Village Without Words


View at Zeughauskino - Deutsches Historisches Museum
  • Lajityyppi: Documentary film
  • Vuosi: 1950
  • Kesto: 00:11:39
  • Kuvaus: If there were an ideal-typical Marshall Plan film, "Village without Words) would come very close to it. Surprisingly, in Kurland's film the ideal takes the form of a hymn, a celebration of aid and recovery. Many of the means and techniques so readily used for ERP propaganda are absent from "Village without Words". Instead, the film breaks away from anything documentary. Its images come together to form a construction in which each individual shot is a building block for the enhancement of the whole. Kurland also refrains from individualization in a story; there are no identifiable individual characters. He does not aim at concrete projects (which would have to be documented cinematically), nor at the well-invented exemplary story (which would have to be staged accordingly). Rather, it aims at a film, as a symbol - not for this or that project, but for the idea of the Marshall Plan. "Village without Words" is a "success story" par excellence. All the set pieces that appear in so many Marshall Plan films to tell of the success of the ERP by means of a project that is as precisely located and dated as possible and tied to identifiable people are present here. But in pure form: some factory, workers who could live in many places, the streets and storefronts of an unnamed town, a stagnant carousel-this is the film's material. The first part could be titled "stocktaking". It turns out dreary. A factory, run down to ruin, streets without people, shop windows without goods. All wheels stand still, only the decay progresses. A fade-out ends this part - and the misery. A ship enters the harbor, from here on there is only forward progress. The ERP logo is emblazoned on the unloaded crates and on the train that transports them. Workers return to the dilapidated factory, repair machines, resume production. The streets revive, the displays fill up. Where in the first part a panning shot across an abandoned square ended on a boy riding a toy warship there at the fountain, here the carousel turns its rounds again. If at the beginning nothing was in order, at the end everything is well straightened. Village without Words is on the one hand an ideal-typical, on the other hand a showy example. © Rainer Rother (machine-translated from German)
  • Avainsanat: VICTOR-E project / ruins / abandoned building / factory / town / ship / Marshall plan / ERP / train / gate / raw materials / workers / reopening / production / carousel / roundabout / shopping
  • Sisältölähde: Deutsches Historisches Museum
  • Oikeudet: In Copyright / USIA - Embassy of the United States of America / Press Office, Berlin
  • Tuotantoyhtiö: David Kurland Productions, Rome, for ECA Italy
  • Väri: Black & White
  • Ohjaaja: David Kurland
  • Sound: With sound
  • Kokoelma: Films of the Marshall Plan
  • Language: en