The Time of Love and the Time of Death on Arte: The Painful Cause That Made Douglas Circus Make a Film

The Time of Love and the Time of Death, released in 1959 in France, is often regarded by many film lovers as the pinnacle of the melodramatic period of Douglas Circus; Who signed into this register the equally prosperous all that the heavens give, and wrote in the wind, in 1955.

The film is adapted from one of the greatest writers of the post-World War I era, the German Erich Maria Remarque (who also plays a history teacher in the film), whose works are banned by propaganda Joseph Goebbels. Minister of the Third Reich. Mobilized on the front in 1916, severely wounded in 1917, he was a lifelong confident pacifist, as was his French counterpart, the no less famous Roland Dorgelles, author Wooden cross. Erich Maria Remarque wrote Time of life, time of death Published in France in 1954 with the title Island of Hope.

The story unfolds in 1944, under Nazi Germany already heavily bombed by Allied airstrikes. Ernst Greber (the wonderful John Gavin), a young German soldier who witnessed the horrors of war on the Russian front, returns to his hometown on a few-day vacation. He finds a house destroyed by bombs and goes in search of his missing parents.

To help find him, he seeks the advice of Elizabeth, whose father, a political opponent, is a prisoner of conscience, and Oscar Binding, the district head of a fellow Nazi party. The trio will try to keep the look of the mind, survive in the ruins, in a world nurtured by hatred, madness and death …

Painful introspection and catharsis

“I never believed in Germany during the war the way I saw this American film in peacetime” Written by Jean-Luc Godard a year before the signing of A bout de souffle in a famous review published in the Cahiers du cinema in April 1959; Explain this The time of love and the time of death Of course, his favorite work was at Douglas Circus.

The desire to make this film is also related to the intimate and painful drama of the circus, which forced him to flee Germany in December 1937 because he refused to cooperate with the Nazi regime. In 1957 he returned to Germany, his home country, to direct his melodrama Eastmancolor and produced by Universal. This is a personal search for him, accompanied by catharsis.

The filmmaker was really worried about the tragic fate of the child born in his first marriage. His first wife, a fanatical Nazi activist who had been committed to the ideas of National Socialism since 1927, introduced his son, Klaus Detlef, in part to seek revenge against the circus, whose second wife was of Jewish descent. The circus son allegedly disappeared on the Russian front in the spring of 1944 and was later pronounced dead.

“The circus turned the time of love and the time of death into an imaginary recreation of his son’s last weeks, expressing in him his suffering – hope – and despair. After the war, the director made an unsuccessful attempt to return to work in Europe. She spent a year trying to figure out what happened to her boyfriend, following instructions and checking report cards. Said British historian John Halliday, author of a book dedicated to filmmaking. Conversations with Douglas CircusPublished in 1971, but with us only in 1997.

Ill, the circus could not complete the editing of his film. The film’s producer, Bob Arthur, took responsibility for following the filmmaker’s instructions. Deftly combines history, melodrama and painful personal reflection, The time of love and the time of death By no means should you miss this evening at Arte.