Wälsungenblut (film)

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Movie
Original title Wälsung blood
Country of production Germany
original language German
Publishing year 1965
length 85 minutes
Age rating FSK 18
Rod
Director Rolf Thiele
script Erika Mann
Franz Seitz
Ennio Flaiano (script assistant) based on the novel of the same name by Thomas Mann
production Franz Seitz
for Franz-Seitz-Filmproduktion, Munich
music Rolf A. Wilhelm
camera Wolf Wirth
cut Ingeborg Taschner
occupation

Wälsungenblut is a German feature film by Rolf Thiele from 1964. The material is based on the novel of the same name by Thomas Mann .

action

It tells of an unconditional, almost incestuous sibling love in Germany before the First World War .

The Count's Arnstatt family belonged to the upper social class in Wilhelmine Germany before 1914. The head of the family is the old Count Arnstatt, whose long-grown and working children Kunz and Märit are at home in the villa estate as are the nineteen-year-old twins Siegmund and Sieglinde Arnstatt, two creatures of ethereal beauty. These two young people, carried by solemn seriousness - "graceful as whips and childlike of stature in their nineteen years" as Mann describes them in his template - are inseparable, their ideas and views of life and the judgments of their fellow men are always congruent and often of arrogant distance. They present their assessments of others as snobbishly as they are with sharp-tongued clarity.

Sieglinde is engaged to Leutnant Beckerath, an aspiring, young officer, who, however, is in no way intellectually equal to the two siblings and is valued by them as clumsy and usually low. Right from the start, Siegmund and Sieglinde let their social and intellectual superiority over Beckerath shine through. Above all, Siegmund makes sure that Beckerath never comes close to his female alter ego Sieglinde, which he naturally claims for himself, and only for himself. A joint visit to the opera, Richard Wagner's Die Walküre , becomes a narcissistic self-reflection; In Siegmund and Sieglinde, the Nordic children of the gods acting on stage, they see none other than themselves. The twins listen with fascination to the musical love frenzy of their counterparts. Dream and reality blur into one another.

Beckerath, who wanted to go to Spain on his honeymoon with Sieglinde, feels more and more excluded; he suspects that there is something between the two twins that he can never break through. Both relationships touch the facts of incest - touches, desires and desires characterize this ambivalent team, without first taking the decisive step. But one evening, shortly before sleep, all the dams finally break. Like a ritual, Sieglinde visits her brother like every evening to say “good night” to him. But this time both shower themselves with caresses.

Production notes

Wälsungenblut was created in Munich from July 27 to September 12, 1964 . The world premiere took place on January 21, 1965.

The film constructions come from Maleen Pacha , who, together with Eva Maria Gall, also created the costumes. Willy Zeyn junior was in charge of production .

The production costs were 1.2 million DM .

Elena Nathanael , who was hired from Greece and played the leading female role, had her breakthrough at home immediately before, but was completely unknown in Germany until then. Immediately after filming was over, she returned to Greece. Ingeborg Hallstein, who was experienced in cinema , was a well-known opera singer. It was almost her only speaking role in front of the camera.

In his role as screenwriter, producer Seitz and his co-author Erika Mann , a daughter of Thomas Mann, included the manuscript “ Ein Glück ” from 1904 in the manuscript .

Literary background

The novella Wälsungenblut was to be published for the first time in 1906. However, the printing planned for the 17th year of the “Neue Rundschau”, pp. 91 to 111, was withdrawn before the issue was published - probably on the advice of the Mann family. Almost all printed sheets were destroyed. Wälsungenblut did not appear until 1921 as a private print by Phantasus Verlag, in translations and in the "Gesammelte Werken" (1960).

Awards

The gold film ribbon awarded on June 27, 1965 was awarded to:

  • Rudolf Forster in the best male supporting role
  • Gerd Baltus as the best young actor
  • Maleen Pacha for construction and equipment

Reviews

In its review of February 10, 1965, Der Spiegel wrote on page 95: “From two novellas by the Nobel Prize poet and decadence specialist Thomas Mann, the chief erotic of German cinema, Rolf Thiele, distilled the story for the 1.2 million film (SPIEGEL 34/1964): The twins Siegmund and Sieglinde (Michael Maien and Elena Nathanael), devoted to each other in more than brotherly affection and tenderness, imitate the incest on a large polar bear skin that they saw in Wagner's "Walküre". Then Sieglinde will marry Lieutenant Beckerath, who rode naked through Munich because of her. Thiele's own comment: "It was important to me to fill the gap between 'silence' and '491'."

Handbook VIII of the Catholic Film Critics said: Thiele's "film, which shows incomprehension for the original, gives itself under socially critical pretext to the pleasurable description of the aberrations that it claims to denounce."

The lexicon of the international film came to the following conclusion: "Sultry eroticism and decadence celebrated with relish in a film based on Thomas Mann's story of the same name, staged in a neat and tasty manner by Rolf Thiele."

The Protestant film observer drew the following conclusion: “Motifs from Thomas Mann's little-known story and free ingredients resulted in a rather unusual film theme, but the artistic design surprisingly celebrates past class conceit in the conventional style. More superfluous than perishable and simply without recommendation! "

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Wälsungenblut on spiegel.de
  2. ^ Films 1965/70, Verlag JP Bachem in Cologne 1971, p. 339
  3. ↑ Klaus Brüne (Red.): Lexikon des Internationale Films, Volume 9, p. 4183. Reinbek near Hamburg 1987
  4. ↑ Evangelischer Presseverband München, Review No. 46/1965, p. 89