From Caligari to Hitler: German Cinema in the Age of the Masses (2014) - full transcript

We must cover the city
with a network of informers.

Each square meter must be
under our permanent control.

No child in this city must take a step
without our knowledge.

“Germany, where does it lie?
I cannot seem to find this country.”

Weimar,
the city of Goethe and Schiller,

gave Germany’s first republic
its name.

Weimar Republic.

What a radiant beginning,

yet what a miserable end.

This first German republic
has vanished,

degraded to a mere precursor
even in our memories.



And yet, it was so much more.

1920s Germany was young
and modern,

like these two girls on the left.

Brigitte and Christel,
we shall meet them again later.

From Caligari to Hitler

German Cinema
in the Age of the Masses

The Weimar Republic
was a mass society on the move.

Berlin was its flitting metropolis,

a boomtown full of contradictions

that fascinated people
across the globe.

How strange they seem,
these people,

yet how similar they are to us.

What have those eyes seen?

Is there such a thing
as a German glance?



What is the face
of the Weimar Republic?

Wartime experiences,
authoritarian thought?

Misery?

Hope?

Pride?

Happiness?

Maybe this country
can be traced by its cinema?

Maybe it survived in its movies?

How strange those images look.

My father was born in this era.
My grandfathers experienced it.

They were the same age
as the young men in the films.

Gustaf Grundgens, for example.

This beast has no right to exist,
it must be exterminated,

mercilessly,
without any compassion.

A great actor,
not at all one-dimensional.

Dazzling, ambiguous,
just like his character and his times.

The safecracker in Fritz Lang’s M.

Grundgens’s black-gloved hand
hovering over the city

is a symbol of violence,
an eminently modern symbol,

representing connectivity,
domination,

control and cybernetics.

The film is a symphony of horror
in light and shadow.

The shadow of the future.

What does cinema know,
that we don’t?

10,000 REICHSMARK REWARD!
WHO IS THE MURDERER?

That’s a nice ball you have there.

What’s your name?

Light and shadow.

An actress and her audience.

Expressionism and sobriety.

A cool bath.

A kiss in the countryside.

Volatile images.

The Weimar cinema
was mythical and modern,

portraying strict fathers,

wild daughters
and beautiful women.

It created heroes...

and special effects.

It evoked fear and happiness,

it showed horrors and utopias.

It was playing —
With utopias and transgressions,

with doppelgangers and loners.

People were laughing in
German films. They were happy.

And they were in love.

Falling in love again
Never wanted to

Which isn’t the same thing.

What arn I to do?

I can't help it

Their directors constructed
surrealist images

of longing and romance.

I’m your new secretary.

Cinema was captivating
by way of magic and mystery.

It made the hearts beat faster.

Let’s remember: All this is
the history of German cinema.

All this lives on
in our collective memory.

Again: hands over the city.

This time, from Mabuse.

| only discovered German silent films
when I went to Paris.

Filmmaker

That’s where I saw films
by Fritz Lang, Murnau

and others for the first time.

And l was instantly hooked.

And more than that,

these were finally fathers
we could identify with.

The 1920s were all about
discovering oneself

and trying things out.

Filmmaker

You can see this approach
when you look at the actual films.

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

From the very start,
cinema was aware of its power.

It depicted this power,

suspending the boundaries
between image and viewer.

Mysterious unearthly creatures.
Stepping off the screen

and into the world of the audience.

Here, the audience is faced
with their own astonishment.

The Golem Cinema’s
earth-shattering power.

Dr. Mabuse, The Gambler
Part II: lnferno

Also Fritz Lang’s Mabuse
shows us a cinema situation.

Again, the audience
is completely transfixed.

But this time, cinema literally
comes to life and seizes power.

The screen seems to be unleashed.

Again, there is a seductive magician
by the side of the screen.

Art and life seem
to have merged completely.

It’s almost a miracle...
Film Historian

that in a country so seriously
damaged by the war,

we saw the reemergence
of such an influential output

in culture and film.

Historian

Cinema was the art form
of the emerging 20th century.

Within a few years,
it became a mass medium,

with Germany
as one of its centers.

Erich Pommer was one of German
cinema’s first geniuses at UFA,

a producer
who created cinema history.

Pommer intuitively grasped
the mechanisms

of the international film business.

Furthermore, Erich Pommer
did not so much invest in stars,

but in directors and scripts.

His masterpiece is Robert Wiene’s
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

The mysterious magician Caligari
appears at amusement parks.

He has turned his
somnambulist creature Cesare

into a murder weapon.

He creeps
into the bourgeoisie’s bedrooms,

committing his vicious deeds.

Caligari was born out
of the “storm of steel,”

the mayhem of the First World War.

The film is about the war
and its consequences,

about upheavals within society,
the decay of values and of order,

about nothing remaining as it was,

about valuation and identity
not being valid anymore.

Is the seemingly omnipotent manipulator
himself a driven character?

Is he a mad scientist
or curing the insane?

The film is
deliberately vague about it.

It blurs the lines
between authority and insanity.

All of society is
in need of a straitjacket.

Film critic Siegfried Kracauer
saw the film

as a subconscious anticipation
of Fascism,

with Caligari as tyrant
and society losing its sanity.

The dictator is already present

within the collective psyche.

Over the next few years,

tyrants would march
across German cinema screens.

Villains and mass murderers emerged

from the subliminal
German consciousness.

Manipulators and magicians,
omniscient and omnipotent,

aspiring world rulers
with infectious seductive powers.

And on the other hand
their creations:

somnambulist, possessed,

only too willing to carry out
their masters’ orders.

Why were there so many of them?

Where did they come from?

Anyone wishing to explain
the history of German film

will have to answer
these questions.

What does cinema know,
that we don’t?

How can any of you know
what goes on inside me,

how my innermost
is shouting and screaming to me

forcing me
to do it against my will,

I must do it, I don’t want to,

I must do it,

and then a voice is screaming.

I can’t stand it anymore!
Help!

I would certainly agree
with Kracauer when he says

that these are conceptualizations,

trying to make
the world comprehensible,

which have a long tradition
in Germany...

Cultural Scientist

and which are remarkably frequent
in Weimar cinema,

much more so
than in Hollywood at the time.

Born 1889 in Frankfurt,
and raised there,

Siegfried Kracauer studied
architecture and philosophy.

The free city of Frankfurt was
the secret center of the Left-liberal.

It combined money and intellect,

and in the 1920s, became a center
of the left-leaning avant-garde.

From the start, Kracauer thought more
about the mundane than the abstract,

following his mentor, Georg Simmel.

In 1920, Kracauerjoined
the Frankfurter Zeitung,

then the country’s leading paper
for the educated middle classes,

where he quickly rose to become

one of the most renowned
journalists of the republic.

Frankfurt was also home to the
Marxist democratic Frankfurt School,

the “Institut fur Sozialforschung,”
to which Kracauer associated himself.

The institute absorbed
the cultural-revolutionary ideas

of Marx, Nietzsche and Freud,

amalgamating them
into a new worldview,

no longer under the name
“philosophy,” but “critical theory.”

Even the capital
was taking on a new shape.

The new headquarters of lG Farben
was a sensational building.

It had been designed
by Hans Poelzig,

the set designer of Paul Wegener’s
expressionist Golem.

Kracauer avoided peer pressure
and university,

preferring to immerse himself
in the thriving life of the new republic.

Like his friends Adorno,
Benjamin and Lowenthal,

he was enthusiastic about
the phenomena of the new mass society.

Kracauer wrote about anything,
including theoretic works and novels,

but he focused on film criticism.

The volatility of cinema,
always in motion,

appealed to Kracauer
who was always on the move

and loved everything elusive.

It began with a revolution.

With the emperor ousted,
the empire became a democracy.

But its foundation was weak.

The loss and financial debt of the war
burdened the new first republic.

Pure chaos reigned,
people were hunted in the streets.

Revolts, hundreds killed,
mainly among liberals and the Left,

a civil war which kept flaring up.

Robert Reinert’s
traumatic ronde Nerven,

with its hysteric mass scenes,

depicts the revolts
that took place in Munich

after the end of the war,

portraying a deeply unsettled society
trying to find its own identity.

The film is a torrent
of shock and catastrophe.

It shows
a bourgeois family descending

into a maelstrom
of guilt and redemption.

Industrialists and prophets,

well-to-do female communists
and psychiatrists.

A melodrama with
expressive gestures and colors.

Nerven constitutes
a different form of expressionism:

three-dimensional,
without any spikes or lopsided walls.

Not set in a fairyland,
but part of the real world.

Nerven is without doubt
more modern than Caligari.

It is less influential,
because it can’t be used as decor.

The film is a never-ending riot,
in a constant state of flux.

Its star, Erna Morena,

was one of the great divas
of the silent era.

Director Robert Reinert,
a forgotten talent,

exemplifies the advent of the
unconscious on German screens.

And he tells of the future,

the masses, crisis,

ideology.

The nervousness of the characters,
and also the political upheaval,

is a reaction to the mass deaths
of the First World War.

And you actually see all the dead,

haunting the cinema screen
like apparitions in people’s minds.

So you could say the screen

becomes the collective thought
process of an entire nation.

Who still remembers Robert Reinert,

Manfred Noa,

Karlheinz Martin,

Werner Hochbaum,

Henrik Galeen,

Richard Oswald,
Reinhold Schunzel,

Marie Harder?

Great talents all of them,

they are among hundreds of
forgotten directors of the Weimar era.

The new star directors were others:

Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau,

Ernst Lubitsch,

Fritz Lang.

Destiny Cinema also
always meant spectacle.

This was probably
best understood by Fritz Lang,

whose stunning career coincided
with the birth of the republic.

Destiny was an episodic film,
delivering pure escapism,

such as the flying carpet
in this scene.

Lang was a virtuoso, combining
suspense and profoundness

with Lubitsch-like elements.

The Spiders

Lang’s trademark was combining
cliched plots with formal imagination.

Lang turns the viewers
into detectives,

showing them evidence,
describing cognitive processes,

thus observing the mind at work.

Enlightenment as suspense.

Lang seems almost obsessed
by certain archetypal scenes.

Spies Manhunt,
wide-spread hysteria,

order versus chaos,
system versus freedom,

and their confrontation.

A sick brain
which is also independent.

The most modern film tyrant
is Dr. Mabuse,

Mabuse is a hero of crime.

A faceless man wearing
an ever-changing array of masks.

He wants power and money,
but he’s also obsessed.

On some days,
his behavior is entirely alogical,

and it is the alogical
that constitutes Mabuse’s terror.

We don’t know him,
but he knows everything about us.

He’s everyone and no one,

manipulating the masses
as an invisible conductor

in a symphony of crime.

Mabuse symbolizes mass hysteria
and the panic of the 20th century.

He personifies the unknown,
the ungraspable,

absolute modernity,

dreams, visions,
delirium and the abyss.

He is more volatile than
all those who are on his trail.

Mabuse is impossible to catch.

This modern volatility
likens him to ourselves.

Mabuse is the most contemporary
hero of Weimar cinema.

The first Mabuse films are
a product of the inflation period,

of its fears and insecurity,

but also of its speed
and permanent time pressure.

Fritz Lang depicted a certain
kind of German

who is almost soulless.

Filmmaker

It’s very much
about power relations,

with matters of the heart
or feelings

hardly ever making an impact.

This also relates
to a specific kind of architecture,

to a kind of objectivity that may...

almost preclude any feelings,

or at least restrain them.

The Doll

The director as world-constructor.

This is Lubitsch
in the opening scene of The Doll.

He stages himself,
lovingly, vain and full of passion.

What a confident performance!

Lubitsch was a director of comedy

and of the comedic recesses
of human existence.

| Don’t Want to Be a Man

But he did produce other works.

While German streets
still saw revolts,

he directed a distanced and ironic
take on the French Revolution.

What he loved most, however,
was the choreography of masses.

Here, he already depicts
what Kracauer would later term

“The Mass Ornament.”

The Oyster Princess

It’s easy to see

why Lubitsch left for Hollywood
shortly afterwards, in 1922.

Slowly,
the republic was consolidating.

Free and progressive laws came in.

The new president was
Friedrich Ebert,

the first Social Democrat
in this position.

But the old authoritarian society
still overshadowed anything new.

The military was a state
within a state.

Many on the right were merely
waiting to show their true face.

They did so on June 22, 1922.

The Foreign Minister,
Walther Rathenau, a liberal Jew,

was murdered in broad daylight.

What Chancellor Wirth had shouted

in his speech
against passionate opposition

was now obvious to all:
“The enemy stands on the right.”

ASSASSINS IDENTIFIED AS MEMBERS
OF “ORGANISATION CONSUL”

Foreign Minister

The biggest memorial service
in German history.

The streets of Berlin.

Twenty-year-old Christel personifies
the young generation,

putting all their hope
into the new republic.

Freedom,

departure...

curiosity.

Christel wants to become an actress
and starts as an extra.

The volatile, strolling movement
typifies this period,

when everything
was constantly changing.

But what is
the flaneur’s worldview?

Kracauer still gives
a good account of this.

“Reality is a mosaic,
a construction.

Surely, life must be observed
for it to appear.”

Kracauer was perhaps
the most typical flaneur of his age,

compounding the modern
experiences of the metropolis

to portraits of reality that
were both dense and fragmentary.

A metropolitan writing about
advertising, public transport,

anonymous passersby,

the cult of divertissement
or just sauntering along.

His random perceptions combined
to paint an overall picture of the age.

His friend
Walter Benjamin called him

“a ragpicker on the
eve of the revolution.”

Cinema was now also representing
the lower working class,

although still from the perspective

of decent citizens
looking down on them.

You can sense the alienation
and cliched bias of these images.

Reinhold Schunzel’s
adaptation of the novel

Das Madchen aus der AckerstraB e.

A lonely older man
takes in a working-class girl

and teaches her manners
and etiquette...

Pygmalion in Berlin.

It will be his downfall.

Nevertheless, these films show
an unusually naturalistic

and realistic perspective.

But it tends to be the bourgeois
characters of such melodramas

who are falling victim
to the lower classes,

motivated not by misery,
but by greed.

At least
those films reflected reality.

Many were worse off
during the first Weimar years.

For many people, the ’20s,
with the inflation,

were anything but golden.

1923 — the Great lnflation.

500 BILLION MARKS
Journey into the Night

Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau
repeatedly focused on men.

Men on the verge
of nervous breakdowns,

men under pressure, stressed men,

established bourgeois men in crisis.

Murnau’s naturalism is one
of landscapes, of wind and waves,

but not of feelings.

Everything is exaggerated
in silent films.

It’s hard
to take this entirely seriously.

Women are a threat to these men.
They lead them astray.

They signify imposition
and importunity.

The Haunted Castle

The Burning Soil

Murnau is a director of society,

but also a director of landscapes
and a creator of myths,

a romanticist, whose work
unifies melancholy and longing.

No film by Murnau is
more famous than Nosferatu.

Yet again, it tells of a man
overestimating his powers,

thinking he can take on
a vampire, a countervvorld.

A naive German
who encounters horror.

He is lost from the very outset.

His nightmarish journey into darkness
is a journey into nature.

How often we see Murnau
opening and closing doors.

They represent entry points to
the closed-off realms of our soul.

The young man
overstepping his limits

causes evil to come to Germany:

the terror,

the death, the rats.

A terrifying stranger,

an intruder stealing the wife
of the brave German.

Is Murnau playing here
with anti-Semitic stereotypes?

Like Caligari’s Cesare, Nosferatu
is a murderous somnambulist.

But he is a different kind
of sleepwalker,

he is master and slave combined.

Likewise, Nosferatu is as well
a film about the German psyche,

about nightmares
and creatures of the night.

Modern mythology infused
with mysterious symbols.

It is also pure cinema, attempting
to translate emotions into images,

to bring psychological processes
to the surface of the cinema screen.

THE HAUNTED SCREEN

Lotte Eisner,
an exiled German in Paris,

described expressionist Weimar cinema
as “The Haunted Screen.”

The hauntedness is mainly inherent
in the metaphysical designs.

Set designers Hans Poelzig,
Otto Hunte and Walter Reimann

were the alchemists
of these realms.

They created magical atmospheres
and surreal worlds.

The unsettling takes shape.

Objects become strangely animated,
they become landscapes of the soul.

Abyssal scenarios unfolded
on German cinema screens.

The objects themselves are
set in motion.

The train travels
into the unconscious.

Psychopathological nightmares,
directorial calculation

and neo-Gothic yearning.

Lotte Eisner with her colleagues
of the Cinematheque Francaise

“The Haunted Screen”
meant extreme artificiality,

hocus-pocus, crumbling idylls,
catastrophic moods,

lust for destruction.

Cinema had only just been invented.

It was a fairground attraction,

part of Berlin’s
“Luna” amusement park.

And then people like Fritz Lang

returned from the war
in1918, 1919,

and proclaimed,
“No, film is actually an art form.”

The Spiders

The return of illusion
was reflected on the screen

by the popular
adventure film genre.

Fritz Lang’s The Spiders
features crossing the Cordillera,

and preventing
Aztec-like human sacrifices.

The intended four-part series
was a physical action film.

A German precursor
to the Indiana Jones adventures.

Desert sands and Indian
elephants in German studios.

The films reflect an increased
demand for escapism and the exotic.

Joe May’s The Indian Tomb
is a typical example.

The Indian Tomb

The script was by Fritz Lang
and his wife Thea von Harbou.

The Flute Concert of Sans-Souci

Prussia represented a different kind

of longing for the Germans.

A longing
for the good old days, for order,

and also for grand politics
or what was perceived as such.

Audiences loved Otto Gebuhr
in the role of the Prussian King.

The actor played
Frederick the Great 11 times

before Hitler came to power.

Germany no longer had an emperor,
but it had Fridericus,

who was taking on
all of Europe in the cinema

in a war of trenches,
gun smoke and suffering

which looked uncannily like
the World War that had just been lost.

There was one difference, though:
Fridericus won his war.

Strangely, two generations earlier,
most Germans had hated Prussia.

Now many of them were longing
for this style of authoritarian rule.

Only 10 years later, in March 1933,
Adolf Hitler celebrated Potsdam Day,

thus putting a fatal end
to any dreams of a new Prussia.

A pact with the devil.

“German man
is demonic man personified,”

according to Lotte Eisner.

Murnau innocently wanted
to show cinema’s possibilities

by adapting a classic theme.

He turns Faust
into circus-like magic and decor.

The flight
with Mephisto’s magic cloak

demonstrates the effects
the camera can achieve.

Murnau presents the cinema
as an alchemical process,

but also as an evil pact
between director and politics,

between myth and method.

For not only are images reinvented,

but books are being burned,
as are people.

Watching the film today,
we sense there is no way back

to this German mythology.

Another director, Fritz Lang,

knew full well that myths
are never innocent.

The Americans would later ask:
Chaplin or Keaton?

The French: Godard or Truffaut?

The Italians: Antonioni or Fellini?

We Germans must ask:
Lang or Murnau?

Murnau depicts phantoms
and phantasms,

his heroes are driven, possessed,

not of this world —
Just like he himself.

By contrast, Lang is
more reserved, more rational,

he doesn’t believe
everything he shows,

doesn’t give himself over to it.

Fritz Lang basically invented
everything, all the genres,

and always...

Always postulating

that film was the “seventh art,”

it was an art form,
but it was art for the masses.

It was accessible to all.

As a director,
Lang is out-and-out modern.

While Murnau is a romantic,

Lang constantly tells us viewers,
“Stop your romantic gawking!”

Or doesn’t he?

At first glance,
Lang’s two-part epic Die Nibelungen

is just a sensational milestone
in the history of film.

While its story and design
are still expressionist,

it’s also hyper-modern
and pure fantasy.

German nebulous dreams.

The biggest blockbuster
of German cinema,

with special effects
that were truly innovative.

Die Nibelungen
Part |: Siegfried

A sea of flames,

a magic hood
making the hero invisible.

Or the lindworm that Siegfried
fights and that spews real fire.

Siegfried, a blond German superman
who will succeed at anything.

Aided by magic, if necessary.

He can only be defeated
by an act of treason.

SO SPOKE GRIM HAGEN:
THE HUNT IS OVER!

Die Nibelungen
Part II: Kriemhild’s Revenge

Die Nibelungen is fantasy,

New Mythology and at the same time
its deconstruction.

They are part
of the political fantasy:

the dirty, barbaric Huns
from the East,

bringing the downfall
to the noble Germans.

German audiences loved this...

The fruit
of relishing their own fear.

Die Nibelungen is an entirely
grown-up revenge drama,

bloodthirsty gothic horror

including a showdown in the burning
palace of Etzel, King of the Huns.

Kriemhild, vengeful queen
and femme fatale.

Hagen,
the German psyche’s Dark Knight,

a murderer
out of national interest.

Gunther, a cunctator on the throne,

a weak ruler, personifying
the 1920s’ contempt for politics.

YOU DON’T KNOW
THE GERMAN SOUL, ETZEL!

Something must have been lurking
in the German forests

which eventually
ended up on the screen.

Filmmaker

It must be the forests.

Ultimately, it always
comes down to flora and fauna.

By the mid-’20s,
the republic had consolidated.

Things were on the up,
the factories were busy.

There was money,
there were more liberties...

and occasionally sensations.

The director Gerhard Lamprecht
remained down-to-earth.

An old hand, he was amongst those
filming in the courtyards of Berlin.

Using nonprofessional actors,

his film titles speak
for themselves:

Slums of Berlin,
Children of No Importance,

People to Each Other.

A clever way
of sensitive enlightenment.

Slums of Berlin

I’d say the experiences
of young people during the 1920s

were shaped by inflation
on the one hand.

But on the other hand,
the enormous acceleration of life...

Both the economic upsurge
and fast-growing big city life...

Also brought about a certain
febrility and instability

which, in a positive way,

constituted
a rather explosive mixture.

And it was this
exact explosive mixture

that then went on to influence
all that which followed.

There was a new style,
called “New Sobriety.”

Expressionism went out of fashion.

The demeanor was
post-expressionist,

cool, critical and unaffected.

New Sobriety was
about facts rather than feelings,

types instead of personalities.

One of them is Brigitte.

She just started herjob
in a Berlin record store.

She’s the typical example
of the new class of employee.

The filmmakers wanted to take in
all of society objectively,

producing “cross-movies.”

Weimar cinema now
was practically anti-expressionist.

Fritz Lang walked
through the Weimar Republic

like a political somnambulist.

His most outwardly political
film became Metropolis.

A science-fiction Babylon,

which is both a technological Utopia
in the style of New Sobriety

and a social metaphor.

Brutally enslaved, soulless workers

are worked to death
in subterranean factories

while their masters rule above.

Using a visual telephone,

the industrialist patriarch controls
his foremen — a pioneering method.

Metropolis is both politically
and aesthetically schizophrenic.

Time and again, Lang shows
dual concepts and dual characters.

Economic power is
complemented by scientific power.

Two fathers, two tyrants, patriarchs.

Together, they strive
to create a new human.

The robot woman is meant

to function even better
than the underground workers

who, yet again,
are like somnambulists.

Brigitte Helm plays the dual role
of saint and femme fatale...

innocent and amoral,

serious and playful.

The mechanical, seductive Eve
also represents the “new woman,”

no longer conforming
to the stereotypical meek character,

surrounded by children,

sacrificing herself
for husband and nation.

Instead, she asserts herself
as an erotic female

who could potentially act
against the male and the family.

What can be clearly observed
in Weimar era films

and expressionist films,

and Kracauer described
this brilliantly,

is the sons rebelling
against their fathers.

Although paradoxically,
or rather, typically,

the fathers remain victorious.

In other words, what,
in the language of psychoanalysis,

would constitute
an oedipal revolt, a rebellion,

did take place
in German film in this way,

but it was the fathers who benefited.

It wasn’t easy
for the sons of Weimar.

But revolution is possible.

The masses of the underworld
rise to revolt.

With hindsight, this is a documentary
about the republic’s inner turmoil,

a bombastic insight into
the unconscious mind of the 1920s.

A vision of the future,
which anticipates aesthetically

what was to happen politically
not long after.

Kracauer farsightedly
observed early on:

“ln Metropolis, the paralyzed
collective consciousness

seemed to talk in its sleep
with unusual clarity.

Metropolis was full
of subterraneous content

which crossed the boundaries
of the conscious mind

like contraband.”

The aesthetics of social partnership,

a New Deal,
with a hint of Riefenstahl.

Historian

Berlin: Symphony of a Great City

While Metropolis takes place
away from the surface

in the bowels of the city,

Walter Ruttmann’s film
of the same year

shows us the reality
above the surface.

Ruttmann had been working
in early broadcasting

while also making a name for himself
as an avant-garde filmmaker.

Soon he was employed by the UFA
to carry out specialist tasks.

He filmed the near-abstract
falcon dream scene in Die Nibelungen,

a highlight of 1920s animated film.

Walter Ruttmann is one of the most
important directors or personalities

of Weimar cinema who are yet to be
discovered, for different reasons.

He is definitely a member
of the cinematic avant-garde.

But at the same time,
many of his avant-garde films

were commissioned by others.

He demonstrates to what extent
the industry and advertising

shaped and influenced
the stylistic possibilities of the cinema.

Ruttmann’s film,
Berlin: Symphony of a Great City,

depicts the city in a realistic way,

while elevating it
to a different kind of mythology.

He emphasizes the structures
of mass society.

His editing style creates coherence,
it links and compacts.

This was the “cross-movie”
the New Sobriety had dreamt of.

Ruttmann shows
how the systems are linked.

This seems more important
than observing the fleeting.

Fast-paced, rhythmic montages
of the city in its own right,

a symphony of mass society.

A beguiling journey into past realities.

In a newspaper serial turned book,

Kracauer discovered a new

and highly modern
class of society in 1929:

the employees.

Young, modern citizens
are now working

behind desks or shop counters,

with regular working hours.

“Berlin today is a city
with a pronounced employee culture.

A culture created
by employees for employees,

and perceived as culture
by the majority of employees.

They fill the cities,
but they do not belong anywhere.

The monthly salary,

the so-called mental work
and other meaningless features,

are currently founding the existence
of large parts of the population.

The building of bourgeois values
has collapsed,

its foundations having been eroded.

The salaried masses
are spiritually homeless.

Along with health,
transport and gifts,

the employees’ cultural needs
include, amongst other things,

tobacco products, bars
and intellectual or social events.

Many employees’ lives escape
from their wretchedness into distraction,

dissolving into the nocturnal void.”

A weekend at the Wannsee.
Four young people are having a picnic.

They hardly know each other,
but spend the day swimming,

listening to music,
flirting and lazing around.

It all ends in the evening,
as does the film,

but the day belongs to them,

etched into our memories
with the film’s images.

Its title mirrors its content:
People on Sunday.

People on Sunday

We’ve already met
Christel and Brigitte earlier on.

They are typical of the new class
of employees Kracauer describes:

young, female,
urbane and poorly paid,

but at least they have Sundays off.

On the previous day,
Christel met a man.

The way this is initiated is one
of the masterstrokes of Weimar cinema.

As if by accident,
the camera strolls across the crowd.

Seemingly randomly, it rests
on the couple, moves on, comes back...

moves on and comes back again.

Now we watch the approach —
A hunter and his prey.

At first,
the camera keeps its distance,

even retreating to a panoramic view
as we recognize the couple,

as if not to disturb them.

An ethnological perspective,
ancient gestures and rituals.

As the couple sit in the cafe,
the camera moves in closely,

similar to Soviet style photography.

Getting closer.

How do you impress a woman?

By doing something special,
affectionate, exciting.

And she likes it.

A different couple:

Erwin is a cab driver,
his girlfriend Annie is a model.

Soon they are arguing, about nothing,
just the daily battle of the sexes,

the baseless annoyance of long-term
relationships, little rivalries.

Here,
they attack substitute photographs,

fetish objects of the cinema.

But it’s not just any stars being mauled
by shaving cream and curling tongs.

They are Willy Fritsch and Lilian Harvey,
the era’s dream film couple.

Only a few minutes in,
the film ironically mocks

the celebrity cinema culture
of its time...

A programmatic statement.

People on Sunday
tells us about itself:

“I am different.”

What kind of film is this?
Starting in such an unusual manner?

It is the work of a collective.

It was created not by one,
but several young film enthusiasts.

The most prominent was
cinematographer Eugen Schufftan.

He had worked on Metropolis
as part of Fritz Lang’s team.

His agile camerawork delves
into the light of the summer,

on the meadow, in the water.

The other creators would
become even more famous.

The film was co-directed by
Robert Siodmak and Edgar G. Ulmer.

The script was by Billy Wilder.

This young man from Vienna
made a living as a reporter in Berlin.

Full of drive and curiosity,
and under eight different pseudonyms,

he wrote about daily life,
a chronicler of the urbane,

and an example of the
new type of “roving reporter.”

His first script already reveals Wilder

as the genius storyteller
later celebrated by Hollywood...

Both funny and cool
at the same time.

The film’s concept is obvious:
spontaneity, fragmentation.

Particles of reality
and inventions merge into one.

The found supports the invented.

Found were as well the protagonists,
discovered on the streets,

all four of them amateurs,
all four playing themselves.

People on Sunday
is nouvelle vague avant la lettre...

30 years before Godard and Truffaut,

a feast of the casual.

A critic mentions the “magical
effortlessness of the flowing images,

more musical
than any film with sound.”

It’s also the film of a generation.

Its creators are almost the same age
as their protagonists,

young urbanites of the moment,

prosaic, yet carefree,

hopeful, yet skeptical,

humorous and ironic.

Contemporaries called it
a “generation without temper,”

without the pathos or the religious zeal
of a youth movement.

The coolness of the New Sobriety
is also a freshness.

People living in a postwar era,
which is not aware it is also a prewar era.

It sometimes seems as iftheir faces
already show a premonition of the future.

Male bonding.

Where would these young men be
in 10 or 15 years’ time?

Who would be in London or Mexico?

Who at the Eastern Front?

Looking for His Murderer

Robert Siodmak went on
to direct two more films.

What’s this?

A few years later, he,
like all of the film’s creators,

went into exile in Hollywood.

It was an import
of the art of storytelling.

Paul Czinner shot
Arthur Schnitzler’s Fraulein Else.

He transferred the plot
to the elegant ski resort of Sankt Moritz

and happened to shoot
during the Winter Olympics

and in a luxury hotel.

Dark days at the stock market, again.
Fictitious, for the time being.

Catastrophic plunge at the stock market!

Else, from a good family, spoiled,
but neither dim nor bigheaded,

is fed to the creditors by her parents.

She is supposed to seduce a rich man
to ensure continuous credit,

a very mundane,
and therefore immense, sacrifice.

The well-bred Else
is expected to turn into a whore.

She has many talents,
but this is beyond her.

Czinner’s direction of the magnificent
Elisabeth Bergner is a masterpiece.

The film owes it all
to cinematographer Karl Freund

who had worked with Wegener,
Murnau and with Lang.

Once again an unleashed camera
totally unbound in terms ofthis era,

yet also calm, as if lying in ambush.

This long, continuous shot shows
Else’s hesitating, and its overcoming,

and the ancient interplay of the sexes.

A ballet of looks and movements,
perfectly choreographed.

Almost abstract as if shot by Antonioni.

Let’s focus entirely on the timing
of the era for a moment.

And then, desperation.

Let’s just focus on her hands.

Using them, Elisabeth Bergner
tells the entire story.

Fraulein Else is psychological realism

and a portrait of society
in a nutshell — full of foreboding,

and ahead of its time
also in artistic terms.

A generation of morally corrupt parents
gambles away their children’s future.

The problem lies not with the heirs,
but with the current owners.

At the same time, Bergner’s Else
is an example of the new modern woman,

a variant of Marlene Dietrich
and Louise Brooks.

In Fraulein Else and Mabuse,
the market crash is fictitious,

but ominously prescient.

These are films
about a growing discontent in culture.

Lang depicts the stock exchange

as delusional incarnation
of a hysterical society.

The advent of crime and of panic
in bourgeois society.

Bear market!

In the Great Depression the world
of Mabuse became commonplace.

Bull market!

In 1929, society was torn, in a turmoil,

longing for both freedom and order,

more guessing than sensing that the earth
beneath their feet started to shake.

A dance on the volcano.

Maybe it’s this sarcastic existence,
the lust for life in the here and now,

that we mean when we refer
to the “roaring ’20s” today.

When we, somewhat naively,
long for the era to return,

when we consume its art and fashion,

we connect with both
the utopias and the decadence,

liberties and modernity.

The freedom also extended to sexuality.
Berlin was a hotbed of sensuality

with an abundance of possibilities
and not many taboos.

All of society was excited by sports
and a new-found physicality,

sporting events
became mass entertainment,

distraction, but also a way
of publicly disciplining the body.

A new, totally modern order.

Revue shows like the one
by the Tiller Girls were booming,

celebrating the mechanics
of the human body.

In 1927, Kracauer wrote an essay
on this “Mass Ornament”:

“These products of distraction factories
are no longer individual girls,

but indissoluble girl clusters,

ornaments composed
of thousands of bodies.

The structure of the mass ornament
reflects the contemporary situation.

Like the pattern in the stadium,
the organization stands above the masses,

a monstrous figure.

The mass ornament is the aesthetic
reflex of the rationality

to which the prevailing
economic system aspires.”

Diary of a Lost Girl depicts
this girl ornament in everyday life.

In the reformatory for wayward girls,
gymnastics is a means of drilling them.

Diary of a Lost Girl

Jolly uniformity becomes
tyrannical synchronization.

Georg Wilhelm Pabst is one
of the few unforgotten Weimar directors.

Nevertheless, he is yet
to be discovered properly.

A master of thematic
and stylistic variety.

He does not follow his own agenda
like Lang or Murnau.

Instead, he observes closely
and unapologetically.

This makes him the quintessential
director of New Sobriety.

But he clearly prefers certain motifs:

the inextricable entanglements
of power, passion and money,

the unadorned depiction
of universal desires.

A fetishist.

Diary of a Lost Girl recounts the way
of passion of a well-raised daughter.

She passes through all institutions
of societal imprint...

Reformatory, brothel,
inheritance and marriage.

The star is Louise Brooks.

Discovered by Pabst
and fresh offthe steamer from America,

she becomes the shimmering sylph
and ghost light of Weimar cinema.

An androgynous companion,

a childlike femme fatale.

Pure innocence,
pure sex, pure pragmatism...

She typifies the new woman.

It’s a purely cinematic performance.

Brooks doesn’t have to act,
she only has to be herself.

But Brooks also shines
as a great actress.

Her versatility enables her to handle
the director’s sharp-witted psychology.

Brooks repeatedly
comes across as a blank sheet.

An intuitive creature
with alert intelligence.

Brooks is far from being cunning,
she’s beyond good and evil.

Intellect and hedonism
do not exclude each other.

Nothing about her
was truly mysterious,

and this is what scared
the Germans of her time.

Lulu’s presence held up a mirror to them
reflecting their own vices.

If Louise Brooks is international,
Marlene Dietrich is truly German.

An earthy being,

a woman of the people,
seemingly tangible to all.

Physicality and voice,

the body as language.

Acting replaced by presence and psyche,

down-to-earth glamour.

Even the harlot is ruled
by the eroticism of the housewife.

One of the first talkies, von Sternberg’s
and Pommer’s The Blue Angel,

marked the birth
of a second global film star.

My dear Miss Lola,

l have something for you.

Would you accept this as a gift from me?

This marriage proposal has proved
unique in the history of German film.

And with it, may I ask
for your hand in marriage?

- You wanna marry me?
- Yes.

The Blue Angel

God, how cute you are.

Sternberg discovered Marlene Dietrich
and in a way created her.

On the night of the premiere,
she left for Hollywood with the director,

lost several pounds
and turned ethereal Venus of the screen.

Falling in love again
Never wanted to

What am I to do?

Can't help it

Love's always been my
game Play it as I may

In many ways, the new world
meets the old in The Blue Angel,

the 20th century meets the 19th,

bourgeois society egalitarian republic,

romantic expressionism once again meets
the cool surfaces of the New Sobriety,

silent movie meets sound.

ALMOST 4.5 MILLION UNEMPLOYED

OVER 5 MILLION UNEMPLOYED
OR ON SHORT HOURS

The crisis had arrived.

Following Black Friday,
unemployment figures rose sharply,

inflation returned, and with it, misery.

There was more to Weimar cinema
than expressionism.

Wage Clerk Kremke

Alongside escapist
adventure, gangster and revue films

there had already been
a leftist social cinema

that actively targeted
poverty and the crisis.

The famous Kuhle Wampe and
Mother Krause's Journey to Happiness

unjustly overshadow
Wage Clerk Kremke.

Marie Harder was one of very few
female directors during the 1920s.

This was to remain the only film
by this forgotten artist.

She was head of the SPD’s film service
when she went into exile in 1933.

She died two years later
while carrying out research in Mexico.

It’s the story of an old man

being steamrolled by the new era
and its machines.

At some point
he feels let down by everyone

and cannot cope
with the disappointment.

I really liked Brothers,
it was a new discovery for me.

One reason was the wonderful,
magical footage of Hamburg,

which also features
in Raid in St. Pauli,

but Brothers takes it a little further,
into the world of the workers.

Brothers I like the
harsh lighting

in the German films of the 1920s.

The theme of Brothers,
the summoning of the proletariat,

the effects of the Russian Revolution,

the waves this made
go all the way into this film.

You don’t find anything like this today,

a political idealization such as this.

It’s a film emerging
from a political vacuum.

This is what really
appealed to me in Brothers.

A proletarian manifesto,

the story of a harbor strike,
heavily influenced by Soviet cinema.

Strike!

The term “class struggle”
still meant something then.

The film also serves as a reminder
of the lives of the proletarians,

of their poverty and their pride.

How do these people live,

the frugally furnished workers’ houses.

It was more than just watching
and consuming a film.

It was a journey in time,
an anthropological experience.

Raid in St. Pauli

Hochbaum was also able to create
an intricate cinema of motion.

A burglar and a prostitute fall in love.

The boundaries between misery and crime,

gangsters and proletarians
are dissolving.

They are after me.

Excuse me,
we need to search the room.

What do you want?

He is one of the few directors
sympathetic to breaking the law,

a German filmmaker depicting the police
not as protectors, but as a threat,

and rebuffing them completely.

Come.

Are they gone?

Hochbaum focuses
on the nightlife’s demimonde,

but very differently compared to Pabst’s
fascination or Sternberg’s cliches,

showing sympathy for the mundane,
not the sensational.

While we do see the fascination

with the thriving high life
of the roaring ’20s,

Hochbaum never forgets
where he stands.

17th Precinct here. Suicide?
Unemployed. All right, we’ll come.

I don’t understand
why they throw in the towel so easily.

How are the likes of us
coping with the banking situation?

Hochbaum is one
of the most modern of his era,

his films are German Neorealism.

In the end,
the brittle status quo is restored.

But the workers’ struggle continues.

This is how some of them are living.

Others, however...

Crossing the city at dawn

Rained on by dust, not dew

The great, gray army of workers
It marches on

Money is calling them to the machines

Master, give us our daily bread

Hochbaum’s films aren’t far away
from the so-called “asphalt films.”

On more than one level,
cinema discovered the streets.

Joe May’s Asphalt
is the very last silent film

to come out of the Weimar Republic.

Accident

Accident unleashes a succession
of randomly dealt blows.

Everybody is after money,

but whoever owns it
is cursed by bad luck.

Escapism and genre
combine even more tellingly

in Lang’s entertainment films
following Metropolis.

The Germans
had already made it to the moon.

Wernher von Braun, who went on
to invent “reprisal weapons” for the Nazis

and later designed
the US Apollo program,

making the actual moon landing possible,

worked as expert advisor
on Lang’s Woman in the Moon.

“Six seconds left!”

NOW

There is a countdown
and discarded rocket stages,

just like Apollo 1140 years later.

Woman in the Moon

And there is,
even more magically, zero gravity.

Spies

For decades, Spies
was unjustly overshadowed

by the masterpieces
Mabuse, M and Metropolis.

It’s a tremendously thrilling,
aesthetically innovative espionage film,

a modern action movie.

It features a secret agent,
a femme fatale,

murders, sabotage,

and a bank
as a criminal organization.

A prescient film,
inventive, logical and gripping.

The Holy Mountain

With the exploration
of the Alps by tourists,

“mountain films” became a popular genre

that was unique to Germany.

German westerns portraying nature
as massive, dangerous

and clearly superior to man.

Luis Trenker and the later
Nazi director Leni Riefenstahl,

became the stars of this genre.

A German must always
scale the highest peaks,

in these films as well,
in which there were no stuntmen

and almost everything was authentic.

Director Arnold Fanck
made mountain films his speciality.

With great skill and physical effort,
he made them as authentic as possible

and repeatedly showed desperate Germans
pitted against the unforgiving elements.

They are surrounded by romantic backdrops
of ice and rocks, blue light or sunshine.

Fanck’s mountain world,
presenting nature as fateful entity,

both dangerous and idyllic,

also serves as an alternate world
to the conflicts,

rifts and class struggles
of the modern era.

Alienation is replaced by innocence.

An extension
of the youth movement’s desires.

Anti-urbanism and nature kitsch,

often nature mythology,
and always escapism.

The Great Leap Writes Kracauer:

“Lyrical heroes with boisterous instincts,

deification of glaciers and rocks.

A heroic idealism
expressing itself as touristic feats

due to its ignorance
towards more substantial ideas.”

This strange idolization of nature,

the connection with nature
and people’s own impulses and desires,

is like the counterpart
of a different side...

Cultural Scientist

namely,
the interest in the metropolis,

all the movement of the metropolis,
the cars, the trams,

as well as all that makes
the metropolis possible,

not just the workers,
but also prostitution,

bars and a variety
of escapism options.

The Three from the Filling Station

Men in uniform,
albeit still nonmilitary,

and marching music,
albeit still entertainment,

this was
The Three from the Filling Station,

a German-French evergreen
in both language versions.

It set off a whole series
of German musical films.

Early sound films found songs
easier to do than dialogue.

But they are mainly remembered
due to Willy Fritsch

and especially Lilian Harvey.

They were the dream couple
of the early ’30s.

Lilian Harvey, half-English,

born in London
and raised in Switzerland,

became one of the most German of
German stars, despite her internationality.

Congress Dances

The mass media termed her
“the cutest girl in the whole world.”

Harvey personified
the ordinary girl’s dreams

of the big world
and its fairy-tale princes.

Happiness and easy life
at the height of the crisis.

This only happens but once in life

Tomorrow it may all be gone

UFA films, particularly
the comedies and revue films...

Film Historian

did indeed create a new sense of life

which was quite complex and partly
accompanied by a certain sordidness,

but could also carry
a new and positive outlook,

especially in terms of sexuality,
sensuality and consumption.

The most accomplished of these
films is A Blonde Dream,

which was written by Billy Wilder.

It’s a conservative Germanic
variation of surrealist fantasticism.

Truth is revealed in a dream.

A Blonde Dream

A Blonde Dream is also
the most revealing of its kind.

The old dream of becoming a princess
has now changed to Hollywood film star.

The film pursues this dream with its
protagonist, but also against her,

as it all turns into a nightmare,

from which the star
awakes to a German idyll.

Don’t dream, girl, stay humble.

Show us what you can do.

Is that all?

For I just want to find

Love and happiness with you

What’s happened here?

I was in Hollywood.

Are you still dreaming
of becoming a film star?

I think the Weimar cinema
was not as ideological

as it was always portrayed.

Starting in 1919 and until
the invention of the talkies in 1930,

essentially all of the genres
had been invented

and put into practice.

And that, for me, is the Weimar era.

Chaplin in Berlin.

In March 1931, the genius
Hollywood comedian visits the capital.

In Germany too,
he is loved like no other film star.

Everyone can relate
to his “tramp” character.

Chaplin stayed for seven days,

met Marlene Dietrich,
Hans Albers and Albert Einstein.

Only the Nazis agitated against him.

Uncle!

A child killer causes horror
and hysteria amongst Berlin’s population.

He is chased not only by police, but also
by the stirred-up criminal underworld.

- Uncle.
- What is it?

You got a white stain there.

- Where?
- There, on your shoulder.

Come, let’s go.

He is soon driven into a corner.

M features a manhunt.

It is a portrait of a
city, a film noir of

the nightly streets and
questionable morals,

ambiguous and unfathomable.

Humans as beasts
and cogs in the system.

The murderers are among us.

Fritz Lang’s masterpiece would become
an allegory for the rising totalitarianism.

Lang’s view is more distanced than ever,
sociologically precise,

and yet socially committed...

A psychopathological insight
into violence.

Peter Lorre embodies
terrifying human abysses.

The camera captures
the murderous gaze

and appropriates it
as the child becomes an object...

The perverse nature
of the consumer world.

Stop going on about engaging the public.

The mere thought of it
makes me want to puke.

Pardon my language, Mr. President.

But when you really need some
useful information from the public,

then all of a sudden they can’t
for the life of them remember a thing.

The scenes interspersing the police
briefings with the gangsters are famous.

Although the police are also shown
to uphold morality and safety,

the lines between state and crime
become increasingly blurred.

We see two competing systems
and their managers.

We must catch him.

Ourselves.

In the end, the more effective
police are the gangsters.

This efficiency is accompanied
by latent, unscrupulous brutality

which still today can be identified as
Lang’s anticipation of future developments.

Grundgens as gangster boss,
a glittering angel of brutality

leading the gangsters’ charge
against the captured perpetrator,

exposes the true face of the era.

The accused maintains

that he has no choice.

In other words, he is compelled to kill.

By this, he confirmed
his own death sentence.

Bravo! Very true!

A man who admits that he
compulsively annihilates other lives,

this man must be exterminated
like a damaging fire.

This man must be eradicated,
he must disappear!

M comes across as a caustic
commentary on the Republic’s turmoil

between the emergency decrees
and the emerging National Socialism.

Since the outbreak of the economic crisis,
governments changed continuously.

The Nazi Party became
stronger and stronger

and the Democrats were failing.

The films were beginning to summarize.

Once again, Fritz Lang
confronts order with chaos.

Weimar cinema begins
and ends with a lunatic asylum.

The Testament of Dr. Mabuse

One final appearance by Mabuse,

now sitting in his cell,
manically filling page after page.

What is he writing there, behind bars?

It’s in Dr. Mabuse, isn’t it?
He’s writing a book in prison.

That’s it, he’s writing
Mein Kampf, isn’t he?

Dr. Mabuse is really writing
Mein Kampf.

Wasn’t that why the Nazis
banned the film?

For the ultimate goal of crime

is to establish
the absolute reign of crime.

The interiors in The Testament
of Dr. Mabuse are fantastical,

compulsive deceptions
and psychic illusions.

The return of the “haunted screen.”

The therapist is turned
into a psychopath.

The circle closes.

The dazzling director
of a mental hospital,

oscillating between sanity and madness,
postulates the “reign of crime.”

And so the film ends in a long,
frantic drive into the night.

The Germans too were to embark on a
journey into the dark evils of the abyss.

Psychopaths and criminals
took over the steering wheel.

Nevertheless, the story
could also be told differently.

Hello, gentlemen,
would you like to come along?

For the last time.

Into the Blue

A few years earlier, just after
People on Sunday and Black Friday,

cinematographer Eugen Schufftan
shot his only film as director.

It depicts four young people
from the heart of the city,

children of the crisis.

They get together and drive off
on a whim, Into the Blue.

It’s a film of motion,
of changing positions.

The automobile, now affordable
for the new class of employees,

also represents a place of freedom,
of privacy and intimacy,

a substitute home.

Hello! A car journey!

They are driving out to the Wannsee.

It’s a film full of happiness,
full of high spirits and human solidarity.

Once again, Schufftan shows
the best of the Weimar Republic:

departure, youth,

freedom,

irony,

curiosity.

What does cinema know,
that we don’t?

Brigitte married and survived the war.

She lived to over 100 years old
and died in Hamburg in 2011.

Christel went into exile
in the spring of 1933.

She died in 1960, at age 48,
in a plane crash in New Mexico.

Siegfried Kracauer went into exile
in Paris in February 1933.

After the occupation of France
by the German Wehrmacht,

he managed to flee to the USA in 1941,
where he wrote his most significant books.

He only saw Germany again
on short visits.

Siegfried Kracauer died
in 1965 in New York.

Fritz Lang emigrated
to Paris in March 1933.

His last Weimar film,
The Testament of Dr. Mabuse,

was banned in Germany prior to release.

From 1934 on,
Lang worked in Hollywood.

He filmed his last three films
in West Germany in 1959 and 1960.

In 1963, he played himself
in Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt.

Fritz Lang died in 1976
in Los Angeles.

The following filmmakers left Germany
after Hitler came to power.

Most of them never returned
and died in exile.