DVD Chronicle
2012; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 5; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/thr.2012.0040
ISSN1939-9774
Autores Tópico(s)German History and Society
ResumoDVD Chronicle Jefferson Hunter (bio) People on Sunday, directed by Robert Siodmak and Edgar G. Ulmer (Criterion Collection, 2011); The Hour, directed by Coky Giedroyc et al.(BBC Warner, 2011); The Long Good Friday, directed by John Mackenzie (Image Entertainment, 2011); The Phantom Carriage, directed by Victor Sjöström (Criterion Collection, 2011); The Magician (Ansiktet), directed by Ingmar Bergman (Criterion Collection, 2010); Ben-Hur(1959), directed by William Wyler Ben-Hur(1925), directed by Fred Niblo (Fiftieth Anniversary Ultimate Collector's Edition, Warner Brothers, 2011). Edgar G. Ulmer, talented maker of Poverty Row B-pictures. Eugen Schüfftan, cinematographer of the Paul Newman hit The Hustlerand inventor of the Schüfftan special-effects process. Fred Zinnemann, director of such varied works as The Member of the Weddingand High Noon. The brothers Robert and Curt Siodmak, the first a major film noir director, the second a screenwriter. Billy Wilder, screenwriter and director of Sunset Boulevard, Some Like It Hot, and The Apartment, to name only three of his masterpieces. What unites these Hollywood figures, some of them famous, some less well-known, is a silent film they made in their youth, in Germany, People on Sunday( Menschen am Sonntag). The credits for this film say that Robert Siodmak and Ulmer directed, Ulmer produced, Schüfftan did the photography with Zinnemann assisting, and Wilder wrote the script after reportage by Curt Siodmak, but from the start People on Sundaywas not just a collaborative but an improvised, produced-on-a-shoestring project, and its true auteuris really young German cinema in experimental mode, trying things out, mixing genres up. The Criterion Collection has brought out a well-produced DVD of the film—one of a number of new releases I'll be discussing in this Chronicle—and so all of us now have the chance to see what so many young talents concocted in 1930. People on Sundayfollows four young Berliners, a taxi driver, a wine salesman, an aspiring film extra, and a salesgirl in a record shop, on a weekend jaunt to one of the lakes on the outskirts of the city. There might have been a fifth in the party, a model, but she sleeps lazily in and misses the excursion. A plot of sorts develops, with the two men and the two women snatching romance when they can, changing partners, feeling twinges of jealousy, wondering if there might be a next Sunday, but we scarcely know enough about the quartet to think of them as characters. Rather, they are just "people," a sample of young city-dwellers out for a [End Page 263]good time swimming in the lake or romping in the glades of the sandy pine forest or listening to a wind-up Victrola, and they are presented to us in quasi-documentary style, with a minimum of intertitles and a lot of social context. When the two couples nap, the camera wanders off to show other Berliners enjoying or enduring their Sundays, in montages of faces laughing or of park visitors strolling amidst grandiosely Prussian civic statuary. Incidental actions present themselves to be photographed: when the two couples board a paddle boat, the foreground of the shot is occupied by a slightly fidgety little girl in pigtails, her back turned to the camera and her face invisible, who is evidently transfixed by the sight of adults playing. If all this seems miscellaneous, it is, but miscellaneous in the style of such sophisticated documentary as Walther Ruttmann's Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, from 1928, two years before People on Sunday. In both films the unity which a plot might have provided is replaced by a consistency of tone and clever photography. People on Sundayfeatures high-angle perspectives and bravura tracking shots, and at quieter moments fills the screen with image after beautiful image of sunlight dappled with shadow. The credits announce forthrightly that the actors in the film were not professionals, but ordinary people who returned to their regular jobs after the production. In one or two moments we see gestures clumsier or more melodramatic than a professional would have employed (the taxi driver, Erwin Splettstösser, is a...
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