Revolt of the Fishermen

Plot

The Revolt of the Fishermen deals with a strike among the impoverished deep-sea fishermen and sailors of the coastal town of Port Sebastian (also: San Sebastian), which is triggered by deteriorating working conditions on the ships of the shipowner Bredel. The fishermen on one of Bredel's ships bring in the catch. A shark has come on board as by-catch and tries to eat a small fish while it is still dying. The sailors gutting the fish are repeatedly told to work faster. The pace of work on the ships in Bredel's fishing fleet has increased considerably, as the shipowner now only employs three men per shift instead of four. When a worker cuts off his thumb with a shark knife, the fishermen spontaneously stop working in protest.

In view of the accident, the deep-sea fishermen call on the captain to reduce the work intensity. Four men per shift are to be employed again. When the captain rejects this demand, the deep-sea fishermen decide to go on strike. The fishing fleet had to return to the port of the main town of Port Sebastian. At the shipping company office in Port Sebastian, the sailors are deprived of their wages. The garrison commander and the shipowner Bredel witness the orderly departure of the striking sailors. The commander deploys soldiers.

Strike leader Hull calls for a joint strike between the deep-sea fishermen from Port Sebastian and the coastal fishermen from the surrounding area, whose economic situation is slightly better than that of the deep-sea fishermen. However, joint industrial action does not materialize as the shipowner Bredel offers the small-scale fishermen in the area the prospect of one hundred percent more pay for their catch. The small-scale fishermen then set sail for Bredel, but lose half of their catch in stormy seas. The deep-sea fishermen, on the other hand, win their case against the shipping company and initially resume work. Bredel breaks his promise to pay the coastal fishermen a wage supplement. When the coastal fishermen realize that Bredel does not intend to keep his promise, they finally join forces with the deep-sea fishermen from Port Sebastian. In Desak's inn in the small coastal town of St. Barbara, the deep-sea and coastal fishermen discuss a joint labor dispute. However, the meeting is blown up by an act of arson.

A group led by the moderate fisherman Kerdhuys decides against going on strike and wants to go fishing for Bredel the day after the unsuccessful meeting in St. Barbara. In the morning, Martin Kedennek, an individualist from St. Barbara, and his people, who want to go on strike against the shipping company, ambush Kerdhuys and his comrades-in-arms. Kedennek tries to stop Kerdhuys from breaking the strike with a knife. When Kedennek attacks Kerdhuys, he is struck down by a bullet from one of the soldiers mobilized by the garrison commander. The next morning, there is another direct confrontation in the dunes between strikers and a group of coastal fishermen led by the well-off boat owner Bruyk, who - like Kerdhuys the day before - want to set sail for Bredel. Andreas, a young fisherman who lives with the Kedennek family, also joins the strikebreakers for the sake of appearances. Secretly, however, Andreas is planning an explosive attack on Bruyk's fishing boat.

Relationship to the original literary work

The feature film is based on the novel Revolt of the Fishermen of St. Barbara by Anna Seghers, for which the author was awarded the Kleist Prize in 1928. Piscator made significant changes to the story. He turned the pessimistic ending of the original, in which the fishermen's misery is described in detail, into a militant appeal for the popular front against Nazi Germany. The director pointed out that he had initially moved the plot of the film "from northern Spain to northern Germany", thus enabling the main characters "to come into contact with those who had a similar social position at the time[.] It corresponded to the small fisherman, the small farmer." Piscator's geographical considerations initially relate to the unfinished German version of the film. Film scholar Günther Agde also interprets the completed Russian film version from 1934 as a " virtually placeless, but clearly non-Russian film." Piscator originally wanted to reach a German film audience and the unionized and politically unorganized classes in Germany, who seemed to him to be particularly susceptible to National Socialism. Anna Seghers had already shown that these classes were "dependent to the point of being drained". He, on the other hand, wanted to illustrate how it was possible to remain independent by organizing oneself into a trade union.

According to theater scholar Peter Diezel, Piscator's film adaptation was in line with the strategic guideline of Thälmann's KPD leadership of the "anti-fascist united front and the inclusion of the petit-bourgeois classes". However, this manifested itself as a "rather brutal approach" towards Anna Seghers, as it meant nothing less than a "deconstruction of her narrative text". To this end, as he later summarized, Piscator had introduced a seamen's union in his film adaptation, who worked on the "trawlers sent out by large fisheries and had started a strike over the removal of the fourth man in a work group." Meanwhile, the small-scale fishermen continued to work and had thus essentially become strikebreakers; a series of won and lost strikes followed. According to Piscator, however, "since the organized helped the unorganized, even when it was no longer about their own cause, these strikes turned from purely economic to political actions and - at least I hoped so - into a call against a system like the one the Nazis intended."

Seghers expert Helen Fehervary also concludes that Piscator deconstructs an essential element of his literary model: the subject of Seghers' model is the "failed strike of the fishermen against the shipping company that controls their wages and their entire lives. In the end, the boats leave under the same conditions that gave rise to the uprising. The everyday life of class relations is thus restored." This element of failure in Seghers' original bears witness to the revolutionary history in Central Europe after the First World War. At the beginning of Seghers' story, the failure of the insurgents is visualized with an allegorization of the uprising: Long after the uprising of the fishermen, the insurrection had "still sat on the empty, white summer-bare marketplace" and "calmly thought of its own, whom it had born, raised, cared for and sheltered for what was best for them". This allegorical moment is missing in Piscator's film, as it is aimed at a successful uprising.

Film analysis

Soon after Piscator's death, the State Film Archive of the GDR published an undated information sheet on the Revolt of the Fishermen in its "Film Sheets" series, according to which Piscator, a man of the theater, had mastered the wide range of cinematic expression in his only film. The constant alternation between close-ups, long shots and long tracking shots, the atmospheric lighting direction and the symbolic visual language are emphasized as striking film-aesthetic design elements: "The close-up and detail shots repeatedly bring order to the crowd scenes and constantly force the viewer to make a personal statement. It is both symbolic and at the same time of expressive atmospheric power." The author of the information sheet refers, for example, to the opening symbol of the dying shark devouring a fish with its last convulsions, to a knife flashing in the sand as the workers' fronts face each other, and to the soldiers' boots that freeze Marie shortly before the rape sequence.

Incidentally, the film's highlights are due to a montage technique based on Eisenstein's silent films, through which the dramaturgical contrasts are heightened to "incredible speed". In addition to the camera work, the crowd scenes and the cross-cutting, the still young sound direction is also cited: "The sound becomes particularly effective in the functional incorporation of songs and battle songs, which are heard again and again at the climax of the action." The choir of deep-sea fishermen forms a counterpoint to the action surrounding the small-scale fishermen as a static, reflective element.

The German scholar Klaus Gleber describes the preferred use of "editing effects and montage" as characteristic of Piscator's film: "The latter is used both contrastively (while the priest invokes the divine right of power, the soldiers rage) and symbolically reinforcing (surf as an illustration of the uprising). Close-ups and long tracking shots are just as much a part of the inventory as the image, which is geared towards the viewer's power of association." The communication scientist Hermann Haarmann also emphasizes the rapid camera movements and tracking shots - unusual for the time -, oblique camera work and rapid editing sequences. However, Piscator's film always maintained a "balance between aesthetic innovation and outdated schematization", especially with regard to the rather conventional character acting including physiognomy, posture and clothing on the one hand and an avant-garde formal language borrowed from epic theater on the other. The avant-garde formal language includes the brief introduction of the protagonists through their faces at the beginning of the film, the spoken and superimposed commentaries - the intertitles are reminiscences of silent films - as well as the choral element of the music. The fact that a chorus intervenes in the action after each "film chapter" is due to Bertolt Brecht's Lehrstück-Theater, from which Piscator borrows.

Topics

On the occasion of the film's re-screening at the Berlinale 2012, film scholar Günter Agde emphasizes the close look at the "work in the details of its execution", which the Revolt of the Fishermen shares with other productions by Mezhrabpomfilm. For example, the "furious beginning" of the film shows "a wealth of details of fishing at sea, salvaging and landing in the harbor." At the same time, however, this presentation of different forms of work revealed "an almost naïve trust on the part of the filmmakers in the physical strength of the workers, which pointed beyond the films." Apart from the technological side of the topic of "work", these film sequences would have given the cinema audience of the time interesting insights into the everyday life of Soviet working environments. In this respect, these images had their own documentary value beyond the film itself. The treatment of the topic of work quickly shifts from the initial focus on concrete work processes to aspects such as the intensification of work, organized labour disputes and their violent suppression.

The film is characterized by the desire to counter the growing Nazi movement at the end of the Weimar Republic with an anti-fascist united front, in line with the KPD policy of the time, for which the petty bourgeois classes were to be won over. Based on the labour dispute between the deep-sea fishermen and the petty-bourgeois coastal fishermen, who, unlike the deep-sea fishermen, owned their means of production, with the shipping company, Piscator wanted to demonstrate the necessity of a joint, organized struggle. In 1975, a West German study on Piscator's work in Soviet emigration had already pointed out that the petty bourgeoisie, constantly threatened with proletarianization by big capital and increasingly so during the crisis, was becoming a potential accomplice of fascism, which promised a solution to the crisis but concealed its means of solving it. Here, "the avant-garde of the proletariat had to create clarity and point out the revolutionary alternative." The necessity and success of such a policy were the subject of Piscator's film.

Exile research in the GDR in the 1970s also picked up on this thematic focus of the film. The united front theme becomes particularly clear at the end of the film, where a chanting choir formulates a call to all exploited people to join the united front. But even the beginning of the film reflects this concept. Since, according to GDR exile researcher Renate Waack-Ullrich, the film aims to enlighten the middle classes, who are afflicted by petty-bourgeois ideology, about their own social situation, Piscator begins it "not with the story of the [coastal] fishermen, but with the increasingly intensifying main contradiction between capitalists and the working class: Bredel's fishing vessel."

Adverse production circumstances

In the summer of 1930, Piscator had initially planned to film Theodor Plievier's successful debut novel Des Kaisers Kulis, which dealt with the precarious working conditions on the ships of the imperial navy. According to the German scholar Klaus Gleber, however, the realization of an elaborate film with revolutionary content in Germany would have faced "considerable difficulties, especially as the 'Münzenberg Group' did not have the necessary means of production." The left-wing media entrepreneur Willi Münzenberg therefore put Piscator in touch with the Soviet joint-stock company Mezhrabpomfilm. During negotiations in Moscow, Piscator reached an agreement with Mezhrabpomfilm in September 1930 on a film version of the Plievier novel. In April 1931, he traveled to Moscow with an initial synopsis for the screenplay. Piscator had asked to use ships from the Soviet Black Sea Fleet for the filming. He wanted to use these ships to recreate the 1916 Battle of Jutland, which is the subject of Plievier's novel. It was only weeks after his arrival in Moscow that Mezhrabpomfilm informed him that his application to use the Black Sea Fleet had been rejected. The Soviet Foreign Minister, People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs Maxim Litvinov, feared diplomatic entanglements with the German Reich in this case and refused.

Anna Seghers' novel Revolt of the fishermen of St. Barbara was quickly selected as a substitute. Peter Diezel assumes that the intensive study of the 1918 sailors' mutiny and thematic analogies between Plievier's and Seghers' works contributed to Piscator's decision to choose Anna Seghers' story as a suitable replacement.

As subsequent dubbing was not yet possible at the time for technical reasons, both a German and a Russian version of the film were to be shot. The screenplay for the planned German version of the Revolt of the Fishermen was to be written by the Austrian-British writer Anna Wiesner, who had also worked on Piscator's screenplay for Des Kaisers Kulis. The Russian version of the screenplay was written by the scenarist Georgi Grebner. Although Piscator had virtually no experience in the film industry, Meschrabpom-Film had set aside just five or at most six months to work on the script and shoot the film, which meant that considerable problems were inevitable.

In July 1931, Piscator began filming the first shots of nature in the port city of Murmansk on the Arctic Ocean. The Arctic film motifs and the long summer twilight phases made a lasting impression on him: "These magnificent white nights there in the north, which last for three months, or the nets frozen in the ice." Later that month, during a stay in Berlin, he hired fourteen German and Austrian actors for the film project, including Lotte Lenya as the prostitute Marie and Paul Wegener as the shipowner Bredel. At the beginning of August 1931, indoor filming was to begin in the Meshrabpom studio in Moscow, but a fire broke out. A fire destroyed two of a total of three studios, including the decorations that had been set up in them, and required weeks of renovation work.

Film poster

The film poster for the original Russian version from 1934 was designed by commercial artist Michail Weksler. The poster for the black-and-white film is designed in color. The film title is set off from the actual illustration at the top edge of the poster in white letters on a red background. The poster shows three characters from the film, the strike leader Kedennek, the boatman Bruyk with his characteristic tobacco pipe and the prostitute Marie in the background, on a sea background in strong yellow and green tones. Kedennek and Bruyk are identified as sailors and coastal fishermen by features such as striped clothing, slouch hats, pipes and spade beards. The poster thus focuses on the two contrasting positions within the communities of coastal fishermen, some of whom, following Kedennek, join the sailors' strike or, like the relatively well-off boat owner Bruyk, set out as "strikebreakers" to fish for Bredel. The upper image segment contains details of other film artists involved. (Western) European distribution companies advertised the subtitled export version for the (Western) European market, in some cases with their own film poster.

Reception at the time

A few months before the official premiere in Moscow cinemas, a differentiated appraisal of the film was published in May 1934 in the Moscow-based Deutsche Zentral-Zeitung by the Soviet critic Sergei Dinamov, who was captivated by the artistic quality of the film and "completely spellbound". Nevertheless, Dinamov complained that the plot was so complicated that "in the middle of the film, all the threads get tangled up and it becomes difficult to follow the story." A few weeks after Dinamov's review, the trade magazine "Kino", published by the Association of Filmmakers (ARRK), published a drastic review. The prominent author of this review, the avant-garde writer Osip Brik, criticized the film for its "consistent pathos", the "diverging styles" and the "lack of dramatically growing tension." Brik blamed the management of Mezhrabpomfilm for the supposed failure of the project - a common approach for attacks on unpopular film projects at the time. The film company had not supported Piscator sufficiently in his foray into film directing and had not familiarized him with the actual needs of the Soviet cinema audience. Jasmin Arnold assumes that Brik carried out his attack on Meschrabpom "with the approval of state authorities." The communication scientist Hermann Haarmann also interpreted the criticism as part of a "staged press campaign", which Brik had started under official pressure.

The following month, Piscator seconded a group of renowned directors of the Mezhrabpomfilm around Vsevolod Pudovkin in Izvestia, who praised Revolt of the Fishermen as a "realistic work", praised the "closeness to life and authenticity of the individual portrayal of its heroes", defended the film as " clever tendency art" and sharply attacked Brik.

Piscator's feature film premiered in Moscow cinemas on October 5, 1934. Whether it was also shown in other parts of the country besides Moscow and presumably Leningrad is by no means certain, given the considerable lack of films in Soviet cinemas at the time. After the premiere in the Deutsche Zentral-Zeitung, the Austrian critic Hugo Huppert attributed the film a high topical value in view of the "events in Spain" - that is, an uprising by the Spanish socialists and the bourgeois Catalan government prior to the Spanish Civil War. The Hungarian film critic Béla Balázs, who reviewed the film for the Rote Zeitung, did not yet recognize "a perfect masterpiece" in the Revolt of the Fishermen, but nevertheless described Piscator as a great film director in view of the "special nuances of the characters". The Revolt of the Fishermen was the first sound film that fulfilled the expectation of a "differentiated, so to speak psychologically deeper, so to speak three-dimensional characterization". This can be seen in the impressive performance of the female characters as well as in the many nuances of the political characters.

Rediscovery in Germany

At the 6th West German Short Film Festival, which was held in Oberhausen in February and March 1960, the film was officially screened for the first time in West Germany on March 4, 1960, in a trimmed, 65-minute print. The founder of the West German Short Film Festival, Hilmar Hoffmann, had learned of the existence of two 16-mm copies of the film in the Cinémathèque royale de Belgique and the Cinémathèque française the previous year. The director of the Belgian Cinémathèque, Jacques Ledoux, had agreed to a screening of The Fishermen's Revolt as part of a retrospective in Oberhausen. The Film-Telegramm was impressed by the dynamic crowd scenes: "Ant-like, nervous and feverish, the back and forth swaying of fear and anger in the shooting scenes - the counter-movements of the masses culminate in the spirited counter-cutting of the images to create oppressive drama. " The magazine Filmforum praised the masterful direction of the images: "When a clenched fist stretches towards the ceiling and is captured by the camera together with a lamp, when the Bible of the unctuous clergyman is torn apart at the funeral and the sharp sea wind drives the leaves across the cemetery [...] - the image content is always skillfully assigned to the sequence of events." Subsequently, the film was increasingly shown in West German film clubs. Piscator was pleased with the positive media response in West Germany, but found the Belgian copy of his film "dreadful and completely wrongly edited."

The film became known to a wider West German audience when it was shown on West German television (NDR) on February 20, 1965, with an introduction by Hilmar Hoffmann. The film critic Dietrich Kuhlbrodt described the film on the occasion of the television premiere as an "irreplaceable document of German film history" and praised Piscator's "further development of Eisenstein's and Pudowkin's montage principles." The official premiere in the GDR followed on May 1, 1965, in the "Archivfilmtheater" Camera, the cinema of the State Film Archive of the GDR, in East Berlin. An information sheet from the GDR State Film Archive characterized the Revolt of the Fishermen as one of the "top works of the sound film era in the Soviet Union" and placed the film in a row with other masterpieces: "With its thrillingly topical message, the magnificently adequate form that compels passionate partisanship, it [i.e. the work] has earned an honorable place in film history alongside such masterpieces as 'Chapayev' or 'The Road to Life'. " In November 1975, the film was also shown in a "new adaptation" on GDR television (DFF 2) on the occasion of Anna Seghers' 75th birthday.

A restored version, which had been reconstituted from several film prints, was presented by Neue Visionen Filmverleih in Berlin on March 1, 2001. Hermann Haarmann commented the following year in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung: "Piscator's film is a work of art of special quality, which not only borrows from the greats of 'Russian film' (Alfred Kerr) such as Eisenstein and Pudovkin, but also independently develops the young medium in terms of visual and sound dramaturgy. Against Eisenstein's advice, Piscator insists on moving the camera. He attaches it to the bow of a ship or lets it go on a roundabout. Cross-fades are another creative device. However, this was by no means acceptable to Joseph Stalin, who expressed his disapproval of the foreigner Piscator in a private preview in the Kremlin."