Faithful heart

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Movie
German title Faithful heart
Original title Cœur fidèle
Country of production France
original language French
Publishing year 1923
length 1990 meters, at 20 fps 87 minutes
Rod
Director Jean Epstein
script Jean Epstein
Marie Epstein
production Pathé
camera Léon Donnot
Paul Guichard
Henri Stuckert
occupation

Treues Herz (also: Herzstreue ) is the German title of the French silent film melodrama Cœur fidèle , which Jean Epstein realized for Pathé in 1923 based on a script that he wrote together with his sister Marie Epstein . It tells the story of an unhappy love in the old port of Marseille.

action

As an orphan, Marie was adopted by the couple who run a bar in the port district of Marseille and has been used by him as a waitress ever since. She is coveted by Kleinpaul, a work-shy, alcohol-addicted brute, but her heart secretly belongs to the dock worker Jean, with whom she occasionally meets to dream of a better life. When Jean Marie proposes to marry and therefore wants to negotiate with the landlords, he is threatened by Kleinpaul and his cronies until he leaves the restaurant. Marie has to go away with Kleinpaul under duress, but Jean follows them to a fairground, where a fight breaks out between the two men. A police officer who wants to intervene is stabbed to death. While Kleinpaul can escape, Jean is arrested and has to go to prison.

After a year, Jean finds Marie again. She has a sick child and lives with Kleinpaul, who drinks her hard-earned money. Loyalty to the heart, Jean tries to help Marie wherever he can, supported by a crippled woman from the neighborhood. Kleinpaul, however, informed by the neighbors' gossip that Jean continues to meet “his” Marie, lets it go to another violent one after he has already smashed the bottles with the expensive medicine and has almost endangered the child's life Confrontation arrive, but this time armed with a Browning. In the following fight, the crippled neighbor succeeds in getting hold of the weapon that Jean Kleinpaul has wrested: in dire need she shoots Kleinpaul with it. He sinks dead on the cradle with the child.

In an epilogue on the fairground you can finally see Jean and Marie, how they are now free to love each other, but their faces tell the viewer that the experiences they both had to make have drawn them for life.

background

The film was made between May and June 1923. Léon Donnot, Paul Guichard and Henri Stuckert were in front of the cameras. Outdoor shots took place in the old port of Marseille and in the small town of Manosque . Interior scenes were recorded in the studio des Vignerons in Vincennes .

The film was produced by the Pathé Consortium Cinéma , which also took over the distribution in France.

reception

Cœur fidèle , premiered on November 23, 1923 in Paris, was not a hit with the public. Just three days after the premiere, audience protests forced the performances to be canceled. When the film was to be shown again the following year, more and more viewers stayed away. With the critics and the other filmmakers, however, Cœur fidèle attracted the greatest attention. Georges Sadoul called the film a sensation and Epstein's best film because it still touches us today with its honesty in everyday life. Also René Clair wrote enthusiastically that one Cœur fidèle must see to detect the origins of today's cinema

“A prime example of this type of film of the Impressionist school is Epstein's COEUR FIDELE, which has the full range of characteristics of this style, e. B. the deliberate blurring in a scene at the beginning when Marie shrinks back from Paul (and the camera) and becomes increasingly blurred, while Paul moves towards the camera in the opposite cut. Double exposures especially occur, especially in melancholy moments when Marie and Jean enjoy a few moments of happiness or when Jean thinks of them: Here, sometimes their bodies, sometimes their faces (many close-ups!) Blur for seconds with the calm water of the harbor basin, which creates a mood of peace or longing (depending on how you interpret it ...). Another characteristic of Impressionist film is the subjective camera. There are also many examples of this in COEUR FIDELE, e.g. B. Marie's gaze in a mirror or her gaze into space at the beginning of the film. There are also distortions, e.g. B. in scenes of drunkenness. Fast assembly is a clear stylistic device. Especially in the scenes on the fairground, there are accelerated cuts from the most varied of perspectives that capture life at the fair. "(André Stratmann)

The high-speed scene on the fairground attracted particular attention, for which Epstein, as announced in his cinema manifesto Bonjour Cinéma , let the camera ride on a carousel: “The fairground is gradually becoming less clear. The drama is visually intensified by the centrifuge effect - thanks to the 'photo-genic' qualities of the vertigo and the vortex. "

The film critic Jerzy Toeplitz wrote about Epstein: "For Epstein, the virtuoso cinematic technique is not an end in itself to bluff the viewer, but with its help he strived for the greatest possible psychological precision in the reproduction of the events and characters."

In Germany, after several attempts , the showing of Treues Herz was banned even after editing requirements and their fulfillment, because, as stated in the censorship decision of the Berlin Film Inspectorate No. 182 of April 22, 1925 said that "the entire content of the picture strip was so depressing and dulling the feeling of the viewer that a deterioration in moral feeling and thinking was to be worried about from its performance".

After Epstein died on April 3, 1953, the Cinémathèque Francaise showed Cœur fidèle with piano accompaniment in a retrospective on Sunday, July 24, 1955 ; the writer Peter Weiss attended the performance.

The film was released on DVD by Pathé Classique in 2007 .

literature

  • Richard Abel: French cinema: the first wave, 1915-1929 . Princeton University Press, 1984 (English).
  • Nicole Brenez, Ralph Eue (eds.): Jean Epstein: Bonjour cinéma and other writings on the cinema . Austrian Film Museum, 2013, ISBN 978-3-901644-25-2 .
  • René Clair: Cinéma d'hier, cinéma d'aujourd'hui . Gallimard, Paris 1970 (French).
  • Stefanie Orphal: Poetry film: poetry in the audiovisual medium (= Welt-Literaturen / World Literatures . Volume 5). Verlag Walter de Gruyter, 2014, ISBN 978-3-11-035167-5 , p. 88.
  • Juliane Rebentisch, Christoph Menke (ed.): Art, progress, history (= kaleidograms . Volume 5). Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2006, ISBN 3-86599-000-2 , p. 83.
  • Georges Sadoul: Le cinéma français Flammarion, Paris 1962 (French).
  • Günter Schütz: Peter Weiss and Paris 1947–1966 (= Peter Weiss and Paris: Prolegomena to a biography . Volume 1). Röhrig University Press, 2004, ISBN 3-86110-365-6 .
  • André Stratmann: COEUR FIDELE (Heart loyalty, F 1923) . on March 30, 2005 at beepworld.de .
  • Jerzy Toeplitz: History of the Film . 2 volumes. Translated from the Polish by Lilli Kaufmann, among others, Zweausendeins , Frankfurt am Main 1983. (in the original Historia sztuki filmowej . Warsaw 1955–1970).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ cf. G. Schütz, p. 114.
  2. ↑ IMDb / locations
  3. ↑ cf. difarchiv.de
  4. ^ Richard Abel: French cinema: the first wave, 1915-1929. P. 359.
  5. ↑ Georges Sadoul: Le cinéma français : “ Cœur fidèle fit sensation, et devait rester sa meilleure oeuvre.” (P. 29); "Et Cœur fidèle nous touche encore, par sa fidélité au quotidien." (P. 30)
  6. ↑ René Clair, Cinéma d'hier, cinéma d'aujourd'hui 1970, quoted in the booklet for the DVD edition by Pathé Classique (2007): “Il faut voir Cœur fidèle si l'on veut connaître les ressources du cinéma d'aujourd 'hui. […] Qu'un film soit digne du cinéma, voilà déjà un bien plaisant miracle! Cœur fidèle en est digne à plus d'un titre. "
  7. ↑ cf. CH at filmmuseum.at
  8. ↑ as "Exemplary trash film and therefore emotionally brutal", according to the film supervisory board no. 115 of March 12, 1925.
  9. ↑ cf. Censorship decisions at difarchiv.de
  10. ↑ cf. Schütz, pp. 113-114.
  11. ↑ cf. DVDtoile.com