There Hella wins the approval of most of the inmates, and finds out that a ‘trusty’ supervisor is a closeted sympathizer with the resistance cause. She spends two horrible years in a solitary confinement dungeon run by abusive wardens before Hermann is able to get her transferred back into the normal prison population. Her boyfriend Hermann Reimers (Regimantas Adomaitis) works as a peddler but also runs a secret resistance cell his suspicious boss holds him in contempt for not disavowing Hella. The film begins in the mid-1930s, when Hella Lindau (Jutta Wachowiak) is sentenced to prison for nine years for aiding antiNazi subversives she’s caught carrying a large sum of money but refuses to name her comrades. Searching through wikipedia threads for now-obscure resistance notables in Europe during the war can be very rewarding… it’s difficult to imagine people so dedicated and courageous. It’s from a part-fiction novel by Eva Lippold, a Nazi resister who spent eight years in prison. As an added benefit, the East German regime could use films about the war to accuse the post-War West Germany of providing a haven for unreconstructed Nazis.ĬineSavant reviews of recommended DEFA films:Ĭo-produced by DEFA and East German Television, the very popular 1980 picture The Fiancée (Die Verlobte) comes late enough to not be encumbered by too much political speechifying it in fact received a token festival release in New York, when most GDR pictures were rejected as outright propaganda. But the historical resistance to the Nazis in WW2 was a relatively safe subject for the communist overseer: many of the resisters were communists, and many were genuine heroes. As one might expect, many East German pictures of the 1950s and ’60s have strong anti-West themes, and many movies that tried to reflect real-life problems in the ‘workers’ and peasants’ German Democratic Republic were censored or banned. I began reviewing DEFA films in 2003 after pursuing the original version of First Spaceship on Venus, Der schweigende Stern.
THE INVISIBLES TRAILER ARCHIVE
The University of Massachusetts Amherst archive studies and distributes the DEFA collection for library and public consumption. Written by Günter Reisch, Günther Rücker, from books by Eva Lippoldĭirected by Günter Reisch, Günther RückerĮast German films from the Cold War era all came from the state-owned studio DEFA (Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft).
Starring: Jutta Wachowiak, Regimantas Adomaitis, Slávka Budínová, Christine Gloger, Inge Keller, Käthe Reichel, Hans-Joachim Hegewald, Barbara Zinn.
2019 / Die Verlobte / available through DEFA Film Libary / institutional access.
THE INVISIBLES TRAILER FULL
The recent The Invisibles from the reunited Germany chronicles the true story of four Jewish Berliners, who went underground and hid right through the war.ġ980 / Color / 1:37 flat full frame / 106 min. A political prisoner struggles to subsist in The Fiancée an East German classic from the part-educational DEFA Film Library. Both stories are set in Germany during the war, but the approaches are quite different. Why do stories about resisting the Nazis seem so important right now? Here are two discs from different labels, with one subject.
0 kommentar(er)
