Modern Languages and Cultures » Film Reviews

Illegal Abortions as Social Poison – Cyankali

Molly Harrabin — Tue, 22 Mar 2022 10:17:46 GMT

Illegal Abortions as Social Poison – Cyankali

Germany, 1930, 85 minutes, b+w

Evan Torner, Associate Professor of German Studies (University of Cincinnati)

Dir Hans Tintner (?-1942), Scr Hans Tintner, Friedrich Wolf Act Herma Ford (Frau Fent), Grete Mosheim (Hete), Nico Turoff (Paul), Louis Ralph (Prosnick)

Struggles over political modernity in the Weimar Republic often took place at the site of the woman’s body. From the women prostitutes of the ‘Straßenfilm’ to the archetypal worried mothers and innocent daughters of the melodrama, the admixture of social policy and economic hardship shaped fictional explorations of the persistent male control over female agency, despite the latter’s recent political emancipation. The title of the agit-prop melodrama Cyankali, slang for the lethal toxin potassium cyanide, invokes poison on both a literal and figurative level to achieve a specific political objective: revocation of Paragraph 218, the infamous law criminalizing abortion in Germany. Both the film and its source material, the 1929 play Cyankali: Paragraph 218 by author, doctor, and abortionist Friedrich Wolf, served as entries in the fierce debate around this law and illegal abortion that emerged in the late 1920s, and remain to this day effective depictions of the helplessness and despair surrounding poverty and unwanted childbirth. Yet one can also situate this roughly-hewn semi-silent film within the latent 1930s socialist film aesthetic – a ‘message picture’ that certainly makes the personal political, while also categorically refusing to reduce national political issues to the level of the individual woman.

Cyankali frames a narrative of a young, beautiful-but-poor woman’s accidental death by poison in her attempt to terminate an unwanted pregnancy. Hete, the eldest daughter of widow Frau Fent, discovers she is pregnant with the child of her boyfriend Paul, but does not want to keep it due to the outright starvation conditions the family already endures. Her search for a safe-albeit-illegal abortion leads her on an odyssey through the unenviable options available to her. She violently snatches her would-be-rapist landlord Prosnick’s sanitary nozzle to drown the fetus inside her with carbolic soap, but Paul cannot assist her, as he cannot stand the blood. The elitist Dr. Moeller comes to the informal aid of a wealthy woman but invokes Paragraph 218 to avoid helping Hete after her. Finally, she visits midwife Madame Heye, who provides Hete with a bargain bottle of cyankali (cyanide) to poison the fetus. Meanwhile, Paul and his friend Max steal from their work cantina to keep the Fent family alive and are consequently pursued by the police. Frau Fent reluctantly administers cyankali to her daughter, who then becomes fatally ill. The police imprison Paul and, as her daughter dies, also arrest Frau Fent for her role in killing the fetus, as per Paragraph 218.

Despite being an early and socially engaged feature film about abortion, Cyankali has received little exposure for technical and political reasons. Shot by the small Berlin company Atlantis-Film on cheap film stock with intertitles scrawled in chalk, the work takes on the very aesthetics of hunger appropriate to both the film’s content and context, the worldwide Great Depression. Audio on the surviving print cuts out on the second, fourth and fifth reel, leaving the viewer in real silence for much of the film. Kuhle Wampe oder: Wem gehört die Welt? (1932), Bertolt Brecht and Slatan Dudow’s tale of a Berlin woman coming to grips with her agency, would outshine Cyankali shortly thereafter in its nuance and optimism, though the latter prefigures numerous moments from the former, such as someone committing suicide by throwing themselves into a courtyard, as well as encounters with an unjust legal system. Moreover, other films from the era’s fierce debate about the right to choose – Eine von uns (1932), Frauenarzt Dr. Schäfer (1930), and Der Sittenrichter Paragraph 218 (1929) – have either been destroyed or exist only in fragments. Neither in the Weimar Republic, nor in the Third Reich, nor in either post-war Germany was abortion a desirable topic for an entertainment (or even educational) production. After Cyankali’s stirring premiere at the newly opened Babylon theater in Berlin, it was banned in Bavaria and eventually consigned to the archive as a work neither aesthetically worthwhile nor politically safe to screen, given the controversy surrounding Wolf’s play and his own arrest as an abortionist.

Nevertheless, Cyankali makes several moves of interest. One is its intermedial tension between text and the body. From the shock opening sequence depicting the title emitting from a desperate woman to the newspapers describing the numerous infanticide-suicides throughout Berlin, the film mediates between text that produces and communicates only pain and death and bodies under stress that insist on their own reality. Not only does the text of the written law apply physical pressures on the female body through enforced pregnancy and lack of support, but Hete’s struggle is precisely against becoming just another statistic: one of the 10,000 women who died each year from the estimated 800,000 illegal abortions administered. Another move is the film’s ending, which suddenly introduces synchronous sound at the moment when an anonymous woman with a guitar sings the ballad ‘Pretty gardener’s wife – why are you crying?’ outside Hete’s window, and Hete cries out in pain ‘Mother! Mother!’ The film reverts to silent film conventions again until the police commissioner interrogates Hete and her family at her deathbed. The powerful sequence to follow literally gives voice to the different discourses at play: the self-satisfied legal apparatus persecuting the helpless, the outraged male workers protesting the law, and the women expressing sadness and remorse. ‘The law that makes criminals of 800,000 women a year is not a law!’ Max yells. ‘Don’t deliver a speech’, responds the commissioner. This self-reflexive moment when the film technologically ‘speaks out’ mirrors the socially expected behavior from its audience, namely open discussion of an issue previously restricted to realms of silence and fear. Colorless and odorless, the cyanide solution is exposed on celluloid.

Though legalized in Germany in 1974, abortion remains a contentious issue in many countries, such that Cyankali continues to prove its relevance. Its effectiveness lies in the fact that it, according to Kerstin Barndt, ‘functionalizes the decision-making process of its principal female character to force a broader set of issues into the political arena’.^[1] Despite the film’s transparency and simplistic appeals, its call for action could very well contextualize today’s debates about the future of women’s bodies under modern regimes of control.

[1] Kerstin Barndt, ‘Aesthetics of Crisis: Motherhood, Abortion, and Melodrama in Irmgard Keun and Friedrich Wolf’, Women in German Yearbook, 24 (2008), 71-95, pg. 83.

Nosferatu: A Breath of Fresh Air

Molly Harrabin — Fri, 25 Jun 2021 11:38:06 GMT

Nosferatu: A Breath of Fresh Air

Eve O’Dea - University of British Columbia

A century after its release, F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), remains a masterpiece of German cinema and expressionist horror. Based heavily on Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Nosferatu follows Thomas Hutter (Gustav von Wangenheim), a young German real estate agent, on his journey to the mysterious land of Transylvania to conduct business with the elusive Count Orlok (Max Schreck), leaving his wife Ellen (Greta Schröder) behind in their sleepy hometown of Wisborg. After a night at the Count’s castle, Hutter becomes convinced of Orlok’s malicious motives as a bloodthirsty vampire. In the dead of night, Orlok begins to make his way to Wisborg for Ellen’s neck, spreading chaos and hysteria in his wake.

Thematically, Nosferatu sits comfortably amongst its expressionist peers, such as Robert Wiene’s Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (1920) and Orlacs Hände (1924), and Fritz Lang’s M (1931). Within this compelling genre, Nosferatu stands out as a masterfully composed arrangement, at no point lagging or rushing but rather playing out at a consistently hypnotic pace. Murnau has managed to present a fantastical tale as reasonably possible, both through precisely controlled cinematic techniques and setting the film amongst the natural world, unchained from the constraints of a movie studio.

An opening title card introduces the story by referring to ‘my hometown of Wisborg’. We cut to a wide, almost a birds-eye-view shot of a German town. In the foreground, a church spire cuts the screen in two. In the background pedestrians move about the streets, past brick-and-mortar houses and shops. Compare this to the introductory scene of Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari. The narrator begins his tale by reminiscing about ‘The little town where I was born’. We iris-in to a painted backdrop image of around a hundred houses literally stacked on top of each other, bending like rising flames. It resembles something from a children’s book, completely disregarding the laws of physics or gravity. It looks nothing like anything that exists in real life, so we can leave it behind, along with our fear, at the movie theatre. In 1922, European audiences of Nosferatu would have been especially horrified to see a hometown so like their own at the centre of this horrific tale. On their way home from the theatre, they may have hesitated before turning the corner. Today, it presents like a historical document, avoiding any excess of drama or extravagance to remind us that it’s only make-believe.

During Hutter’s voyage to Orlok’s castle, he treks through the Carpathian Mountains, ignoring several warnings from superstitious locals. By filming this region as is, without amplification, Murnau manages to heighten the tension with the mere rustle of a leaf, forcing us to consider what lies underneath. Rather than roll, the mountains stab upwards, as if desperate to break free from their tectonic restraint. This only prepares us for Orlok and his castle, each as if moments from crumbling, clinging desperately to their last signs of life. We hold our breath at the sight of this decay, lest something should topple over. This geographical range does not need to be enhanced by dramatic close-up, or replicated as a painted, highly defined backdrop. The simple presentation of this land midway between day and night, accompanied by this ghastly story does more than enough to produce feelings of unease and anxiety. In lieu of claustrophobia often elicited by the densely designed sets of expressionist cinema, Nosferatu evokes dread from exposure. Here, there is nowhere to hide. Murnau’s masterful depiction of the natural world makes us think twice about our next stroll through the woods.

Nosferatu’s influence appears in countless allusions and remakes. Its shadow has been present throughout the last century of vampire cinema, with filmmakers both German and international using it as the basis for their own projects. German director Werner Herzog took a stab at the property in 1979 with Nosferatu The Vampyre, casting his frequent collaborator Klaus Klinski in the title role. Robert Eggers, director of modern horrors The VVitch (2015) and The Lighthouse (2019) has expressed interest in remaking it as well. As silent films go, it can easily be approached by non-aficionados, transcending a century of evolving tastes to effectively send chills down your spine in 2021. The choice to use real world settings instead of glaringly artificial film sets allows the film to transcend the cinematic universe and exist as a sort of myth, prime for further artistic inspiration.

Though in fact a prominent actor in both film and theatre, Schreck’s low visibility in American entertainment has led to speculation surrounding his identity. So convincing was his performance that legends persist that he was in fact an actual vampire. Such a theory was the basis for E. Elias Merhige’s Shadow of the Vampire (2000), a fictionalized retelling of the making of Nosferatu that suggests that Schreck, played by Willem Dafoe, was able to accomplish his iconic performance due to being an actual creature of the night. This theory also popped up in the fifth season of American Horror story, in which Murnau, transformed by Schreck, in turn transforms silent film legend Rudolph Valentino. Both Orlok’s physical appearance and Schreck’s performance have remained effective one hundred years later. Orlok does not remains hidden in the shadows until a big reveal that ultimately leads to disappointment, his arrival on screen is almost matter of fact. Hutter looks at him with a curious eye, but not immediate terror. The skilled makeup artistry feels neither dated nor overblown. Though overtly inhuman, we are permitted to consider for just a moment whether something like Orlok could exist in the real world. In one of the film’s most iconic scenes, in which Hutter tries to take shelter from his ghoulish host in his bedroom, Orlok appears in the coffin-shaped doorframe, walking slowly towards the camera and his terrified prey. Given the realism of the surroundings, we forget that there is any sort of barrier between us and what appears on screen, and we recoil.

At his best, the films of Murnau play like musical arrangements. With titles such as Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror and Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927), his American feature debut, it is easy to believe that this was his exact intention. More than any of his other films, Nosferatu moves at a constant pace. It is not dragged down by any superfluous subplot, nor is any moment brushed over. Its unwavering rhythm practically hypnotizes, as we, like Orlok’s victims, become ensnared in its mesmeric trap. From the very beginning, it grabs you, and for ninety minutes, you are under absolute control.

Anders als die Andern: The Preservation of Loss

Molly Harrabin — Fri, 04 Jun 2021 13:22:33 GMT

Anders als die Andern: The Preservation of Loss

Neha Shaji, University of Exeter

Austrian director Richard Oswald and German–Jewish sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld’s collaboration Anders als die Andern remains, both technically and narratively, a preservation of loss. Premiering on May 24 1919, the film garnered negative attention due to its openness and acceptance of male homosexuality. It was banned a year later in 1920 by the Weimar Republic’s censor and prints of the film were amongst works burned by the Nazis when Hitler came to power. Hirschfeld and other contemporary directors later subjected the film to revisions and reconstruction. The copy I am using for this review is the Goethe-Institut’s Stefan Drößler restoration, which uses archival footage of Hirschfeld’s lectures, intertitles, and censorship documents in an attempt to reconstruct the film’s complicated flashback structure. Anders als die Andern was one of Oswald’s specialties - the Aufklärungsfilme (‘enlightenment films’) - which depicted ‘societal ills’ in order to better understand them. Other topics covered include prostitution, abortion and venereal diseases. The film was also regarded as part of Hirschfeld’s campaigns against Paragraph 175 of the German Constitution that had criminalised male homosexuality in Germany since 1871. Hirschfeld, expecting the film to be banned, preserved a written outline of Anders als die Andern in one of his yearbooks, from which the reconstructions were crafted.

Anders als die Andern follows violinist Paul Körner (played by Conrad Veidt, later of Caligari and Casabalancafame) and his burgeoning love affair with his student Kurt Sivers (Fritz Schulz). However, their illicit happiness is marred by the blackmailer Franz Bollek (Reinhold Schünzel) who requires 1000 Marks for his silence on Körner’s homosexuality. Bollek’s demands increase until Körner takes his own life through an overdose of barbiturates. As Körner comes to terms with Bollek’s extortion, the film jaggedly transitions between his memories, which include a Hirschfeld lecture and a visit to a hypnotist in an attempt to ‘cure’ himself of his homosexuality. His memories oscillate between misery and joy. For a film often referred to as the ‘first gay film’ and thus carrying the consequent historical responsibility on its shoulders, Anders als die Andern’s narrative is comparatively straightforward. It is bookended by holes, beginning and ending with the tragedy of queer suicide: the unnamed man in the newspaper headline, and then Körner himself. The largest loss, however, is situated in the middle of the film – the loss of Hirschfeld's presence and lecture, which reconstructors attempted to fill with title cards, scientific documents and archival footage. This discordance in the reconstruction serves as a marker indicating that something there too was lost. As such, the film is less of an ode to loss but rather a reminder of what was taken away, and what was subsequently recreated.

Whilst Veidt was not necessarily a household name by the time he starred in Anders als die Andern, a retrospective reading of the film casts him alongside the other heroes he played: vampiric, somewhat exotic, and androgynous. For those familiar with Hirschfeld’s work, this is unsurprising - Körner cuts neither a masculine nor feminine figure but a supernatural, tragic one. He later went on to star in the horror Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, one of Weimar Germany’s most famous films, where his character, Cesare, is incited to murder by the eponymous figure. Physically, there was nothing that set Körner out to be Anders als die Andern- he trod the in-between without resorting to crude stereotype or medical caricature, but a contemporary post mortem of the film connects him to his famous portrayals of death, loss, and tragedy. It is this tragedy that Veidt portrays spectacularly throughout the narrative, illustrating the progressive potential of loss, but also the preservation of an act of Selbstmörder (self-murder) and the reasons it happened. The lost ending of the film uses Körner’s suicide as a catalyst to outline that potential, and the advice given to Sivers is also applicable to the audience – don’t let this happen again.

But it would. Here, Oswald’s theatrical techniques hit the hardest: the majority of scenes in Anders als die Andern are shot perpendicular to the actors’ faces, often intercutting with close-ups from the same angle. Each time Körner is exposed to the letter, Bollek, or negative reactions to his sexuality, the camera first frames Veidt’s face and expression tightly from the front. It then switches to the Öffentlichkeit, the public sphere that Hirschfeld was attempting to influence in his campaign for gay rights. The shifting between the personal and the public was typical of the Aufklärungsfilm, insisting through both narrative and camerawork that Körner was one of many, quite literally part of a parade. This parade, whilst certainly steeped in respectability politics and early twentieth century figurations of ‘the noble queer’, also serves as a temporal link to the public sphere. It disconnects queerness from modernity and links it to tradition and nobility – a uniform representation of queer figures in positions of pride. Respectability politics aside, this method of normalising queer sexuality was both typical of Hirschfeld whilst also being a rare occurrence in cinema of the time. Indeed, as Körner spends half the narrative driven to a metaphorical corner: a parade of “respectable” queer figures offsets and counters the loss of dignity in Körner’s present. Additionally, Oswald’s simultaneous centering and contextualising of Körner makes the film’s ending a successful Verfremdungseffekt (the result of alienating an action from the audience theough artificiality). With Oswald’s constant intercutting between Veidt’s anguished expressions and the wider spaces (including gay spaces) that he inhabits, Körner’s suicide is no longer an individual tragedy to which an audience is passive. It becomes a deliberate act of self-murder, impacting and impacted by the general public and their attitudes.

This is where the loss of Hirschfeld’s uncut lecture is felt most keenly, as it serves as another link between the public and private narratives. The lecture was filmed with a wide angle shot, with Hirschfeld either side-on or facing the on-screen audience, once again linking the impacting and impacted by. But the film is not without queer joy, which is tremendous for a narrative so consumed by loss. Körner and Kurt are happy in their relationship, and the tragedy was caused by those around them instead of themselves. The reconstructions and restorations of the film manages to keep that momentary joy, even as they showcased loss. Whilst it is near impossible to give a reading of Anders als die Andern as it was first shown, even with Hirschfeld’s copious notes on the film, its atemporality endures even through numerous dustings of fingerprint powder.

Works Consulted

Linge, Ina, ‘Sexology, Popular Science and Queer History in Anders als die Andern’, Gender and History, 30.3 (2018), 595-610

Weber, Matthias, and Wolfgang Burgmair, '”Anders Als Die Andern” Kraepelins Gutachten Über Hirschfelds Aufklärungsfilm: Ein Beitrag Zur Psychiatriegeschichte Der Weimarer Republik', Sudhoffs Archiv, 81.1 (1997), 1-20

“Now THAT impresses me!” Review of Die Austernprinzessin (The Oyster Princess, 1919)

Molly Harrabin — Thu, 27 May 2021 11:45:39 GMT

“Now THAT impresses me!” Review of Die Austernprinzessin (The Oyster Princess, 1919)

Thomas Double, King’s College London

A genre dominated by clowns and tramps, slapstick comedy is often considered a “low art”. Narratives are motivated by violence, gags are socially subversive and often challenging to contemporary tastes and mores, and characters – like Chaplin’s “Little Tramp” – more often than not occupy the lowest social stratum. On the contrary, Ernst Lubitsch’s Die Austernprinzessin (The Oyster Princess), a sharply satirical “Grotesque Comedy in Four Acts”, takes the brush strokes of slapstick and applies them liberally to the upper classes. This comedy of (bad) manners owes more to the early French high-society slapstick of Max Linder than to Charlie Chaplin; perhaps this kind of humour played better in Europe.

Lubitsch’s characters, in spite of (or perhaps owing to) their status, are boorish, selfish, incompetent, lustful swindlers who surround themselves with opulence and excess. Their world is propped up by a legion of robotic servants who move in a huge ballet, in which every aspect of life becomes automated for the ruling class. And yet, at the same time, these characters are immensely likeable, and the film leaves such an irresistibly sweet taste in the mouth of the viewer that the satire slips through almost unnoticed, at least if not for Lubitsch’s winkingly self-conscious punchlines, often delivered directly to camera.

The plot is a relatively simple farce but provides a foundation for several solid comic performances. Mister Quaker (Victor Janson), the “Oyster King of America”, is a severe man; “That doesn’t impress me at all,” is his catchphrase. Quaker is disturbed in the middle of his business by the raging of his daughter Ossi (Ossi Oswalda), in the process of destroying the living room. She explains to her father that the daughter of Mr. Blakpott, “the Shoe Polish King”, has married a count. Determined to not be outdone, (but caring little for his daughter’s desires), Quaker sends a missive to the bumbling matchmaker Seligson, requesting “a son-in-law with a pedigree in accordance with my oysters”. Seligson naturally selects Prince Nucki (Harry Liedtke), a disgraced royal heavily in debt and disinclined to marriage (what a catch!) When Nucki sends his dim-witted envoy, Josef (Julius Falkenstein), to Quaker’s residence in his stead, Ossi assumes he is the prince, and thus the farce begins.

It’s a typical Lubitsch film, with excessive consumption, grotesque intoxication, subversive sexuality, scandalous nights on the town, and – spoiler alert – a happy ending in which sex is legitimated through marriage. It’s a pointedly European version of silent comedy, depicting the oafish American industrialist and his materialistic daughter with venomous parody; the potent and dashing Nucki, in contrast, is apparently German. The film’s women (more accurately, woman) are interesting: the shrew nightmare Ossi certainly complicates a feminist analysis, but she has a certain agency in her openly expressed, powerful sexual appetite. She’s also hopelessly incompetent in her gender role. In an early scene, while instructing Ossi in “the ways of marriage”, a maid exasperatedly tries to show her how to bathe a model baby. To the servant’s horror, she holds it by the ankles and tries to shake the water off. “Well, children really shouldn’t be coddled,” she says. Later scenes depict women boxing each other, a rare sight in the silent era. As always when it comes to subversive content in comedy, however, it’s a trade-off: by rendering this liberated behaviour as comic, the film risks merely reinforcing the values it challenges. Lubitsch, always the populist, is adept at knowing exactly where to toe the line so that his films are just edgy enough to be appealing without causing outrage. It’s in this respect that Chaplin outshines Lubitsch as a filmmaker; he wasn’t afraid of courting controversy if it meant he could say the things he wanted.

More time could have been afforded, for instance, to the experience of Quaker’s nameless servants, who in their multitude and their synchronicity become almost non-characters, acting as pieces of furniture in the opulent mansion. In the memorable but all-too-brief banquet sequence, Lubitsch affords us a glimpse backstage. A montage reveals a huge conveyor belt of a kitchen, where the aristocrats’ dinner is prepared by hundreds of disembodied hands behind closed doors, until the guests suddenly burst into a “foxtrot epidemic” and the rhythms of work give way to the sexual charge of the dance. Quaker’s mansion is a precursor to the kind of world that would be parodied by Chaplin in Modern Times, but where Chaplin renders industrial society terrifying, placing us in the perspective of the downtrodden workers, in Die Austernprinzessin it is burlesqued, rendered hilarious and almost appealing, as we follow the petty troubles of the aristocracy. Lubitsch’s mastery of comic rhythm, which would become his trademark, is evident here already. But it’s easy to see how a society who could delight in such images – for whom fascism was looming on the horizon – might have missed the dangerous potential of the machine.

Undressing Injustice: G.W. Pabst’s Die Freudlose Gasse

Molly Harrabin — Thu, 20 May 2021 11:58:33 GMT

Undressing Injustice: G.W. Pabst’s Die Freudlose Gasse

Helen Atkinson, Canterbury Christ Church University

©IMDB

It is a pan-European cast and crew who gather at Berlin’s Zoo Studios in February 1925 to make Die Freudlose Gasse. G.W. Pabst, is already well-known in the theatre community but is beginning to establish himself in the growing medium of film. He has a successful career ahead, though he will not become as famous as one of Die Freudlose Gasse’s stars. Nineteen-year-old Swede, Greta Garbo, has recently arrived in Berlin, fresh from the success of her first film, Gösta Berlings Saga, to play the role of dutiful daughter Greta Rumfort. Just a few months later, she and her Swedish co-star, Einar Hanson, will sail to Hollywood and sign a contract with Louis B. Meyer. In contrast to their inexperience, Pabst’s film is also packed with veteran Weimar talent: Werner Krauss delights in the role of the moustache-twirling butcher who trades meat for sexual favours; dancer and actor, Valeska Gert, has a scene-stealing role as the plasticine-faced owner of a dress shop-cum-brothel. Even the role of Greta’s younger sister, Marianne, is played by child star Loni Nest who, at nine years old, is clocking up her thirty-sixth appearance in Weimar film. And the woman whose international fame is selling the film is 43-year-old diva Asta Nielsen.

With this combination of talent, we might expect Die Freudlose Gasse to be better known. The film’s scathing social criticism juxtaposes the Babylonian excesses of the upper-middle classes with the poverty faced by the residents of Melchoirgasse, the “joyless street” of the title. Pabst’s parallel editing shows us the high life of the Hotel Carlton dancefloor where wives and daughters of wealthy men foxtrot their way between flirtations, then throws us into sleazy Hotel Merkl, where assignations lead to murder and women are forced to sell themselves in order to survive. Die Freudlose Gasse is social commentary disguised as murder mystery. Pabst uses mirrors and windows to reflect society back to his audience but, like a detective, we must put the pieces together to see the full picture. We may be titillated by the promise of extra-marital encounters but are forced to confront the economic inequality that underpins them. By the time that the bodies in the tableaux vivants have shed their clothes, we are aware that these women have also shed their hopes of employment, relationships, economic stability and state support. We think that we are watching a whodunnit, but gradually it becomes apparent that it is not ‘who’ that is important but ‘why.’

Women’s lives are at the centre of the story. Greta and Marie live in the same building and both have to look after themselves when men are unable to do so. Marie’s father is one of the many left disabled, disgruntled and dependent by the war, whilst her fiancée is bewitched by dollar signs. Similarly, Greta’s father (Jaro Furth) is a diligent civil servant whose services are no longer required. He lacks the skills to survive in the modern city. Both women are forced to confront the reality that they are economically powerless – with nothing to sell except themselves. Yet, these women are not just passive victims of a corrupt and unequal society. Greta and Marie may take different paths down the street, but they are both fighters, prepared to act in defence of themselves and those they love. Even homeless Else (Hertha von Walther), the lowest on the post-war economic food chain, is dignified by her small acts of kindness, her devotion to her family and her refusal to give up hope. It’s no coincidence that her baby comes to symbolise the spirit of Melchiorgasse. Nor that the only upper middle-class character who learns anything in the film is a young woman. At the start of the film, Regina Rosenow (Agnes Esterhazy) is a spoilt rich girl, whose thoughtless actions begin a chain of events leading to murder. By the end, she’s shaken off the influence of her businessman father and, alongside Greta, Marie and Else, she gains our respect. Pabst’s skill is in interweaving the journeys of the four women. They make mistakes, their judgement is often poor, and at times they are naive. We know that they won’t all have happy endings but we care about them because they care about others.

The film is also beautiful to watch. With the experienced hand of cinematographer Guido Seeber behind the camera, Garbo’s face glows in an incandescent light. Her mentor, Finnish director Mauritz Stiller, insisted that she was shot on expensive Kodak film, rather than the Agfa that was commonly used in Berlin. This, alongside the use of slow motion, supposedly to disguise Garbo’s visible nerves, creates a soft vulnerability to her beauty - the same technique would be used in her early Hollywood pictures. But perhaps the most striking visual image in the film is of Nielsen, as ‘fallen woman’ Marie. She looks directly out at the camera through unblinking eyes, forcing the viewer to look beyond the outlandish finery that represents the Babylonian excesses of the city, and to focus on her face, frozen in despair.

Die Freudlose Gasse takes us behind the window dressing of the new Babylon, where decadence is the dance partner of despair, and there’s always a price to be paid. Although it is a ‘street film’ what’s important are the lives of those that live, work, love and break their hearts on those streets. The setting may be ‘joyless’ but the women that inhabit them are forces to be reckoned with - and a sheer joy to watch.

Works Consulted

Der Andere Blick [The Other Eye], dir by Hannah Heer and Werner Schmiedel (Thalia Film, 1991) [DVD]

H.D., ‘“An Appreciation” [1929]’, in Close Up: Cinema and Modernism 1927 - 1933, ed. by James Donald et al., (London: Cassell, 1998), pp.139 – 149

Hall, Sarah F., ‘Inflation and Devaluation: Gender, Space, and Economics in G.W. Pabst’s The Joyless Street (1925)’, in Weimar Cinema: An Essential Guide to Classic Films of the Era, ed. by Noah Isenberg (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), pp. 135 – 154

Horak, Jan-Christopher, ‘Reconstructing the text of The Joyless Street (1925)’, Screening the Past, (1998), <http://www.screeningthepast.com/2014/12/film-history-and-film-preservation-reconstructing-the-text-of%C2%A0the-joyless-street%C2%A01925/ > [accessed 1 February 2021]

Pabst Wieder Sehen [Reviewing Pabst], dir. by Wolfgang Jacobsen and Martin Koerber (Ekion Media GMBH, 1997) [DVD]

Forward! Don't Forget!: Review of Kuhle Wampe oder Wem gehört die Welt? (1932)

Molly Harrabin — Fri, 30 Apr 2021 10:43:15 GMT

Forward! Don’t Forget!: Review of Kuhle Wampe oder Wem gehört die Welt? (1932)

Kip Wilson, YA author of White Rose and The Most Dazzling Girl in Berlin

Kuhle Wampe oder Wem gehört die Welt? (1932) is a masterpiece of Weimar cinema that combines excellence in writing, direction, and musical accompaniment, all working together with factory-line precision to offer a glimpse into proletariat Berlin. The key to the film’s brilliance lies with the collective of artists who created it: the writing team of Bertolt Brecht and Ernst Ottwald, director Slatan Dudow, and composer Hanns Eisler.

These core creatives—and Communist supporters—present a city whose residents are suffering after years of hyperinflation, unemployment, and political strife. They waste no time getting their political point across. The suffering, already clear in the initial montage of tenements and factories, only mounts as headlines flying by feature growing unemployment numbers. The film then shifts to a more human focus on the impatient gaggle of young people waiting for the release of the job ads before setting off to the locations of the listings on their bicycles, accompanied by frantic, desperate music. Even then, there’s no respite, as they’re unfortunately and disappointingly turned away.

Beyond the efforts of the creative team, the acting in the film is also superb. Hertha Thiele, who had already achieved fame in the groundbreaking lesbian cult classic Mädchen in Uniform (1931), plays the starring role here as Anni, a factory worker whose father and brother are both unemployed. After her brother is driven to suicide by a combination of his own despair and his parents’ lack of compassion, the family is subsequently evicted for non-payment of rent. Anni turns to her boyfriend Fritz (Ernst Busch) for help. He invites them out to Kuhle Wampe east of Berlin on the Müggelsee—an actual tent city in operation from 1913 to 1935. The film’s scenes shot on location—including the streets of Berlin, the Kuhle Wampe site, and the S-Bahn—are certainly part of what gives the film its authentic flavor.

But it’s not all fun and games out at Kuhle Wampe. Fritz gets Anni pregnant, and once she realizes his eventual agreement to become engaged isn’t voluntary, she turns to other solutions, moving in with her co-worker Gerda (Martha Wolter) and getting more involved in the left-wing workers’ movement, thus staking her claim as a revolutionary against those aiming for tyranny and oppression.

The action leads to a sports festival, where the main focus is on the movement of the crowd of young athletes—including Gerda—participating in rowing and other racing events. Eisler’s music, which accompanied the frenzied pace of the bicyclists at the beginning of the film and turned romantic with “Das Frühjahr Kommt” at Kuhle Wampe, steals the show here with the “Solidaritätslied”—a catchy earworm with a passionate plea for action that remains in the subconscious long after the film finishes.

The film’s climactic scene—a discussion between strangers in a packed car on the S-Bahn—was directed by Brecht and culminates with the ominous question of who will change the world. A young man points to several older people in the car, saying it won’t be any of them, but Gerda speaks for herself and her fellow young activists with the response, “Those who don’t like it!”

This highly political film begins with harsh reality and ends with hope, but it unfortunately didn’t signal the beginning of a mass wave of change these artists desired. Instead, by the time of the film’s release in May 1932, the Weimar Republic already lay on its deathbed. Once the Nazis came to power in 1933, Kuhle Wampewas at the top of the list of films banned and withdrawn.

Most of those involved with the film left Germany, including Dudow, Brecht, Eisler, and Thiele. A notable exception is the actress who played Gerda. Martha Wolter stayed in Berlin and became a member of the Red Orchestra resistance group with her husband Walter Husemann. After the couple’s arrest in 1942, Walter was executed in Plötzensee prison. Martha remained imprisoned until liberated by the Red Army in 1945—having at least done her part to try to change the world.

M - A Milestone of Sound Film

Molly Harrabin — Tue, 30 Mar 2021 11:36:04 GMT

M – A Milestone of Sound Film

Fiona Bumann, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität

When the first sound films were shown in Weimar cinemas in 1929, a new era full of creative possibilities began for German film production. When Fritz Lang released his first sound film M – Eine Stadt sucht einen Mörder (1931), he adopted the new medium with confidence and made it an integral part of moving the plot forward. M has become known worldwide as an artistic piece which celebrates the union of image and sound.

The additional title, Eine Stadt sucht einen Mörder, implies the basic storyline of the film. Horrified by the deeds of an apparently ruthless murderer (Peter Lorre) who kills little girls, a city begins to search for the perpetrator. Although individuals play an important part in the film, it seems as if the city is the true protagonist, engaging in the search as one always vigilant being. Several scenes show suspicion eating up the citizens, who all suspect and condemn one another, but the real killer cannot be found. Peter Lorre as the murderer is known to the audience from the beginning. However, this does not diminish the effect of tension created, among other things, by the actor’s idiosyncratic performance. With ease he switches between ‘nice uncle’ and madman and it is especially Lorre’s art of facial expressions, at one moment kind and amiable and in another horribly distorted, that leaves the viewer in the conflicted position of not knowing what to make of this character: as repugnant as he should be, M has moments of pity in store for him.

Especially for audiences in the Weimar Republic, M must have offered a certain cruel topicality. With the film opening on a group of children, chanting the Haarmann-Lied, it is not implausible that the cinema-goer would be reminded of the mass-murders of Fritz Haarmann which disturbed the country in the mid-1920s. Weimar Germany became a place of hysteria and perverse fascination with crime, which Lang tries to bring into his film.

The manhunt is led by two independent parties who act for different reasons and each of them employs the city for its own purpose: the police (with Otto Wernicke as detective inspector Karl Lohmann) and a group of criminals (with Gustav Gründgens as the group’s leader Schränker). A race begins - against each other andagainst time itself before another murder occurs. In some ways it is even a competition between image and sound through the different means of investigation used by the two groups. The police focus on the visual search for clues and the criminals on the aural one, putting the city under total surveillance. The winner is apparent. Lang emphasises the importance of sound by the ironic presentation of the blind beggar as the only one able to recognize the murderer by his peculiar whistling tune – Edvard Grieg’s In the Hall of the Mountain King. This tune perfectly sets the nervous restlessness that Peter Lorre’s murderer embodies to music and with it comes a tense expectation for something ominous. In fact, In the Hall of the Mountain King serves as the indicator of an impending murder and moreover forms the private soundtrack and the aural leitmotif of the film.

However, Lang proves his extraordinary understanding of the new medium, not only with his knowledge of how to apply sound, but also when not to use it. In the first nine minutes of the film the audience watches an interplay of scenes showing a mother preparing supper for her daughter Elsie. However, on her way home from school, Elsie meets the murderer. These scenes are connected only through the use of sound. The noises of the city are similar to the sounds that can be heard from the small apartment, each shifting into the other. And then, after all noise, the audience experiences complete silence. A series of images follows, amongst them an image of the ball that Elsie was playing with rolling into the grass, and still, everything is quiet. In Lang’s film, death has no voice. In this silence, the story of a child’s murder is being told, a story for which there are no words. Lang’s sudden silences are the most impressive scenes, creating the feeling of horror, terror and pain and showing that sometimes silence can and does speak loudest.

M is not only concerned with the issues of its time, it is also a milestone in German sound film. Lang combines with excellent skill sound and image and shows the importance of their interplay, creating the thrilling chase of a murderer.

Consulted Work

Brockmann, Stephen, ‘M (1931) or Sound and Terror’, in, A Critical History of German Film (Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer, Incorporated, 2010), pp. 113-127

“She must have one complex mechanism”: Review of Die Puppe (The Doll, 1919)

Molly Harrabin — Tue, 23 Mar 2021 12:48:18 GMT

“She must have one complex mechanism”: Review of Die Puppe (The Doll, 1919)

Tom Double, King’s College London

“Vier lustige Akte aus einer Speilzeugschachtel”, the title card reads: “Four amusing acts from a toy chest”. Sure enough, in the film’s opening, a man takes the lid off a large wooden box, from which he removes and assembles a model of a hillside. Then he sets two little dolls inside a cabin and closes the lid. The film crossfades to a close-up, and the two dolls have become actors, the miniature models props and scenery. What may not be obvious is that the man in this prologue is the film’s director, Ernst Lubitsch. This is how the filmmaker sees himself: a little boy playing with toys.

Thus begins Die Puppe (The Doll), a delightfully playful silent comedy and early offering from the Berliner director, who would later be famed across the world for his Hollywood screwball farces. The plot, derived from a story by absurdist author and fellow German E.T.A. Hoffmann, begins with Lancelot (Hermann Thimig), an immature young man prone to fits of crying. Lancelot is ordered to marry by the Baron von Chanterelle, being his nephew and only heir. Fearing the prospect, Lancelot flees to a local monastery, where a gaggle of fat friars are bemoaning their hunger. They agree to hide him, but soon catch wind of his 300,000 franc dowry. One of the men comes up with a plan: Lancelot can marry a lifelike mechanical doll created by the world-renowned dollmaker Hilarius (Victor Janson) and claim the reward for the church. When Lancelot arrives to pick up the doll, however, Hilarius’s precocious apprentice accidentally breaks its arm off, and the dollmaker’s daughter Ossi (the brilliant Ossi Oswalda), who just so happens to look exactly like it, is forced to take the doll’s place.

What follows is a contrived but multi-layered farce, in which Ossi must pretend to be an animatronic in front of Lancelot, but simultaneously pretend to be pretending to be a real girl in the company of his family. When introduced to the Baron, she jerks her hand back and forth violently in a faux-mechanical “handshake”. The Baron is baffled. “She’s from an old patrician family,” his nephew explains. “They’re all very formal.”

All the while, human desires cause her to act out of character – she steals draughts of alcohol and bites of her husband’s food when Lancelot looks away, returns his slaps on the wrist with blows to his face, and in several scenes displays an attraction to him which is very suggestively charged. In one scene, she becomes visibly excited upon entering the marital bedroom when Lancelot starts removing his suit, but is frustrated when he decides to use her as a clothes stand. Earlier, while travelling in a small coach compartment, she feigns mechanical failure in order to lean her head on his chest. At this point, Lubitsch cuts to the moon in the sky watching the pair with an animated cartoon face, which then winks at the camera.

Die Puppe is a stylised film, a modernist fairy tale, alive with a cheeky and often surprisingly obvious sexuality, set in a city which comes to life as it goes to bed. A shot of drunken revellers skipping through the moonlit street is followed by a man silhouetted in a window being undressed by another figure, as the lights inside the building switch off one-by-one. A more explicit shot of a man and a woman canoodling under a streetlamp cuts away to a shadow puppet of a cat meowing. Later on, when Lancelot finds out the truth about Ossi, after sensually feeling her arm and her neck to verify her fleshliness, the gag is repeated as their passionate embrace is interrupted by a cockerel crowing.

There is also a running joke about Hilarius’ young apprentice, ashamed of his responsibility in the farce, attempting to commit suicide by drinking paint (“It would be like you, to go drinking expensive paints!” his master cries upon stopping him) and throwing himself out of a window (where a cut reveals the room to be on the ground floor). But the film’s tone is playful, and the subversive humour is often defused by its absurdity. It’s as if Lubitsch himself is winking at us.

Oswalda is particularly great here. Her comic performance as the “doll” is the glue that holds the film together, as she reacts in frustration to the frankly ridiculous sequence of events that befall her. It’s a shame that she isn’t better remembered; almost exclusively playing characters called “Ossi” (including in multiple other Lubitsch films), and always fitting the same general type, a fiery New Woman, free to dish out as well as take it, Oswalda was known as ‘the German Mary Pickford’. A big compliment indeed, but a huge shadow to escape from under, and the comparison suggests an unfortunate lack of women in silent comedy. Fleeing the Nazi regime in the 1930s, she eventually died penniless in Prague, a sad legacy for such a talent, but common for stars of the silent cinema.

Evident here already is Lubitsch’s talent for comedy. His mastery of repetition and sharp wit manifests in the film’s script, as well as a playfulness and sexuality which would go on to push the boundaries of classical Hollywood style, here fostered by the comparatively socially liberal mores of the Weimar period. Die Puppe is a charming film, innocent but cheeky, absurd almost to the point of expressionism, and displaying a creativity which can still raise a laugh. A favourite moment is when Hilarius discovers his daughter has taken the doll’s place. “This is truly hair raising,” he says, and sure enough, in stop-motion, his hair stands up by itself and turns white; the very final shot of the film shows his hair becoming limp again as he sighs with relief. A silly gag, perhaps, but one that speaks for the film that came before it. Who could fail to be won over by its earnestness?

Full Marks All Round: Review of Mädchen in Uniform (1931)

Molly Harrabin — Fri, 26 Feb 2021 13:00:10 GMT

Full Marks All Round: Review of Mädchen in Uniform (1931)

Lucy Clarke, University of Edinburgh

The boarding house is a familiar location in the world of cinema. From Peter Weir’s 1975 gloriously romantic Picnic At Hanging Rock (1975) to the fairy-tale iconography of Alfonso Cuarón A Little Princess (1995), perhaps no boarding school is quite as austere as the one in Leontine Sagan’s Mädchen in Uniform (1931). A Little Princess’s Sarah Crewe might be forced into servitude after her father dies, but the school in Mädchen in Uniform goes the extra mile by starving their wards. But despite their teacher’s cruelty, the schoolgirls form an unbreakable bond of love and friendship.

Madchen in Uniform is a 1931 classic from Weimar Germany. It’s probably most well-known as one of the first films to portray a lesbian romance. When Manuela von Meinhardis (Hertha Thiele) starts at the boarding school, she is unused to the rigmarole and the discipline. She struggles to assimilate to this new environment, even though the girls in her dormitory quickly grow to love her. Her pallid, crying nature may be due to her burgeoning crush on her teacher Fräulein von Bernburg (Dorothea Wieck), a younger and kinder version of the other schoolmistresses. Fräulein von Bernburg’s nighttime ritual of kissing all of the girls on the forehead goes a little further with Manuela when she kisses her on the mouth instead. This was no accident. It soon becomes apparent that both Bernberg and Manuela are developing feelings for one another.

Amongst the rigid classical architecture and Grecian statues of gods and heroes, it is a wonder that any gentleness can grow. And yet, despite their surroundings, the girls’ relationships and the mutual crush between von Bernburg and Manuela are gorgeously tender. Manuela floats up in front of Fräulein von Bernburg’s vision in a hazy soft focus while she is teaching a class. Desire pushes both of these women off guard, yet it is transformative. Unbeknownst to the strict headteacher Fräulein von Nordeck zur Nidden (Emilia Unda), there’s a chink in her school’s armour that she hasn’t noticed, from which the flowers of first love begin to bloom.

As Manuela settles into the school with its whitewashed walls and authoritarian conditions, the comradery between the girls flourishes. They immediately take Manuela under their wing, and like many other successful films set in boarding schools, these girls share an authentic unbreakable bond of sisterhood. The standout here is Ellen Schwanneke playing Ilse von Westhagen. From her impish letters detailing the awful food situation to her collage of her favourite German movie stars with “sex appeal”, it is obvious that Ilse is the loudmouthed leader. In this charismatic role, Schwanneke absolutely shines.

Although Mädchen in Uniform’s fame might be rooted in its depiction of a lesbian romance, it is a shame that its modernity and bravery has been reduced to merely a film of firsts. There’s a lot of skill in Sagan and writer Christa Winsloe’s portrayal of sapphic love and burgeoning teenage sexuality. Crushes on women are completely normalised, and the girls collectively swoon over Fräulein von Bernburg. They try on lipstick, and they are fascinated by the growth and change in their bodies. It’s clear that they’re leaving their childhood behind. Unsurprisingly, in its commitment to accurately portraying young women, Mädchen in Uniform is as modern as Olivia Wilde’s Booksmart from 2019.

Throughout the film, empathy and kindness seem to glow from the screen. There are joyous representations of women and gentle portrayals of lesbian crushes, and despite the controlling and militaristic school setting, there’s a chance for the girls to shine.