Sun Seekers (Sonnensuchers) (1958/1972)

 

Picture: C+     Sound: C+     Extras: B-     Film: B

 

 

When two people in a barroom brawl land up in a Uranium mine rather than jail, the craziness and struggle to live and survive takes on a different meaning, and this is if they do not die of untold radiation dangers.  Konrad Wolf’s film Sun Seekers so upset the former Soviet Union and like countries, including East Germany, where the film was produced.  That is because it questioned the mines and the troubled lives the “people” and the “workers” were doing.  That former SS Nazis were there likely caused more alarm.

 

The film is a nicely shot piece with good, reliable acting throughout.  The film draws from some of the best world cinema filmmakers of the time who remain big names, as well as post-war traditions in its native country and like countries.  Soviet Cinema was its own unique animal, and the look here is typical of the new realism that was setting in, whether the Supreme Soviet liked it or not.  The vivid look of many of the shots would go on in films like the classic like I Am Cuba, while black and white itself was reaching a new vividness.  This film was out the same year as Orson Welles’ Touch OF Evil, the last original Film Noir.  The next cycle of monochrome would go up to Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1965), which pushed monochrome so far, it entered another phase.  Sun Seekers is part of the in-between era, though it did not finally see the light of mass release until 1972.

 

Some of it’s influences can be seen all the way back to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1926, reviewed elsewhere on this site), especially when the workers go underground.  It runs 100 minutes, though the box claims 116.  First Run has issued this with Icestorm, who has been handling the DEFA catalog for a while.  An alternate version was actually shot under Soviet request, mostly changing the first half, but it remained too subversive.

 

The 1.33 X 1 image is pretty good, all black and white film, as shot by cinematographer Werner Bergmann.  The print used is very good and the transfer is about as good as this is going to get on DVD.  The Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono is good for its age, including clear dialogue, interesting sound effects and music.  Original music by Joachim Werzlau is also effective, match and well integrated into the narrative and traditional pieces.  The combination is very memorable.

 

Extras include a text explanation on the film and how writers Karl Georg Egel and Paul Wiens had unprecedented access to research all kinds of information on these mines, text biography and filmography information, a stills gallery, the Wismut mine today that includes a great scale models of the sublevels, a text portrait of that mine, the DEFA film library and five sections from The Eyewitness newsreel series on key actors and filmmakers, which have their own subsections.  That is great historical bonus material, but what you usually get from First Run.  Sun Seekers is a film no one was supposed to see, but anyone serious about film needs to see at least once.

 

 

-   Nicholas Sheffo