HEART OF STONE (1950)

This is a film for those who get a kick out of Agfa colour processing that makes each scene look like it’s been brought to life out of an old four-colour printed storybook. A film for those who are enchanted by the artistry and artifice of mechanical visual effects and are prepared to meet the image halfway with imagination. This is instant nostalgia showcased beautifully with this admirable restoration scanned at 2K by the DEFA (Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft) Foundation and released on Blu-ray by Eureka Entertainment.

It’s an important movie that any serious film buff should be familiar with and will also appeal to those with an interest in European fairytales, as well as more serious scholars of folklore. Paul Verhoeven’s Heart of Stone still serves up a sumptuous spectacle which was both groundbreaking and controversial in post-war East Germany in the 1950s… and no, it’s not the same Paul Verhoeven, director of RoboCop (1987), who would’ve been 12-years-old at the time.

It’s a reworking of the fairytale The Cold Heart / Das Kalte Herz, collected and written down by Wilhelm Hauff, first published in 1827, and tells the story of Peter (Lutz Moik), a lowly charcoal maker and seller who falls in love with Lisbeth (Hanna Rucker), an orphaned girl raised by her middle-class uncle (Alexander Engel) who has been promised in marriage to the rich farmer Hannes (Hannsgeorg Laubenthal).

Peter and Lisbeth have clearly nurtured a friendship while growing up together. So, when Lisbeth has been crowned the queen of the dance at the town’s summer fair, she seems prepared to shun her fiancé to dance with Peter. However, he’s too self-conscious of his grubby attire and charcoal-blackened hands to take hold of hers. Plus, the drunken Ezechiel (Paul Esser), richest man in town, gleefully taunts and bullies Peter.

The disgruntled and headstrong Peter vows to somehow get rich enough to be able to get his own back and be able to confidently ask Lisbeth to marry him. His mother (Lotte Loebinger) tells him that the rich folk in town didn’t earn their position, instead accruing their wealth by nefarious, unnatural methods. She reminds him of a nursery rhyme she used to recite that is said to summon the spirits of the woods to grant wishes. There’s a choice of fairy folk: the kindly ‘Glass Imp’ (Paul Bildt) or the evil but effective ‘Holländer Michael’ (Erwin Geschonneck). These are local spirits associated with the two main industries of the Black Forest setting—glass-blowing and logging.

The magical sequences when Peter meets the Glass Imp and Holländer Michael are highlights of the film, particularly the use of real animals—a rabbit, a small deer and a red squirrel that turns out to be a fairy in disguise—mixed with stop-frame animation of taxidermied specimens that really signal that everyday reality is breaking down. This rift in reality allows Peter into the hinterland of the forest folk. I don’t know if pioneering Czech animator Jan Švankmajer would’ve ever seen this, but the style seems to presage his methods and distinctive aesthetic. The result is enchanting, cute even, but with a hint of sinister edging in.

Luckily, Peter comes across the little Glass Imp first who agrees to grant him three wishes—just two to begin with and the third if and when his first two wishes prove him worthy. He wishes to be able to dance better than Hannes and to have a magic pocket that will always contain as many coins as Ezechiel has in his pockets, thus tying his fortunes to the richest man. The Glass Imp admonishes him for such silly wishes and suggests he should have wished for wisdom instead.

It’s then that the frightening giant woodsman, Holländer Michael, shows up. Peter only manages to escape with the aid of the Glass Imp, who sends a great black grouse to save him from Holländer Michael’s huge snake. The blatant phallic symbolism highlights a gendered subtext that isn’t uncommon in fairytales that deal with coming-of-age stories. Which is what Heart of Stone is on several levels—for Peter and for the community that at first shuns but will later embrace him as a changed man on his return from misadventure and descent into darkness.

After his first two wishes backfire, and he’s threatened with the gallows for unpaid debts, he decides to strike a bargain with the evil Holländer Michael that involves replacing his heart with a stone. This enables him to be as calculating and callous as Ezechiel, whose heart we also see labelled in the woodsman’s collection. He then leaves for the city where he can earn a fortune through the exploitation of others. Needless to say, things go from bad to worse and, by the third act, he’s done something so heinous that he calls upon the Glass Imp once more to claim his unused third wish in a last-ditch grab at redemption…

Finally, it’s the rejection of bourgeois values and the embracing of hard work, not magic, that integrates Peter back into the community, thus reinforcing the collectivist ideology of a socialist state. Produced at a time when the GDR (German Democratic Republic) was asserting a new cultural identity while attempting to erase any remnants of fascist ideology with a new socialism, Heart of Stone stood out for embracing style and content that harked back to pre-war cinema.

Although serving socialist ideals, much of the imagery is reminiscent of Nazi propaganda paintings that also leaned heavily on German Romanticism and the involvement of cinematographer Bruno Mondi was highly contentious. He’d been a Nazi party member and shot some of their most despicable propaganda films including Jud Süß / Süss, the Jew (1940), commissioned by the Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels. However, it seems he was one of the few who had any technical experience of shooting in colour, which hadn’t yet been attempted in the GDR. Heart of Stone was the first colour movie made by the new nation.

Mondi’s involvement is counterpointed by the presence of Erwin Geschonneck who was a member of the opposition Communist party prior to the outbreak of war. He was a known associate of the Nazis’ most wanted man, the counter-propaganda artist John Heartfield, and a member of Bertolt Brecht’s theatre company. During the war, he’d been interned in concentration camps and survived his time in Dachau. As a fan of Lon Chaney, he designed his own grotesque make-up involving taping his ears into twisted forms, distorting his face with wadding, and placing an ill-fitting milky contact lens over his right eye, causing inflammation that only adds to the effect.

Interestingly, there’s a scene near the climax when Holländer Michael invokes the destructive forces of nature and in one shot he clutches a fistful of lightning bolts. It’s an image closely resembling John Heartfield’s very famous poster ‘The Voice of Freedom in the German Night’ made in 1937 to publicise an underground radio station during the Spanish Civil War, which features a fist of resistance surrounded by similar zigzag sparks of energy. It’s so similar that, given Erwin Geschonneck’s association with the artist, it seems unlikely to have been accidental.

Although set in the Black Forest, Heart of Stone was filmed in the mountains of Thuringia and on ingenious sets built at the DEFA studios at Babelsberg. The impressive sets and special effects were, and still are, the main attraction. These were designed and supervised by Ernst Kunstmann who’d provided VFX for Fritz Lang on Metropolis (1927) when he’d worked with Eugen Schüfftan to develop a process of shooting live action and miniatures at the same time. The process became known as the Schüfftan Process and involved an angled mirror that reflects the miniature while parts of the silvering were removed to allow actors on an aligned set to appear as if they are within the model or matte painting.

This was a time between the end of the War and the building of the Berlin Wall, so cast and crew could still move between East and West Germany and so could the film. It was hugely popular and ranks as the third most successful film ever produced by DEFA, surpassed only by another fairytale film, The Story of Little Mook (1953) and Marriage in the Shadow (1947), an epic melodrama set against the backdrop of the Holocaust.

Although popular with the public, Heart of Stone was met with mixed reviews, some criticising its reactionary elements and also its violent content that were deemed too graphic for a general audience. Apparently, some scenes had already been removed prior to domestic distribution, including lingering shots of the pool of bubbling blood in Holländer Michael’s cave. Also, it seems some executives were fired over the excessive budget that took resources away from other possible productions. The DEFA fairytale films that followed did not have such spectacular sets or scenes with so many extras, meaning that Heart of Stone remains a definitive example of the genre.

EAST GERMANY | 1950 | 104 MINUTES | 1.37:1 | COLOUR | GERMAN

Limited Edition Blu-ray Special Features:

• Limited Edition [2000 copies].
• Limited Edition O-card slipcase featuring new artwork by Carly-AF [2000 copies].
• Limited Edition collector’s booklet featuring new writing on Heart of Stone by Qinna Shen, author of The Politics of Magic: DEFA Fairy-Tale Films [2000 copies]. Changes made to Wilhelm Hauff’s original tale in order to meet the studio’s ideological remit are discussed alongside a summary of the story from start to finish, so it’s best to read after viewing. This is a nice little object and adds value to the package but, as is often the case, I was disappointed that apart from the reproduction of one promotional poster, it’s illustrated with images grabbed from the film itself. There’s no rare ephemera—design sketches, behind-the-scenes documents and such—which I assume is just too hard to legitimately source. Qinna Shen’s essay itself is well-researched, informative and addresses East German production conditions in the post-war years, though it covers remarkably similar details to the audio commentary. However, with her book The Politics of Magic: DEFA Fairy-Tale Films being published 10 years ago, in 2015, perhaps it’s the other way around and Seán Allan was leaning heavily on it, or they are simply drawing from common sources. There are also plenty of quotes from contemporary reviews that deemed the shots of beating hearts nailed to a wall and boiling blood too horrific and contrary to the humanist message, also criticising the imbalance of naturalism dominating realism. Shen explains how Heart of Stone was derided by some intellectuals in the GDR of the 1950s for its ideological contradictions, and there are plenty of quotes from contemporary reviews. Both the booklet and the commentary come from very knowledgeable film historians so it’s unavoidable that they would cover the same ground and quote the same materials.
• Heart of Stone presented in 1080p HD from a 2K restoration of the original 35mm camera negative by the DEFA Foundation.
• Optional English subtitles on the main feature and accompanying shorts, newly revised for this release.
• NEW audio commentary by DEFA historian Seán Allan, author of Screening Art: Modernist Aesthetics and the Socialist Imaginary in East German Cinema. Thorough, authoritative, and educational, providing solid historical and cultural context. Though it does get a little repetitive towards the end, it comes across more as a lecture than a commentary as it rarely coincides with what we’re seeing on the screen. I would have appreciated a bit more analysis of the visuals and perhaps more interpretation of the folklore elements.
• Once Upon a Time in the East—NEW 22-minute interview with Soviet cinema expert Claire Knight on Heart of Stone and children’s media in the Eastern Bloc. Again, a little repetitive to begin with as she covers the political climate surrounding the production and the history of the DEFA studios, but she goes on to offer an additional literary perspective, touching upon folklore and earlier Gothic traditions. The German concept of ‘Sturm und Drang’ is discussed with reference to Goethe’s Faust and the works of Friedrich Schiller. She links the German Romantic Gothic traditions to the Black Forest with its ominous forests and mediaeval castles before delving deeper into the fairytale heritage of the region. The likes of Charles Perrault’s Mother Goose Tales and Grimm’s Fairytales are aligned with notions of Romantic Nationalism espoused by Johann Gottfried von Herder. Finally, there’s another critique of Heart of Stone as an anti-capitalist parable, also mentioned in the audio commentary and booklet.
• Tales from the Black Forest—NEW 24-minute video essay on Heart of Stone, folktales and gothic horror by film and literature scholar Mary Going. In a somewhat intellectual approach, clearly and concisely expressed, Going explores the metaphor of ‘the big family’ where the state becomes father, the land is mother, and the people are their children. This then lends itself to appropriation by political forces and was exploited by the Nazi regime and then by the Socialist government. There’s an analysis of the political remit and the freedom that children’s media in general, and the fairytale film in particular, had to be less explicit and more allegorical, while compromising commercially to sell cinema tickets.
• ‘The Bremen Town Musicians’ (Bruno J. Böttge, 1954)—silhouette folktale short produced by the DEFA Studio for Animation Film. ‘The Magic Ring’ (Bruno J. Böttge, 1957)—silhouette folktale short produced by the DEFA Studio for Animation Film. ‘Thumbelina’s Adventures’ (Christl Wiemer, 1958—animated folktale short produced by the DEFA Studio for Animation Film. These three short animation films produced by DEFA are a welcome bonus, and it would have been good to have an introduction or commentaries for them, or maybe a mention in the booklet. As it is, these family-friendly folktales are exactly what one expects from East European animation in the 1950s, with “The Bremen Town Musicians” being a fun story and the best of the trio. The influence of the period’s kitsch style is evident in the cutesy, big-eyed Thumbelina of the third film, which is a colour cell animation instead of the distinctive cut-out silhouette style of the other two.
• Original theatrical trailer.

Cast & Crew

director: Paul Verhoeven.
writers: Marieluise Steinhauer, Paul Verhoeven & Wolff von Gordon (based on the fairy tale by Wilhelm Hauff).
starring: Lutz Moikm, Hanna Rucker, Paul Bildt, Erwin Geschonneck, Paul Esser, Lotte Loebinger, Alexander Engel.