Frisians in Peril (German: Friesennot) is a 1935 German drama film directed by Peter Hagen and starring Friedrich Kayßler, Jessie Vihrog and Valéry Inkijinoff.[1] Made for Nazi propaganda purposes, it concerns a village of ethnic Frisians in Russia.
Frisians in Peril | |
---|---|
Directed by | Peter Hagen |
Written by | Werner Kortwich |
Produced by | Alfred Bittins Hermann Schmidt |
Starring | Friedrich Kayßler Jessie Vihrog Valéry Inkijinoff |
Cinematography | Sepp Allgeier |
Edited by | Wolfgang Becker |
Music by | Walter Gronostay |
Production company | Delta-Film |
Release date | 19 November 1935 |
Running time | 97 minutes |
Country | Nazi Germany |
Language | German |
The film's sets were designed by the art directors Robert A. Dietrich and Bernhard Schwidewski. Location shooting took place around Bispingen. It premiered at the Ufa-Palast am Zoo.
The film has also been known as Dorf im roten Sturm (Germany; reissue title) and Frisions [sic] in Distress (USA).
Soviet authorities are making life as difficult as possible for a village of Volga Germans, most of whose ancestors originated in the Frisian Islands, with taxes and other oppression.[2]
After Mette, a half-Russian, half-Frisian woman, becomes the girlfriend of Kommissar Tschernoff, the Frisians murder her and throw her body in a swamp.[3]
Open violence breaks out and all of the Red Army soldiers stationed nearby are killed by the villagers. They then set fire to their village and flee.[3]
Despite Nazi hostility to religion, a cynical piece of anti-Communist propaganda depicts the Communists as posting obscene anti-religious posters, and the Frisians as piously declaring that all authority comes from God.[4]
The portrayal of Kommissar Tschernoff does not conform to the heavy-handed depiction of Communists as brutal and murderous in such films as Flüchtlinge; he is truly and passionately in love with Mette, and only with her death does he unleash his soldiers.[3] A villager objects to the affair on the grounds that even though her mother was Russian, her father's Frisian blood "outweighs" foreign blood, and therefore she must not throw herself at a foreigner.[3] Her murder is presented as in accordance with the Nazi principle of "race defilement."[5]
After the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, in 1939, the film was banned; in 1941, after the invasion of Russia, it was reissued under its new title.[6]
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