Cement (film)
Cement is a two-part television film by DEFA by Manfred Wekwerth from 1973 based on the novel of the same name by Fjodor Gladkow from 1925 and commissioned by GDR television .
action
Spring 1921. The regimental commissar Gleb Tschumalow comes home to his hometown on the Black Sea after three years of civil war . His wife Dasha greets him coolly and considers a task of the Communist Party to be more important than her husband. In the years of his absence she has become self-confident and only has her social tasks in mind. They even put their daughter in a home to have more time for party work. But everything else in town confuses Gleb as well. The cement plant is completely neglected and largely dismantled. The former workers deal with cattle breeding, lighter making and other things. Here Gleb wants to intervene and he is appointed commissioner for the cement plant. He manages to convince the workers of how important the work is to them. He can also win over the former production engineer Kleist, who once betrayed him to the whites who wanted to kill him. Only the comrades in the higher-level departments repeatedly oppose progress with their bureaucratism. But Gleb always prevails. The procurement of fuel and the festive reception of the tankers in the company are a great success. In the middle of the festivities, the White Guards attempt to attack and destroy the plant.
At the same time, Dasha is captured by the whites on a carriage ride with the chairman of the Executive Committee Badjin to an appointment with the peasants and Cossacks in the countryside. Badjin, who is in love with Dasha, wanted to get closer to her on this trip, but he does not succeed because of the attack. Dasha escapes death by the rope only because she is a woman and impressed the Cossack captain with her courage. When she meets Badjin again after her release, she realizes that he will do whatever she asks of him. When she surrenders to him, it happens of her own free will and the feeling of being protected and held by someone stronger. She by no means perceives Gleb as a betrayal, as she no longer loves him and the revolution has made her understanding of the values of marriage completely irrelevant. Gleb Chumalov suffers from jealousy about Dascha's behavior, but instead of sinking into lovesickness, he leads the expropriation of the remaining bourgeoisie and intellectuals.
On the other hand, the head of the women's committee, Polja, feels very drawn to Gleb, because she is not free from desires and feelings. Dasha notices and advises Gleb not to spurn Polja. The day Polja and Gleb want to get closer in their room, Dasha bursts in and destroys the opportunity. It is shortly before his trip to Moscow , to the Supreme Economic Council and the Council for Labor and Defense, where he will also meet Comrade Vladimir Ilyich Lenin . In the cement works, some comrades have taken over the helm, who want to prevent the construction of the works with references to the new economic policy . After his return from Moscow, Gleb takes over the direction of the plant again, because he had achieved everything he wanted on his journey. He had even brought fuel. Unfortunately, he had to find out that his and Dascha's daughter had passed away in the meantime.
Dasha leaves the common house in which she still lived with Gleb to move in with Polja. She asked for it because she is completely bruised to the ground. Not only was she mentally and physically destroyed by rape by Badjin, but also when she was expelled from the Communist Party in the past investigations that she was deeply affected. In these so-called purges, a great many true and good comrades were expelled from the party for flimsy reasons.
Gleb gives all his strength to the restart of the plant, which will succeed.
production
Cement was shot as a black and white film and premiered on August 4, 1973 in a special screening as part of the 10th World Festival of Youth and Students in the Kosmos cinema in Berlin . This should remain the only presentation on a big screen. The first performance in the first program of GDR television took place on November 2 and 4, 1973, the second broadcast had to wait until the fall of the wall and took place on December 1 and 2, 1989 in the second program of GDR television. A half-hour documentary about the shooting was broadcast on October 16, 1973 in the first program of GDR television under the title 500 people make a film . The outdoor shots took place on the Bulgarian Black Sea coast in the area of Balchik and at VEB Zementwerke Karsdorf, Plant 7, Halle- Nietleben . The employees of this company were also used as extras.
Reviews
In Die Neue Zeit , Mimosa Künzel found that the film was convincing down to the last detail and that there was a noticeable creative discipline in working out the apparently most insignificant scenes. This created a panorama of rousing expressiveness after the civil war in the early 1920s in the young Soviet republic.
Peter Berger wrote in Neues Deutschland that Manfred Wekwerth rediscovered this exciting testimony to conflict-ridden human coexistence after the revolution for the screen.
In Gisela Herrmann's opinion in the Berliner Zeitung, the first part still seems quite episodic, an impression that is often reinforced by the not always plausible intertitles, but the second episode becomes more cinematic and fluid, although it often still has a touch of theater attached to it.
Web links
- Cement in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Cement at filmportal.de
- Cement in the lexicon of international film
- Cement in the online dictionary of television in the GDR
- Cement by Fyodor Gladkow at Nemesis - Socialist Archive for Fiction
- Manfred Wekwerth: On the re-performance of »Zement«. sopos.org , 2004, accessed September 18, 2016 .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Neue Zeit of November 6, 1973, p. 4
- ↑ Neues Deutschland, November 6, 1973, p. 4
- ↑ Berliner Zeitung of November 6, 1973, p. 6