Sybille Schmitz

[Estella*]

inspired by watching fassbinder's veronika voss the other day ... which is apparently based on the life of sybille schmitz ... i decided to dedicate a thread to her. though i'll have to admit i haven't seen any of her films yet, i find her appearance very striking.. her life of course was quite tragic.

a short biography from http://movies2.nytimes.com/

The haunting Leone in Carl Theodor Dreyer's Vampyr (1932), Sybille Schmitz remains perhaps the most unusual of Nazi-era German stars, her tragic fate long remembered by such postwar filmmakers as Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who based his Veronica Voss (1981) partially on her. Dark and with enormous brooding eyes, Schmitz's almost somnambulistic beauty was perfect for Dreyer's vampire allegory but Ufa didn't know what to do with her and the Nazi minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, disliked her and thought her "too foreign." A favorite of director Frank Wysbar (Wisbar in Hollywood), Schmitz starred in one of the strangest films to emerge during the Third Reich, Fährmann Maria (1936), in which she played a ferryperson attempting to save a doomed youth from Death. Wysbar remade the film for low-budget company PRC in Hollywood in 1945 but former Miss America Rosemary La Planche was hardly a worthy successor to the ethereal Sybille. Schmitz suffered blacklisting by the regime for a while but stage director Gustaf Gründgens persuaded Goebbels to allow her to star in Tanz auf dem Vulkan (Dance on the Volcano, 1938), one of the many circus melodramas made during the Nazi regime. She was also in Titanic (1943), a retelling of the famous maritime disaster that was promptly banned by Goebbels for being too depressing and not anti-British enough. The drama survives, however, and Schmitz once again offers a standout performance.
Fearing that she was washed up and probably suffering from the aftereffects of her Nazi-era troubles, the postwar Sybille Schmitz became addicted to alcohol and drugs. She still worked regularly both in films and on the legitimate stage but the old mystique was missing. In April 1955, she was found unconscious in her Munich apartment, an apparent victim of a suicide attempt. Without regaining consciousness, the former star died a few days later at a Munich hospital. ~ Hans J. Wollstein, All Movie Guide

 

[Estella*]

pictures from www.sybilleschmitz.de.vu

in berlin in the fourties:

munich, 1951 by f.c. gundlach (who we have a thread on in case anyone's interested)

 

[Estella*]

same source... (www.sybilleschmitz.de.vu)

shooting 'fährmann maria'

in dreyer's 'vampire'

probably one of the most famous images, in f.p1

from filmportal.de

 

[Whitelinen]

Interesting! Thanks for posting, I had never heard of her before.

 

[northernsky]

^i haven't either.

she looks perfect in the first picture.

 

[Josephine]

the first pic in post 3 is so lovely

 

[MulletProof]

interesting, i love the images. and fassbinder as well.

 

[Estella*]

yay, finally a german filmmaker we can agree on

 

[somnambule]

beautiful sybille schmitz...there was something "otherworldly" about her.

from the biography : "schöner als der tod-das leben der sybille schmitz" by friedemann beyer

 

[somnambule]

same source as above
the perfect symbiosis of smoke and melancholy

a very young sybille schmitz

perfect harmony of features

almost statuesque

 

[somnambule]

strange and loose

mein film jahrgang 1956 (scanned by me)

 

[-lucyinthesky-]

Thank you so much for the fantastic pictures, somnambule! I think there's something misterious and fascinating around her. I've only watched two of her films ("Vampyr" and "Diary of a lost girl"), but I hope to see more, although her films are very hard to get.



delcampe