Eureka Entertainment, the leading independent distributor of classic silent/early films in the UK, recently released its latest Masters of Cinema box set, Into the Forest: Folktales At DEFA – and if you are of an age to remember the BBC’s Tales from Europe, you’re in for a treat.
This limited edition Masters of Cinema Blu-ray box set, coming in a hardbound slipcase, features newly restored, high definition versions of The Singing Ringing Tree (“Das singende, klingende Bäumchen”), Rumpelstiltskin “Das Zaubermännchen”), Little Red Riding Hood (“Rotkäppchen”, The Devil from Mill Mountain (“Der Teufel vom Mühlenberg”) and The Devil’s Three Golden Hairs (“Wer reißt denn gleich vor’m Teufel aus”); accompanied by an exclusive 60-page collector’s book.
Eureka! established its award winning Masters of Cinema Series in 2004, a specially curated director-led Blu-ray and DVD collection of classic and world cinema using the finest available materials for home viewing.
Step into the darkly enchanting world of DEFA’s legendary fairy tales…
• Masters of Cinema: Into the Forest: Folktales At DEFA is available direct from Eureka Films here | Buy it from AmazonUK (Affiliate Link) here
The DEFA Story
Between 1950 and 1989, the East German studio DEFA produced a huge number of Märchenfilme, or adaptations of popular fairy and folktales. By turns macabre, heartwarming, odd, whimsical and occasionally downright frightening, these visually arresting and luridly colourful pictures drew on the works of authors such as Wilhelm Hauff, Hans Christian Andersen and, above all, the Brothers Grimm. Some of the finest – and darkest – DEFA folktales include The Devil from Mill Mountain, The Singing Ringing Tree, Rumpelstiltskin, Little Red Riding Hood and The Devil’s Three Golden Hairs.
In The Devil from Mill Mountain, a greedy miller attracts the ire of forest spirits when he and his accomplices disguise themselves as demons to burn down a rival mill. In The Singing Ringing Tree, a young prince must find a legendary tree to win the heart of an icy princess – and risks being transformed into a bear if she fails to fall in love with him.
Rumpelstiltskin follows a young woman whose boastful father claims she can spin straw into gold, leading her to make an ill-advised pact with a magical imp.
Then, the eponymous Little Red Riding Hood sets off to see her sick grandmother, relying on her friends the rabbit and the bear to help her evade the cunning fox and the big bad wolf.
Finally, The Devil’s Three Golden Hairs sees an unfortunate young man tasked with travelling into hell to retrieve three golden hairs from the Devil himself.
“DEFA’s Märchenfilme were perhaps the most enduringly successful genre films produced in East Germany,” say Eureka, “remaining popular for as long as the German Democratic Republic existed – but they are criminally under-seen outside of the former Eastern Bloc. Filled with uncanny imagery and socialist messaging in equal measure, DEFA’s folktale adaptations are both immeasurably important to Germany’s film heritage and wildly entertaining examples of popular European cinema.
“The Masters of Cinema Series is proud to present these five Märchenfilme together for the first time on Blu-ray in the UK.”
• Masters of Cinema: Into the Forest: Folktales At DEFA is available direct from Eureka Films here | Buy it from AmazonUK (Affiliate Link) here
Do you remember Tales from Europe?
While this new Blu-ray marks the first time these films have been released in this format in the UK, older downthetubes readers will recall The Singing Ringing Tree, for one, was first broadcast in the UK by the BBC in the 1960s, as well as previously being released on VHS and DVD.
Both The Singing Ringing Tree, narrated by Antony Bilbow, and Rumpelstiltskin were shown in a serial format, as part of their Tales from Europe programme strand, which ran from 1964 until 1969 on Thursdays at 5.25pm or 5.30pm, after Blue Peter, and before the 6.00pm news.
These European fantasy and adventure tales, dubbed from their European, Soviet and even Mongolian originals, also included The Golden Goose, some stories introduced to viewers by Peggy Miller.
As we previously noted on back in 2019, some of the stories were repeated after the 1960s, often in colour, but not as part of Tales From Europe. It’s my understanding many of these are Missing Believed Wiped.
The Singing Ringing Tree (a beautifully filmed, loose re-telling of the Grimm’s fairy tale, “Snow White and Rose Red”, complete with scary dwarf played by Richard Krüger), was first produced in East Germany in 1957.
“It was a forerunner of Star Wars and came full circle with Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings and Hobbit films, where visuals are woven into parable, recalled UKTV drama commissioning editor Philippa Collie Cousins in 2019, who was hugely influenced by the show when it was first aired.
“I still love that combination of trash, imagination, subtext and sophistication with really interesting visuals, the quest for something we haven’t seen before.”
The Tales from Europe project sprang, initially, through an administrative anomaly. In an article for The Telegraph published in 2002, when The Singing Ringing Tree was re-issued on DVD, Mark Hudson notes that, for a brief period in the early 1960s, the children’s programmes department was unable to make drama programmes of its own, and was forced to scout round foreign film festivals for suitable material.
Much of what they found had a poetic resonance that British television has only rarely achieved, principally because they were made not by television companies, but by their respective countries’ national film industries, which were all heavily subsidised.
“The Eastern Europeans were making first-class feature films for children,” former head of children’s programmes, Edward Barnes told Hudson. “And they didn’t ask very much for them.
“We would re-edit them into short series, and, because we couldn’t afford dubbing, we’d add narration over the dialogue. This became virtue from necessity, because the viewers could hear the original language and it gave them a taste of other cultures and other worlds.”
Of course, some were also wonderfully re-dubbed and spoofed, for example, by The Fast Show with “Der Swinginginen Ringinen Plinginen Tingingen Plinkingen Plonkingen Boingingen Triee“.
The Singing Ringing Tree has since been re-made, in 2016, as part of the German series Sechs auf einen Streich (“Grimm’s Finest Fairy Tales”) starring Jytte-Merle Böhrnsen as the Princess, which is available in English, French and German.
Christel Bodenstein, who played the princess in the original DEFA film adaptation, cameos in the role of herbalist and if you look carefully, you might see a picture of her from the original as a portrait of the Queen.
Produced by ARD The Finest Fairy Tales offers over 40 of the best and most well-known fairy tales from the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen, the films were shot at castles and in forests all over Germany. Just like the originals, they have been a hit in Germany for several years.
However, although widely screened across Europe, including in France, it seems that they have yet to gain a UK sale – although they are offered to schools through the German Goethe Institute.
Head downthetubes for…
• The Shows That Shaped Me: Philippa Collie Cousins on The Singing Ringing Tree
• The Telegraph: Return of the teatime terror by Mark Hudson (30th March 2002)
“The combination of Tolkien’s storytelling in print and the telly visuals of The Singing Ringing Tree were truly odd, disturbing and very romantic. They were what made me fall in love with story, becoming a voracious reader of novels and poetry.”
• Tales from Europe: Story List and original Broadcast Dates (PDF)
A Tales From Europe Story Checklist based on research of Radio Times by Jennifer Shaw, incorporating additional information sourced from BBC Genome
• DEFA Film Library: The Devil from Mill Mountain
• DEFA Film Library: The Singing, Ringing Tree
• The Singing Ringing Tree Fan Site
• MONDO: The Singing Ringing Tree
• Tim Worthington’s take on The Singing Ringing Tree
“Boasting gaudy colours that made it look as though it had been shot through a pile of Quality Street wrappers, mind-frazzling visual effects and alarming interludes including the lead characters being transformed into a bear and a green-haired witch, The Singing Ringing Tree was closer to a nightmare than a fairytale and quite unlike anything else the BBC inflicted on its younger audiences.”
• East German Cinema Blog: The Singing Ringing Tree
• DEFA Film Library: Rumplestiltskin
• DEFA Film Library: Little Red Riding Hood
• DEFA Film Library: The Devil’s Three Golden Hairs
• The Goethe-Institut London offers a touring exhibition consisting of fairy tale posters and teaching materials to British schools and The Finest Fairy Tales are available in German with English subtitles for schools
• Missing Believed Wiped Facebook Group
A group to spread the word about the ‘lost’ classics of television, film and radio and maybe even find a way of plugging some of the gaps. Have you, or your parents or grandparents, got a collection of Film Reels tucked away in an attic or shed somewhere, gathering dust? Did someone in your family have one of the earliest video recorders in the late 1960s?
Masters of Cinema: Into the Forest: Folktales At DEFA
• Masters of Cinema: Into the Forest: Folktales At DEFA is available direct from Eureka Films here | Buy it from AmazonUK (Affiliate Link) here
SPECIAL FEATURES
• Limited Collector’s Edition Box Set [2000 copies]
Limited edition hardbound slipcase featuring new artwork by Carly A-F [2000 copies]
• Limited edition 60-page collector’s book featuring a new essay on DEFA’s approach to folktales by East German film historian Sebastian Heiduschke, new notes on each film in this set by DEFA Märchenfilm experts Sonja Fritzsche, Qinna Shen and Elizabeth Ward, plus the Brothers Grimm stories that inspired The Singing Ringing Tree, Rumpelstiltskin, Little Red Riding Hood and The Devil’s Three Golden Hairs [2000 copies]
• Reversible inner sleeves featuring new artwork for each film by Carly A-F
• 1080p HD presentations of all five films from restorations by the DEFA Foundation
• Original German soundtracks
• Optional English soundtracks for The Singing Ringing Tree and The Devil’s Three Golden Hairs
• Optional English subtitles, newly translated for this release
• New audio commentary on The Devil from Mill Mountain by film historian Michael Brooke
• New audio commentary on Rumpelstiltskin by Sam Goff, editorial director for Klassiki and host of The Klassiki Kino Club podcast
• Fairytales and Nightmares – new interview with writer, broadcaster and Fortean Times columnist Bob Fischer on the history of The Singing Ringing Tree
• DEFA and the Devil – new video essay on the depiction of the Devil in folktales from the Brothers Grimm to DEFA by film and literature scholar Mary Going
• The Magic Scissors (Bruno J. Böttge, 1956) – short silhouette animation inspired by traditional folktales and produced by the DEFA Studio for Animation Film
• Sleeping Beauty Was a Beautiful Child (Katja Georgi, 1987) – short puppet animation adapted from Sleeping Beauty by the DEFA Studio for Animation Film
• The Wolf and the Seven Little Goats (Otto Sacher, 1990) – short cut-out animation adapted from the Brothers Grimm story by the DEFA Studio for Animation Film
All extras subject to change
• Masters of Cinema: Into the Forest: Folktales At DEFA is available direct from Eureka Films here | Buy it from AmazonUK (Affiliate Link) here
- About the Author
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John is the founder of downthetubes, launched in 1998. He is a comics and magazine editor, writer, and Press Officer for the Lakes International Comic Art Festival. He also runs Crucible Comic Press.
Working in British comics publishing since the 1980s, his credits include editor of titles such as Doctor Who Magazine and Overkill for Marvel UK, Babylon 5 Magazine, Star Trek Magazine, and its successor, Star Trek Explorer, and more. He also edited the comics anthology STRIP Magazine and edited several audio comics for ROK Comics; and has edited several comic collections and graphic novels, including volumes of “Charley’s War” and “Dan Dare”, and Hancock: The Lad Himself, by Stephen Walsh and Keith Page.
He’s the writer of comics such as Pilgrim: Secrets and Lies for B7 Comics; “Crucible”, a creator-owned project with 2000AD artist Smuzz; and “Death Duty” and “Skow Dogs”, with Dave Hailwood.
Categories: Digital Media, downthetubes News, Film, Other Worlds, Television
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