‘Stalingrad’Joseph Vilsmaier’s 1993 film depicting the bloody battle between the Germans and Russians that marked the fate of World War II, is now in the catalog Prime video and its filmin. This coincided with a period when German war cinema again made headlines for ‘All Quiet on the Front’ and ‘Der Tiger’.
Although it was the first German blockbuster to depict defeat, it had a significant precedent: in 1959 Frank Wisber had already brought the war to film in ‘Stalingrad: Battle in Hell’, 97 minutes in black and white interspersed with actual footage from German and Soviet newsreels. Wisber, however, did not have the freedom of means of Vilsmaier: 20 million marks, 12,000 extras and Gunter Rohrbach as producer, who had released one of the greatest war films in history, ‘The Submarine’. It premiered in Munich on January 21, 1993, the day before the 50th anniversary of the German surrender.
The chilling authenticity of this film: part of the filming was conducted due to the lack of snow in Finland, and Vilsmayer, seeking the authenticity of the images, recruited a castaway from a veterans hospital near Prague to give life to the disfigured on the battlefield. In the film we follow a platoon of lieutenants, played by Thomas Kretschmann, who go from vacation on the Italian coast to a penal battalion, and which will experience shocking encounters such as Soviet tank charges against men in the open field.
Closer to the time, another film based on the Battle of Stalingrad was released, Jean-Jacques Annaud’s ‘Enemy at the Gates’. The French director, however, chose to romanticize the conflict and envisioned it very differently than Vilsmaier. It gives the war all its brutality and bathes it in an icy chill that makes it perfectly understandable that Hitler was defeated by the elements on that occasion.
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