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Clip description
Captain von Müller (Louis Ralph) orders his ship to open fire on the Sydney. His offsider calls the gun coordinates. The Emden’s attack is initially successful, but the better armed Sydney soon gets on top, inflicting fatal blows to the Emden and her crew. As the Emden burns, she tries to deploy torpedoes.
Curator’s notes
Apart from a few cut-in shots of the Sydney firing back, early in the clip, this is mostly Louis Ralph’s original film, and it shows that he was an accomplished technician. The film is expertly shot and edited with pace and clarity. Ralph himself is playing the captain, von Müller, a role he would reprise five years later in a second Emden film. Hellmeth von Mucke, one of the senior officers, also played himself. The re-creation of the chaos aboard the Emden is skilful and would have required a sizeable budget and considerable cooperation from the German Navy. Just before the torpedo sequence, we get a shot that appears to be aboard the Sydney, where a gun crew sustains a casualty, amid much smoke. This may be a Ken Hall shot, although it’s hard to tell, given that the original film had scenes set aboard Sydney as well. The torpedo sequence is remarkable, showing the loading process in some detail, including the manufacturer’s identifying nameplate and a series of gauges.
In this sequence, we can see the influence of the Russian film Battleship Potemkin (1925), made by Sergei Eisenstein. That film was enormously influential on theories of editing – or montage, as Eisenstein preferred – but also on military personnel in Germany. The German Navy was impressed with Potemkin’s propaganda power, if not its Bolshevik politics. The decision to make a film about the Emden is probably at least partly a response to the success of Battleship Potemkin (1925). If German rearmament was to proceed, albeit in secret, then German pride needed to be reinforced, and the story of the Emden was a source of great pride in Germany. Unsere Emden (1926) celebrated a defeat certainly, but one that entailed no shame for Germans. Captain von Müller’s chivalry was celebrated in England as well as Germany, one reason the film also did well in England. After Ken Hall’s reshaping of the material for Australia, it did well here too.
