Paths to strength and beauty

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Movie
Original title Paths to strength and beauty - a film about modern physical culture
Country of production Germany
original language German
Publishing year 1925
length 104 minutes
Rod
Director Wilhelm Prager
script Nicholas Kaufmann
production Alfred Stern, Ufa cultural film department
music Giuseppe Becce
camera Eugen Hirsch, Friedrich Paulmann , Friedrich Weinmann , Max Brink, Jakob Schatzow (slow motion), Erich Stöcker (slow motion), Gerhard Riebicke , Helmy Hurt, Kurt Neubert
occupation

(in alphabetical order)

Ways to Strength and Beauty is a German cultural film by Wilhelm Prager , which was first shown on March 16, 1925 and in a revised version on June 11, 1926 in the Ufa-Palast am Zoo in Berlin.

action

The full-length silent film conceived in the UFA's cultural department shows sport , gymnastics and dance performances , but also the Roman bathing culture , in order to demonstrate not only intellectual education but also physical fitness based on the example of ancient high schools and personal hygiene . Physical exercise in the great outdoors was intended in particular to prevent postural damage in adults caused by sitting at work and to promote the health of children, but was also a life - reforming alternative to a decadent city ​​life with nervousness , lack of exercise and tobacco consumption as well as national movement based on the model of gymnastics father Jahn . Scientific advisor was Nicholas Kaufmann , who also wrote the script. In contrast to traditional military sport , the film expressly addresses women, for example with gymnastics according to Bess Mensendieck , and shows sporting training in a civilian function, for example for self-defense or lifeguarding .

Aesthetically, the film stages the human body in the style of antiquity by recreating numerous ancient scenarios and shows it extremely freely for the time: “The naked person is, as it could not be otherwise, the focus of this film. The naked, not the undressed. The one who moves freely and rhythmically, for whom the looseness of the limbs is a matter of course, not unfamiliar to his body, who does not know how to make use of the physical gifts given to him. ”Studies in slow motion illustrate the muscular effect of individual exercises and movement sequences.

The film is divided into six parts with the titles:

  • Part One: The Ancient Greeks and the New Era
  • Second part: physical training for the sake of health: hygienic gymnastics
  • Third part: rhythmic gymnastics
  • Fourth part: the dance
  • Part five: sport
  • Sixth part: fresh air, sun and water

In the fifth part, numerous athletes of their time are shown, e.g. B.

In the sixth part “leaders set a good example” like

Reception history

As an expression of body awareness that has enjoyed general popularity since 1900 in the form of nudism , the life reform movement and naturism , the film reached a mass audience in the Weimar Republic and quickly became popular as a "large-scale advertising film". Various educational guides on the subject of physical culture appeared at the same time .

The film was received mostly positively in contemporary reviews, at best rated as too long and cheesy in some scenes. All in all, the film is about “the endeavors to ensure proper care and training of the body” in large parts of the population, especially women with office activities in the expanding service sector. He is from a "pure basic mood" and "far removed from arousing any offensive feelings with fine tact" or to appear too instructive.

Because of its "demoralizing overall effect" especially on young people through a "glorification of nude culture and nude exercises", the Bavarian government, which the governments of Baden and Hesse had joined, applied for the revocation of admission to public demonstrations in the German Reich, but at least in Bavaria and Germany in front of teenagers. The application was rejected by the film inspection agency , with regard to the protection of minors, only two film scenes had to be cut out “with the mere display of naked female body beauty, which increases to the point of being 'undressed'”. For the normally perceived adult observer, if the picture strip is viewed in an unbiased manner, there is no stimulus in terms of gender.

In retrospect, due to its “idolatry” of the human body, the film is considered an ideological forerunner of the National Socialist body cult, as celebrated not least in Leni Riefenstahl's later propaganda films . Riefenstahl made an appearance as an extra in a group of dancers in Paths to Strength and Beauty . The entire opening sequences of both parts of Riefenstahl's later Olympic film are almost "a copy of Paths to Power and Beauty ."

As a historical documentary film about the emergence of rhythmic gymnastics as a mass sport, which marked such a fundamental change in movement behavior at the beginning of the 20th century that it triggered a new physical culture with sometimes irrational idolatry of the body, the film stylizes physical exercises in its ideological tendency as a way to the backward-looking renewal of humanity; In this respect, it is also an indication of the racial myth of the National Socialists , which was anchored in the 1920s, and represents "an interesting document in terms of film history".

Collective pictures

Revers of the cigarette picture Series 4 number 42 from the UFA film Fridericus Rex from the double scrapbook with the film Paths to Strength and Beauty (Series 2);
Constantin Cigaretten, Constantin cigarette factory, around 1926

The cigarette factory Constantin , based in Hanover, published a mostly illustrated double album around 1926 with cigarette pictures for the two UFA films Fridericus Rex and Paths to Strength and Beauty . The library is owned by the German Film Institute based in Frankfurt am Main.

literature

  • Reclam's Universum: Moderne Illustrierte Wochenschrift 42.2 (1926), ill. P. 1132,1137 and plate between p. 1120 and 1121.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Jürgen Trimborn: Leni Riefenstahl. A German career. Biography. Berlin, Aufbau Verlag 2002, p. 58f.
  2. ↑ Rainer Hank: Burnout - It's the nerves! FAZ , April 26, 2014
  3. ^ Siegfried Kracauer : Paths to strength and beauty. In: filmportal.de. Frankfurter Zeitung (Stadt-Blatt), May 21, 1925, archived from the original on October 10, 2008 ; Retrieved April 7, 2016 .
  4. ↑ Claudia Becker: Nude gymnastics is the best drive control Die Welt , August 6, 2013
  5. ↑ Cornelia Klose-Lewerentz: Body in the life reform movement in: Natural bodies? Between liberation and disciplinary norm. Discourses of the life reform movement (in Germany, around 1890 to 1930) and the emergence of the desire for gender reassignment (around 1910 to 1925). Humboldt University of Berlin, 2007
  6. ↑ Kracauer, ibid.
  7. ↑ for example Dora Menzler : The beauty of your body ; Alice Bloch: Your child's body ; Anton Fendrich : More sun ; Hans Surén : Gymnastics , Dieck & Co.-Verlag, Stuttgart; see. Arnd Krüger : There Goes This Art of Manliness: Naturism and Racial Hygiene in Germany , in: Journal of Sport History 18 (Spring, 1991), 1, pp. 135–158. http://library.la84.org/SportsLibrary/JSH/JSH1991/JSH1801/jsh1801i.pdf on . 19th February 2017
  8. ↑ Calendar sheet: March 16, 1925 - FKK in the Der Spiegel cinema , March 16, 2008
  9. ^ Film review Paths to Strength and Beauty Reichsfilmblatt, March 21, 1925. Website of the German Film Institute , accessed on August 16, 2016
  10. ↑ Der Film , No. 21/1925, p. 10
  11. ↑ Minutes of the hearing before the Berlin Film Inspectorate , September 26, 1926. Website of the German Film Institute , accessed on August 15, 2016.
  12. ↑ so the lexicon of international film in its discussion of ways to strength and beauty
  13. ↑ Michael Töteberg (ed.): Classic film. 120 films , Stuttgart: Metzler 2006, p. 104.
  14. ↑ Lexicon of the international film on ways to strength and beauty
  15. ↑ Compare the information in the Karlsruhe Virtual Catalog