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Miss Butterfly (German: Fräulein Schmetterling) is a German feature film by Kurt Barthel, the rough cut of which was completed at the beginning of 1966.

The unfinished film, which was considered an experiment by DEFA, was banned in 1966 as part of the 11th Plenum of the Central Committee of the SED

Based on the script, a film montage of the surviving feature film scenes and sound fragments was created in 2002, which premiered in 2005.

Since April 2021, Miss Butterfly has been available as a fully assembled film for the first time after another reconstruction.

The reconstructed version is publicly accessible and licensable via the online platform Progress Film.

The film had its first television premiere on MDR on the nights of June 25th and 26th in 2021.

Plot

17-year-old Helene Raupe, who dreams of being able to fly, lives with her six-year-old sister Asta in an old building district in Berlin.

When her father, a tobacco seller, dies, his shop is closed, even though Helene had always run it together with him.

At the same time, the old building district is about to be demolished.

An aunt from Potsdam promises to look after the two sisters, but leaves again for Potsdam after a short time.

The aunt claims that they cannot come with her to Potsdam to live with her because she supposedly has little space.

Because of this, Helene now is the only one to care for her sister.

Although Helene imagines herself as perhaps a stewardess or model in her dreams, she must work in the Berlin market hall under the company Himmelblau as a fish seller, where she’s not as skillful.

When the store has a shortage of smoked eels on offer, Helene is unable to cope with the rush of customers, makes mistakes in the billing, and is eventually fired.

Himmelblau now directs her to an exquisite fashion business, where she ends up scaring away customers with her direct nature.

She is fired again and dreams of her own world in which she is a successful seller with many friendly and satisfied customers.

Child welfare worker Ms. Fertig appears at Helene's to inquire about her sister Asta's well-being.

She is horrified when she learns that their aunt did not take care of the girls and that Helene has lost her job for the second time.

Helene, however, finds a new job as a bus fare collector and is able to avoid the threat of institutionalization.

Helene becomes friends with a bus driver named Kubinke. He becomes a kind of father figure to her and fortunately also enjoys her job.

However, when an argument breaks out with a passenger who doesn't want to buy a ticket, Helene voluntarily gives up her job as a conductor.

The passenger is a young boxer who she is unhappily in love with, but whom she ultimately recently rejected due to his pushiness.

On her 18th birthday, Helene and her sister are invited to a circus by their aunt, where she is fascinated by a pantomime who acts out catching the sun during his show.

A short while later, she has to answer again to Ms. Fertig, who is dismissive of Helene.

Ms. Fertig requires Helene to resume her work as a bus fare collector.

However, Asta has to move to Potsdam with their aunt.

Along with this, Helene was given a new apartment.

Shortly after, the excavators started closing in on the old building. The one where Helene lived since she was young.

When Helene visits the old building one last time, she discovers her sister Asta in her old apartment. She has run away from her aunt's household.

Upon their reunion, both of the girls think about their location and the morals of the circumstances surrounding them.

They leave the apartment and go to the circus, where they see the mime artist on stage again.

That evening he chooses Helene as his partner for a performance and together they re-enact the events of the past few weeks; Helene's different job positions, and her battle with the bureaucracy.

In the end, the pantomime hands a sunflower to Helene and the girl feels liberated.

Together with the mime, the sisters come out of the circus tent and hand out sunflowers to the grumpy passers-by, who suddenly look friendly.

The film ends with the off-screen statement of "There's no such thing".

Production

Filming and ban until 1966

Christa Wolf, screenwriter of the film

Manfred Krug, whose retrospectively recorded film commentary was intended to take the edge off of individual scenes

Miss Butterfly is based on a script by the couple Christa and Gerhard Wolf, who director Kurt Barthel met in 1963 while working on Der geteilte Himmel (English: They Divided the Sky").

Barthel wanted to present his directorial debut with Miss Butterfly.

Originally, the cinematic implementation of the birth of a butterfly (Helene’s last name "Raupe" meaning "caterpillar" in German) was planned, in which the artistic potential of a girl is discovered.

In the working process, the film ultimately became a representation of a girl's self-realization and the question of the extent to which this collides with the mechanisms of the state. The presentation of the problems and thoughts of the youth in the GDR was increasingly taken up by the film in the 1960s.

Christa and Gerhard Wolf had chosen actress Jutta Hoffmann for the main character, but she was working on the later banned film of Karla at the time.

So the role had to be recast and the Czech pantomime Melania Jakubisková was ultimately chosen for the role of Helene Raupe.

Miss Butterfly was filmed from August 30th to December 8th in 1965.

Among other things, a hidden camera was used, for example in the scenes at the fish market and in exquisite shop, where real dialogues from customers were captured.

The budget of the film, which was internally considered an “experimental film” due to its mixture of real, fantasy, and documentary scenes, was more than 900,000 German marks. (Approximately $493,000)

As part of the 11th Plenum of the ZK of the SED In mid-December 1965, a number of Defa films were criticized and subsequently prohibited (→ Kellerfilm) or even destroyed, including Denk bloß nicht, ich heule , Das Kaninchen bin ich , Spur der Steine and Jahrgang 45 .

As a result, all DEFA films that had just been shot or were being made were subjected to revision.

Shortly after the 11th plenum of the SED's ZK, the studio made the first changes to the film not yet shown.

Manfred Krug spoke of how at the end of December, a comment written by Christa Wolf, which should relativize and weaken certain scenes of the film, were removed. Individual scenes with a hidden camera were removed and a woman was renamed "Ms. Fenske".

A rough cut of Miss Butterfly was shown to cultural officials on February 4, 1966.

Work on the film was then stopped.

Suggestions for changes to the film were supposed to be made in the following three months, but this never happened.

In April 1966 the rough cut was shown again, as a result of which the film was finally banned.

"The criticism is devastating: Miss Butterfly did not correspond to the GDR reality and does not design the socialist image of man.

All false and harmful ideological views criticized by the 11th plenum of the SED's ZK are represented.

The film is a gross falsification of life in the GDR ". The reconstruction finally began in summer 2002 and was carried out by Ralf Schenk and Ingeborg Marszalek.

It turned out that almost all of the recordings were there, but large parts of the soundtrack were missing.

Since some of the film's actors had already died, it was decided against a new full dubbing.

Miss Butterfly was only reconstructed as material documentation, but not as a feature film: “That meant finding and assembling the best shots that were as complete as possible in terms of sound and images.

Scenes that templates from several perspectives were accordingly included in the documentation, incomprehensible or missing dialogues.

[…] The present version is therefore not a complete film, but an assembly of the traditional settings according to the original script.” The reconstruction of the film was completed in December 2004.

On June 16, 2005, the reconstructed version had its premiere in the Berlin "Blow Up" cinema in the presence of director Kurt Barthel. In July 2005 it was also shown in Berlin Mitte's Kino Babylon. In November 2005 Fräulein Schmetterling ran in a special demonstration on the 2nd CineFest in Hamburg; In 2007 the film was shown in the Dresden Cultural City Hall.

The premiere of Miss Butterfly is limited to non-commercial events.

"The performances are accompanied by introductions that respond to the special features of the completed version."

Synchronization

Since there was no more soundtrack for many scenes, the settings in question and Melania Jakubiskovás Slovak dialogue were synchronized.

Regina Kette wrote the dialogue book and Marion Schöneck directed it.

Freimut Götsch, who plays a friend of the boxer in the film, voices a passenger.

Rolle	Darsteller	Synchronsprecher
Helene Raupe	Melania Jakubisková	Lina Rabea Mohr
Asta Raupe	Christa Heiser	Magdalena Gröllmann
Leiterin des Exquisit	Irene Korb	Sabine Arnhold
Boxer	Heinz-Jörg Hermann	Peter Becker
Marion, Helenes Freundin	Karin Heinrich	Linn Reusse
Fischverkäuferin	Anni Müller	Judith Steinhäuser

Criticism

The Progress Film-Verleih called Miss Butterfly "a poetic contemporary fairy tale about young people's attitude to life, a parable about breaking out of confinement and normality, about the dream of happiness."

"The present fragment, a merging of fictional and documentary, was reconstructed on the basis of the traditional material to an exciting, historically and aesthetically attractive work," said the Lexikon des internationalen Films.

Literature

• DEFA Foundation (ed.): Information sheet about Miss Butterfly. Press Release, June 2005 (pdf).

• Ralph Eue: Nachdenken über Helene R. Fräulein Schmetterling – Fragmente eines Films. In: Ralf Schenk & Andreas Kötzing (ed.): Verbotene Utopie.

• The SED, the DEFA and the 11th Plenum, series of publications by the DEFA Foundation, Bertz + Fischer Verlag, Berlin: 2015, ISBN 978-3-86505-406-7, p. 229 –242.

Radio

• Thomas Gaevert: "The film is nihilistic!”. Miss butterfly - history of a ban . HR Documentation Südwestrundfunk 2007, first show: March 5, 2007, SWR2.

Weblinks

• Fräulein Schmetterling from IMDb
• Fräulein Schmetterling from filmportal.de
• Fräulein Schmetterling from the DEFA-Stiftung
• Film des Monats: Fräulein Schmetterling screening from the DEFA-Stiftung