“A film full of humanity without any trend.” With that overprinting phrase on the screen it starts ‘Solange du Lebst’. A “neither right -wing” manual “that, however, hides a Nazi propaganda film that did not come to be seen in Spain but, surprisingly, in Germans after World War II, where he unleashed a considerable scandal. Today is completely missing.
‘Solange du Lebst’ (in Spanish it could be translated by ‘While you live’) is the closest thing to a cursed film mixture and, at the same time, purely, propaganda. We are facing una movie comparable to which both sides of the war rolled In large quantities, each favoring yours. Those of the allied side are better known, since Hollywood He launched all his machinery so that even non -war movies such as the Westerns or the suspense cinema would insufferate the ideology that the allies were interested in propagating.
On the Nazi side the Fiction and propaganda films They are less popular, however much documentaries such as ‘The triumph of the will’ have gone down in the history of cinema for the power of the propaganda imagery of Goebbels, which produced 1200 films, Many of them prohibited for decades. But films like ‘El Arrow Quex’, ‘I wait for you’, ‘President Krüger’ or ‘Kolberg’ were not as well known as their American counterparts due to their low film quality. In Spain, in fact, the laughible ‘race’, the milestone of Franco’s fiction code, than any of these.
That is why it is not strange that it has not been heard about ‘Solange du Lebst’, that did not premiere in Spain and was barely seen in Germany. The producer, Eva Films (we are not going to get Nazi connotations in every detail, but well, there is the name of the producer, which she shares with that of Hitler’s couple) premiered it thanks to subterfuges as the aforementioned initial message. However, the daring to reach German screens After the Nazi defeatwhen the nation faced global ignonymy and a feeling of guilt, the country ranked, it resulted in a considerable box office failure that ruined the producer.
The film disappeared from the rooms and never broadcast on television. Occasionally it has reappeared in very limited circuits, such as when it was published inadvertently in a collection of DVDs in Spain, ‘jewels of the history of cinema’.
FTW Condor Legion
In ‘Solange du Lebst’, a heroic and handsome pilot of the Condor Legion, the Air Force that Hitler sent to Spain to help Franco in the Civil warshe crashes into the fictional Andalusian town of Torralbán. There he will live a caste and sincere relationship with his caregiver while he remains injured and hidden in a cave, facing the fearsome international brigades who want to invade Spain and the wild Republicans who patrol the area.
The film (which you can see complete, yes, in German, in the video on these lines), despite appearances, it is not a series B shot under co -production. There is a considerable media slack where, in addition, several names that would later be known internationally. The director and screenwriter Harald Reinl has an extensive filmography that arrives until 1982 and where there are from war dramas to family comedies, through ufological documentaries or literary adaptations of the classic mystery writer Edgar Wallace. The leading actress, Marianne Koch, would reach some international fame with Westerns as ‘for a handful of dollars’.
The scarce scope of the film has not even given margin as to become a cult film, but its atmosphere in Spain has raised the curiosity of experts … and the locals. As The ideal newspaper accounttwo scholars carry Three years trying to unravel the mysteries of ‘Solange du Lebst’: They are Julio Grosso, professor of audiovisual communication at the University of Granada and Ralf Junkerjürgen, researcher at the University of Ratisbona. Together they decided to try which areas belonged to the locations of the film.
To do this, they have been publishing in social networks photograms of the lost film and thanks to the collaboration of Internet users have located areas of Granada such as Los Arenales del Trevenque where the pilot, the old clinical hospital in San Cecilio, the Armilla Air Base, the Tablate bridge, the old road of Güéjar Sierra and El Castillo de Lácha. Purely Spanish areas that, however, did not prevent the film from being released in Spain.
Why that unusual destiny? Although his argument left no doubt about his political orientation, neither this nor its atmosphere helped the film to be released in Spain. A possible reason, despite the fact that the Franco dictatorship was completely settled, is that In 1955 the regime was not interested in digging up old ghosts. The pacts of Madrid between Spain and the United States They had just signed in 1953and he was ending the international isolation to which he had submitted to the country. The last thing that interested Franco was his little Nazi propaganda. No matter how well photographed that Granada was.
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