by JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
I have reviewed a number of East German productions as part of the Masters of Cinema series, but I think this is the first time I have watched so much verboten material on one Blu-Ray. Just three months ago I covered Frank Beyer’s East German drama Jakob the Liar, the only East German film to be nominated for an Oscar. Now Eureka Entertainment brings us Frank Beyer’s Trace of Stones – released as a part of their Masters of Cinema series – along with three documentaries, one being an insightful, feature-length film on Frank Beyer himself. So, it’s quite the package.
Trace of Stones itself, based on the celebrated novel by Erik Neutsch, was released in 1966 and promptly banned by the GDR (the German Democratic Republic) for being perceived as an attack on the state. In fact, in the mid-sixties, eleven films produced by DEFA – the state-managed film studio of the GDR – were either pulled from cinemas or just banned because of their alleged anti-socialist themes. It’s interesting how the masterpieces of world cinema, be they from East Germany, China or Iran, seem to blossom under the heavy hand of censorship as their makers find new ways to comment on the status quo. Looking at Frank Beyer’s Trace of Stones today, one could hardly find anything remotely controversial about it, other than perhaps one scene when a gang of workmen strip off and jump into a duck pond, grabbing a fully-clothed policeman along with them.
Many of the DEFA productions made immediately after the Second World War were dubbed the Rubble Films as they were shot in and around what remained of East Berlin after the American bombing. Interestingly, Trace of Stones opens on a not dissimilar landscape, although this – being the year 1966 – is actually a building site, where most of the action takes place. A new power plant is being built somewhere in Saxony, East Germany, and the construction is a farce, with essential materials being stolen, faulty plans drawn up necessitating the demolition of some of the work, incompetent management and the delinquent behaviour of the workers, led by a charismatic troublemaker going by the name of Hannes Balla, who dresses like a Mexican mariachi musician. Unfortunately, Hannes is also a skilful and hardworking labourer. Nevertheless, a middle-man is hired to keep an eye on him, representing the Socialist Unity Party, and to run the day-to-day work. Then, on top of all this, a new engineer arrives in the comely form of one Kati Klee, who is able to stand up for herself, but catches both the eye of the obnoxious Hannes and the new middle-man, the latter who happens to be married – and so chaos ensues.
By today’s standards, all this is innocuous fun, but perhaps it doesn’t shed a wildly positive light on the efficiency of the new Socialist Party, the film essentially being a satire of the workings of the bureaucracy of the time. Such was the GDR’s anger at the film, that its director Frank Beyer wasn’t to direct another picture for a decade, while Trace of Stones itself wasn’t shown anywhere until after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Anyway, it now makes its home video premiere on Blu-Ray, along with three documentaries, including a frank portrait of the director Frank Beyer who wistfully looks back over his career, and an archival film called The 11th Plenum: A Cultural Devastation, an analysis of The East German SED Central Committee, which become responsible for the banning of many East German films.
Ironically, the third documentary in the package was also banned by the East German authorities, a film that looks at life in an East German children’s home, and also withheld from distribution until the fall of the Berlin Wall. Now, while it has been restored on Blu-Ray for the first time, it is not allowed to be shown in its entirely in the UK, due to cuts made by the British Board of Film Classification in line with their current guidelines. Early on in Heim (which is German for ‘home’), the screen goes black for a few minutes, although the voice of a young man talks of the abuse he received at home, culminating with a split-second bath sequence. While the young man’s words are disturbing enough – how his alcoholic mother beat his six-month-old sibling – it is the scenes of nudity (I suspect) that were blacked out by the BBFC. But I really don’t know – I’m just postulating. Why it was banned in East Germany was presumably because the socialist authorities didn’t want the world to know that alcoholism and domestic abuse existed east of the Berlin wall. Heim is only 25 minutes long, and is rather random in its execution, but it has really stayed with me.
Eureka Entertainment’s release of Trace of Stones is now available on Blu-ray
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