Erwin Piscator, Lotte Lenya and others in Odessa (1931) for shooting 'The Revolt of the Fishermen'

Erwin Piscator

"Piscator's task ... was to make a film of Anna Seghers' novella The Revolt of the Fishermen. Originally the idea was that it should be produced in two versions, German and Russian, and to this end a German cast was engaged, including Lotte Lenya, Paul Wegener and Leo Reuss, and brought to Odessa on the Black Sea where shooting was supposed to start around the beginning of November. Not much seems to have got done during the three months of their stay there; according to Asja Lacis, who acted as Piscator's interpreter throughout the making of the film, there were weeks of delays as they waited for a lens hood; then Piscator replanned the fishing town which the art director had built him (for which he roped in John Heartfield, who had come to show his work in Moscow); they had to wait again finally for the whole thing to be rebuilt after a storm had blown it down. As a result the German version had to be scrapped; since Wegener for one was due to play Mephisto in Darmstadt in January; none of the footage remains. The Russian version however went forward, though the seeming intention that Wegener should play the part of Kedennek in both versions had to be abandoned. Part was shot on trawlers in Murmansk on the Arctic, most of the rest once more in Odessa; little was done in the studio. Piscator felt that he was keeping close to the form of the book, which describes a lone agitator's arrival in a semi-mythical fishing village and his desperate, almost fatalistic, leadership of a broken strike. But much of its almost classical compactness was lost, and there was a general enlargement and intensification, not only in the severe expressiveness of the photography, but also in the introduction of such episodes as a storm at sea, the burning of the trawler company's offices and Kedennek's funeral procession with its hundreds of mourning fishermen whose top hats (specially dispatched from Moscow) were symbolically blown off by the storm. 1200 fishermen were involved in the strike episodes, which became near-revolutionary crowd series."

(from John Willett The Theatre of Erwin Piscator: Half a Century of Politics in the Theatre pp.128-9)

As the German version never got made, viewers have been deprived of seeing Lotte Lenya's playing the role of Maria in the film).