Revolt of the Fishermen

However, joint industrial action does not materialize as the shipowner Bredel offers the small-scale fishermen in the area the prospect of one hundred percent more pay for their catch.

The next morning, there is another direct confrontation in the dunes between strikers and a group of coastal fishermen led by the well-off boat owner Bruyk, who - like Kerdhuys the day before - want to set sail for Bredel.

After conquering strategically important military positions, the numerically superior insurgents led by strike leader Hull win the unequal battle.

"[6] Piscator originally wanted to reach a German film audience and the unionized and politically unorganized classes in Germany, who seemed to him to be particularly susceptible to National Socialism.

According to theater scholar Peter Diezel, Piscator's film adaptation was in line with the strategic guideline of Thälmann's KPD leadership of the "anti-fascist united front and the inclusion of the petit-bourgeois classes".

According to Piscator, however, "since the organized helped the unorganized, even when it was no longer about their own cause, these strikes turned from purely economic to political actions and - at least I hoped so - into a call against a system like the one the Nazis intended.

While the geographical setting of Seghers' story is indeterminable, Piscator imagined "a story explicitly set on the German North Sea coast", which evokes the naval and Spartacus uprisings of 1918 and 1919: "In Kedenek's martyrdom, there are echoes of Karl Liebknecht's assassination in January 1919; the funeral procession and burial scenes echo the resonance of the mourning masses that accompanied Liebknecht's coffin through the streets of Berlin.

[13] However, in the film, the female characters, who in Seghers' work were mainly absorbed in stereotypical roles in the household and at the hearth, are more strongly exposed and actively involved in the economic and political struggle.

[14] While Seghers' narrative is characterized by an emphatically unsentimental, sober form of representation, Piscator is primarily concerned with awakening the revolutionary consciousness of a working-class community in the masses and calling for a united struggle.This can be clearly seen in the "somewhat unrealistic victory of the fishermen over the soldiers"[15] at the end of the film, after an unequal battle with bare hands and sticks against machine guns.

"[17] The author of the information sheet refers, for example, to the opening symbol of the dying shark devouring a fish with its last convulsions, to a knife flashing in the sand as the workers' fronts face each other, and to the soldiers' boots that freeze Marie shortly before the rape sequence.

The German scholar Klaus Gleber describes the preferred use of "editing effects and montage" as characteristic of Piscator's film: "The latter is used both contrastively (while the priest invokes the divine right of power, the soldiers rage) and symbolically reinforcing (surf as an illustration of the uprising).

However, Piscator's film always maintained a "balance between aesthetic innovation and outdated schematization",[20] especially with regard to the rather conventional character acting including physiognomy, posture and clothing on the one hand and an avant-garde formal language borrowed from epic theater on the other.

"[25] At the same time, the intense "emphasis on the elements (sea with ebb and flow, rising and subsiding storm, moonlit night and bright day)" intensifies the "impressive play of light.

At the same time, however, this presentation of different forms of work revealed "an almost naïve trust on the part of the filmmakers in the physical strength of the workers, which pointed beyond the films.

The film is characterized by the desire to counter the growing Nazi movement at the end of the Weimar Republic with an anti-fascist united front, in line with the KPD policy of the time, for which the petty bourgeois classes were to be won over.

According to communication scientist Hermann Haarmann, Piscator positioned his film project "exactly where there is a need for argumentation: in the agitation of the middle classes, who are objectively threatened with proletarianization, but at the same time believe every promise of social advancement.

Given a divided workers' movement, whose factions had accused each other of breaking their word and left the field to fascism at the end of the Weimar Republic, the desire of intellectual KPD sympathizers, who at the beginning of the 1930s "still hoped for a turnaround and wanted to work towards it",[31] was illusory.

In the summer of 1930, Piscator had initially planned to film Theodor Plievier's successful debut novel Des Kaisers Kulis, which dealt with the precarious working conditions on the ships of the imperial navy.

According to the German scholar Klaus Gleber, however, the realization of an elaborate film with revolutionary content in Germany would have faced "considerable difficulties, especially as the 'Münzenberg Group' did not have the necessary means of production.

"[35] Later that month, during a stay in Berlin, he hired fourteen German and Austrian actors for the film project, including Lotte Lenya as the prostitute Marie and Paul Wegener as the shipowner Bredel.

[37] Piscator decided without much hesitation to prepare the exterior shots on the Ukrainian Black Sea coast near Odesa instead, but material shortages and transportation difficulties for the decoration led to delays.

Piscator repeatedly complained to political authorities such as the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union about the desperate production conditions and the poor supervision of the ambitious film project by Mezhrabpomfilm.

In the spring of 1933, the National Socialists' rise to power finally shattered Piscator's intention of reaching a wider German audience with a political film.

The poster thus focuses on the two contrasting positions within the communities of coastal fishermen, some of whom, following Kedennek, join the sailors' strike or, like the relatively well-off boat owner Bruyk, set out as "strikebreakers" to fish for Bredel.

The prominent author of this review, the avant-garde writer Osip Brik, criticized the film for its "consistent pathos", the "diverging styles" and the "lack of dramatically growing tension.

"[46] The communication scientist Hermann Haarmann also interpreted the criticism as part of a "staged press campaign",[47] which Brik had started under official pressure.

The writer Ernst Ottwalt criticized in the German edition of the magazine Internationale Literatur, published in Moscow, that Revolt of the Fishermen lacked "clarity and was difficult to understand", but also decisively rejected Brik's argument.

[53] The communist writer Arthur Koestler, who had attended a closed screening in Zurich, criticized the film in the Parisian exile press in view of its "profound dishonesty", as Piscator unrealistically assumed that the long road from the mass misery of the fishermen to the victorious revolution would be without complications.

Piscator was pleased with the positive media response in West Germany, but found the Belgian copy of his film "dreadful and completely wrongly edited.

According to the journalist Hili Perlson, Voss' phantasmagorical reconstruction of Piscator's film project of the 1930s was not lost to history, "but rather sets its failure as a starting point for the present.