Mädchen in Uniform

Manuela has lost her mother and is placed in a strict boarding school in Prussia for the daughters of officers. The order is military: hunger is a means of discipline, feeling is weakness, and the headmistress controls everything. The teacher Fräulein von Bernburg is the one exception; she is kind to the girls and Manuela attaches herself to her. After a school performance Manuela says so in front of everyone. Leontine Sagan directs. Hertha Thiele plays Manuela and Dorothea Wieck plays von Bernburg. The source is Christa Winsloe's play. The cast is entirely female, and there are women on the production side as well, which was unusual for German cinema in 1931. The narrative does not present the feeling between the two women as an illness or a crime; the matter is not the feeling but the institution's reaction to it. Its politics are open. The order of the school is built as Prussian militarism in miniature and the narrative takes direct aim at it; two years after the film the Nazis came to power and it was banned. It was censored in several countries and shown cut in the United States. The ending was shot in two versions and the prints in circulation differ, which has been argued over. Who it is for: viewers who follow early German cinema and films about institutional coercion. Who it is not for: the acting is close to the stage, the pace is slow, and the sound technique belongs to its period.