Released in 1956, Thomas Muentzer (Martin Hellberg) is an East German biopic conceived on an epic scale and produced in impressive technicolor. The film's eponymous protagonist, a contemporary of Martin Luther, was a radical theologian involved in the Peasant Rebellion that ended with the massacre at Bad Frankenhausen in 1525. West German critics described the movie in derisive terms as portraying Thomas Muentzer as a precursor to the DDR's boss, Walter Ulbricht. Politics makes odd bedfellows and there is some irony in the fact that the chiliastic preacher, Thomas Muentzer, became a hero of the DDR. (In fact, Muentzer's portrait adorned East German currency -- he appeared on the DDR's five mark note.) In the film, the forces of repression are also compelled into paradoxical alliances -- Hellberg, the director, shows Catholic prelates and Lutheran pastors conspiring to destroy Muentzer and his peasant rebels; someone remarks that religious differences must yield to class considerations -- class trumps creed as the Feudal lords and their lackeys make peace between warring religions to crush the peasant uprising. Martin Hellberg was a reliable journeyman director for DEFA, the State-owned studio that made movies in East Germany and he helmed about ten films during his career, many of them staid and respectable adaptation of classical works by Lessing and others. Thomas Muentzer is one of 13 films made by DEFA glorifying heroes of the Communist regime. It's a big-budget propaganda film with a fairly literate script, some massive battle scenes, and lots of earthy, carousing peasants who reveal their true mettle under torture. As historians have pointed out the film falsifies certain aspects of the historical record to make its ideological points.
Thomas Muentzer is introduced as a wayfaring pastor, hiking among the scenic hills of Eastern Germany. (The movie's landscapes are splendidly portrayed.) He observes local nobles harassing peasants and sympathizes with the plight of the serfs. A follower of Martin Luther, he preaches to villagers and conducts masses in the German vernacular. (Martin Luther, a key figure in the narrative, is never shown -- but his presence as a malign force hovers over the film; it's as if there is an iconoclastic prohibition, as with Mohammed, about showing the Great Reformer.) The scenes involving Muentzer's increasingly radical political perspectives are a bit confusing -- I think the movie was made for audiences who would have a general understanding of the hero's story. It suffices to say that Muentzer takes a wife, Ottilie ("Ottie" as he calls her) from a convent that he has been serving. (There is much clucking and scandal about this from the other nuns.) Muentzer argues that a popular pilgrimage site, a nearby monastery perched on a hillside, is trafficking in heresy. He stirs up his congregation to loot the monastery and destroy its religious images. The feudal lords in the vicinity are alarmed and they capture three of Muentzer's parishioners, blinding one of them, cutting off the hand of another, and using red-hot tongs to tear out the tongue of the third. Several peasant villages are burned. Muentzer corresponds with Luther who warns him to cease and desist from this insurgency. By this point, the peasants are in revolt and attacking churches and castles. In the first half of the film, the plot and imagery seem largely derived from Schiller's Wilhelm Tell -- there are lots of scenes involving vows and oaths and groups of peasants armed with crossbows march through the verdant countryside plotting their uprising. These sequences are contrasted with lively banquet scenes in which the princes, offended by the uprising, collude to field armies of mercenaries (Landsknechts) to suppress the rebellion. There are many rather inert scenes involving either the peasants declaring their defiance or the princes taking counsel with one another to suppress the uprising.
Muentzer preaches to his flock in Allstedt. He begins to rant like Adolf Hitler, shrieking that the nobility and clergy must be killed. Church bells are melted down to make cannons: "Wohl geschossen ist halb-gebetet!" one of the peasant warlords declares -- that is, "A good shot is half prayer." Peasant armies are on the march while the princes retaliate by burning villages. The forces of rebellion gather on a mountain at Bad Frankenhausen, setting up a big stockade of haywagons above a conspicuous outcropping of white chalk. Luther has issued a pamphlet supporting the Nobles in their suppression of the peasant revolt, writing that it is a service to God to kill rebellious peasants. Meanwhile, Muentzer preaches that all property must be held in common and that the sufferings of one are the sufferings of all. Muentzer has a son with his wife, Ottilie, by this time. He wavers in his faith in the righteousness of his cause, wondering whether his "inner voice" is not, perhaps, the voice of the Devil. But Ottilie encourages him to believe in the cause and, with a throng of followers, he marches to the white mountain to join the embattled peasants on the peak's summit. Treachery is afoot. Some of the peasants have been coopted by the feudal lords and they betray the cause, deserting the ranks of the insurgents. Further, the peasants have been betrayed by traitors who have adulterated their gunpowder so that they can't fire their cannons. The mercenary armies attack the peasants from all sides after cannonading them within their barricades of wagons. The peasants are defeated and, after a brief vivid battle scene, the camera tracks over hundreds of corpses strewn over the hilltop. One of Muentzer's lieutenants is tortured. The villainous Prince asks the dying man what the rebel forces were trying to accomplish. He murmurs "Omnia sunt communia" -- that is, "all must be held in common". Muentzer has also been captured and tortured. Lying in hay on a wagon that is taking him to his execution, Muentzer tells Ottilie that "(he) was born too early" and the triumph of the peasants, their happiness, will come later -- presumably meaning during the regime of Walter Ulbricht in East Germany. Muentzer is beheaded. The trees near the execution scaffold are heavy with hanged peasants. Ottilie and her young son are conveyed into the twilight, the wheels of the heavy wagon churning through a big puddle reflecting the ominous sky on the roadway -- for the common man, paradise will rise like the sprouting of the golden corn, Ottilie says, and the peasants rejoice that she has saved Thomas Muentzer's writings so that his ideas can guide the revolutionaries of the future.
The film is beautifully restored and contains many impressive images. Hellberg uses low camera angles to pose his characters against turbulent skies. The peasants are resplendent in rich brown and orange tunics and the mercenaries wear scarlet cloaks -- there are banners brightening many of the scenes. Just before the climactic battle, the peasants who unfurl a rainbow flag see an omen in the sky -- a huge double rainbow arching from horizon to horizon. (The film's technicolor is spectacular.) The battle sequences are shot like the combat scenes in Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky, dense tapestries of struggling men in angular forests of lances. The hero played by Wolfgang Stumpf has fanatical bright eyes, harangues everyone around him, and has an unfortunate Prince Valiant-style haircut with long bangs. Stumpf's performance is fairly good and he's plausibly charismatic although the script portrays Muentzer in one dimension only. (The screenwriter, Friedrich Wolf, was an old Weimar Republic Red, who fought on the Soviet side in World War Two and was awarded the Order of the Red Star by the Russians.) The movie is a bit tedious unless you are interested in the historical events that it portrays. The scenes shot in twilight on the eve of the fatal battle are extremely well-staged -- huge groups of men are arrayed vertically against steeply sloping hillsides and there are thousands of torches flaring and the peasant rebels sing hymns while, on the opposing mountains, the mercenaries receive communion administered by villainous Catholic and Lutheran priests who have joined forces to suppress the uprising. (The shots of the mercenaries receiving communion are similar to sequences in Alexander Nevsky showing the hypocritical and vicious religiosity of the Teutonic Knights.)
The film was restored in 1999 and, apparently, about fifteen minutes of footage were lopped off. (The film was 135 minutes long when released; the digitally restored version is 119 minutes long.) Historians point out that the peasants weren't defeated due to treason among their members but simply because they weren't professional soldiers and couldn't successfully repel the well-organized and armed mercenaries -- the film makers were presented with a challenge with respect to depicting the climactic battle which was really just a massacre (casualties with six mercenaries killed and 7000 rebels slaughtered). The movie shows Muentzer defiant to the end. In fact, under torture, he confessed his errors, renounced the rebellion, and admitted that his radical version of Christianity was false -- of course, none of this can be shown in the film.
No comments:
Post a Comment