fascism in a visual, analytical and emotional way in order to counteract any recurring tendencies.

Every medium - film / exhibition / book - has its specific possibilities to address the recipient:

  1. The film “Stumme Schreie” focuses exclusively on the wall inscriptions, the existential statements of which, combined with the music, address the viewer emotionally.
  2. The exhibition “Silent Screams” consists of 50 large photos of the wall inscriptions, brief information and texts about the Gestapo cellar (reports from survivors, smuggled letters, etc.). The visitor can look closely at the photo boards and let their visual presence affect them, and be moved by the content of the translated wall inscriptions.
  3. The book (catalog) “Nobody thinks of me and knows about me” is a photo book that shows the recordings on which the film is based. Detailed reports from former prisoners put the wall inscriptions in a concrete historical context and document various forms of resistance. Other articles - explanations of symbols, background information - condense the cultural reference.

content

During the occupation of Poland (1939–1944), political prisoners from the “Pawiak” prison, as well as those who were arbitrarily arrested off-road, came to the Gestapo cellar in Aleja Szucha (Warsaw). Many who survived the torture made their way to one of the concentration and extermination camps or to immediate execution in the courtyard of the Gestapo building.

The inscriptions conceal the prisoners' faint hopes not to be completely forgotten, testify to the unbroken will to resist and the fear of losing their own identity. You speak of loneliness, sadness, despair ... but also of the power of faith.

The film tries to comply with the request of a prisoner who wrote: "Please make this event known to the public!" And commemorates the nameless victims of the Nazi regime - and all who suffer because of their convictions in one of the many prisons in the world.

History and career

While searching for traces of a film about Poland, Hartmut Kaminski and Elke Jonigkeit visited the former Gestapo remand prison in Warsaw in 1980 at Aleja Szucha 25. No German had dared to go there before - but the material was almost unknown in Poland. What the young filmmakers saw in the basement shook them deeply and they began to study the graffiti - better the scratches on the walls - carefully. You photograph the walls and the individual cells. A museum attendant remembers a photo documentation that was made shortly after the war and slumbered unpublished in a drawer. The two filmmakers are allowed to take these large-format negatives with them to Germany. Together with an interpreter, they analyze the 1200 photos.

Quotation from the book “Nobody thinks of me and knows about me”, page 10: “When working through the photo documentation, we notice that mainly names have been recorded, probably with the intention of saving the addresses, dates and names of the inmates. ... Some of the inscriptions we discovered ourselves are missing from the documentation, especially those with a religious content.

We want to fulfill a prisoner's wish "Please make this event known to the public!" And plan to close a film, an exhibition and a book. "

When the filmmakers came back to Warsaw a year later in the winter of 1981 to scan the walls of Aleja Szucha's cell with a film camera, the Polish state refused them permission to film. Analysis of the photos had shown that the Polish resistance to the Nazis was not just made up of communists, as post-war Poland used to portray. The three other groups AK (Armia Krajowa to German Polish Home Front), religious, and socialist circles were no less - rather more - involved. Nobody wanted to admit that at the time.

From the film ban, Hartmut Kaminski developed the idea of ​​taking large-format photos in Germany with a trick camera.

Quote from Klaus U. Reinke Düsseldorfer Hefte 1982, page 11:

"The unpolemical calm when merely quoting tiny wall inscriptions, often in the original, in pictures and text content puts the weighting of the statement solely on the mental state of the inmates, which is often expressed in extremely depressing poetry."

Those in charge of the television stations found in 1982 that the film "Stumme Schreie" was too intense for the television audience and made the proposal to "loosen up" its severity through interviews with contemporary witnesses. This is how the television film "Nobody thinks of me and knows about me ..." was made, which was sent to the international television festival in Dublin (Ireland) in 1983 as a German ARD contribution.

criticism

... It is also remarkable that young Germans of all people published these documents for the first time. Because in today's Poland - the film was invited to the Cracow Short Film Festival in the spring, but could not be shown - this does not seem possible. For the current rulers, the graffiti from the resistance of yore will probably still (or again) affect the present too much. ...

Wolfgang Ruf: German General Sunday Gazette

Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung, December 1982

“Death to the Germans!” - “Oh God, how they beat!” - “Nobody thinks of me and knows about me I am lonely - 21 years and must die innocently. What a shame that I have to leave the world where I haven't seen anything from life. I do not know . . . but I am told that I am alive. " - "13 years old" - "I did not give away!" - "Please make this event known to the public!"

Inscriptions carved into cell walls with smuggled objects, scratched into them with fingernails, some written in blood. Last messages from a Gestapo cellar in Warsaw. Immediately after the occupation of Poland, the torture chambers were built here, in which the resistance of the underground organization was to be broken. Those who survived the ordeal were mostly sent to one of the concentration camps and extermination camps or to the execution in the inner courtyard.

Festivals

  • 28th West German Short Film Festival, Oberhausen 1982
  • Friedberger Filmtage - Days of International Religious Film, 1982
  • Trondheim, Norway 1982 ("The best of Tampere, Lille and Oberhausen")
  • International Short Film Festival, Kraków (Poland) 1983

Awards

  • Award of the employees of the 28th West German Short Film Festival, Oberhausen 1982
  • 1st Prize of the Friedberger Filmtage, Days of International Religious Film, 1982
  • FBW: Particularly valuable, 1983

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Wolfgang Ruf: "Do you come to Poland ..." German General Sunday Gazette No. 48, November 18, 1982