Ways to Strength and Beauty
About Ways to Strength and Beauty
A six-part UFA Kulturfilm sets modern exercise against Greek models. The parts are the ancient Greeks and a new era, hygienic gymnastics, rhythmic gymnastics, dance, sport, and fresh air, sun, and water. Slow-motion studies show how muscles move. Women are addressed directly, including Mensendieck gymnastics, and the sports are civilian: self-defense and rescue swimming rather than military drill.
Cast & crew
More about Ways to Strength and Beauty
Wilhelm Prager directed for Ufa-Kulturabteilung. Physician Nicholas Kaufmann was scientific adviser, wrote the script, and is also credited as director. The first screening was 16 March 1925. A revised version opened at the Ufa-Palast am Zoo in Berlin on 11 June 1926. Giuseppe Becce wrote the music. Friedrich Weinmann and Kurt Neubert photographed it. Leni Riefenstahl's first appearance in front of a camera is in this film. A shot of Mussolini on horseback was later cut.
Themes
Background
It sits in the 1920s Lebensreform and Freikörperkultur current, and invokes Friedrich Ludwig Jahn's gymnastics as a national model while also aiming the exercises at women in office work.
In film history
It was the most widely seen German Kulturfilm of its period.
Reviews
Contemporary notices were largely favorable and called some of it too long and too posed. Reviewers stressed a careful tone around the nude scenes.
Audiences
It drew a mass audience in the Weimar Republic and was treated as a large advertisement for physical culture.
Look
Friedrich Weinmann and Kurt Neubert photographed it. Slow motion is used to show the muscular effect of single exercises.
Technique
Slow-motion studies break movement sequences into muscular detail.
Music
Giuseppe Becce wrote the score for the silent film.
Notes
- Athletes shown include high jumper Leroy Brown, sprinters Charley Paddock and Hubert Houben, and fencers Aldo and Nedo Nadi.
- Arthur Balfour plays tennis, David Lloyd George and an 85-year-old John D. Rockefeller play golf, and the Norwegian royal family skis.
- Gerhart Hauptmann and his wife appear on the beach at Rapallo.
- Jack Dempsey, Jenny Hasselquist, Camilla Horn, Niddy Impekoven, and Baku Ishii are also in the cast.
- The Bavarian government, joined by Baden and Hesse, asked that approval be withdrawn, citing the effect on young people of nude exercises.
Scenes
- Slow-motion studies of single exercises.
- A revised version screened at the Ufa-Palast am Zoo on 11 June 1926.
Influenced by
- Friedrich Ludwig Jahn
- Bess Mensendieck
Also available
- Internet Archive (silent-ways-to-strength-and-beauty)