Die Straße

This highly influential movie was the first of the German "Street" films. It tells the story of one night in which a middle aged man is lured away from his happy home into the thrills and dangers of the city streets. The city is an expressionistic nightmare, a dangerous and chaotic place. The unfortunate man encounters thieves, prostitutes, and other predators. But the real threat to security and order is the street itself. In one extraordinary scene the bumbling man passes an optometrist's shop on a crooked, deserted street. The moment his back is turned, an enormous neon sign, a pair of eyeglasses, blinks on. The street itself is alive and watching.

A petty bourgeois (Eugen Klöpfer) waits in the parlour while his wife (Lucie Höflich) prepares dinner in the kitchen. Lying on the sofa, he watches the shadows cast on the ceiling by the events outside his window. He can't resist the allure for long. He is drawn outside, into the street, into a completely unbourgeois adventure. He doesn't go with the first streetwalker straight away, but soon after he meets a young lady (Aud Egede Nissen) in a dance hall, whose protector (Anton Edthofer) tempts him into gambling. After several entanglements, our bourgeois returns to his cosy home, dishevelled and happy to embrace his wife and finally eat the dinner that has been kept warm for him.

Karl Grune's film 'Die Straße' is often counted among the canon of 'expressionist' films of the Weimar Republic and there are good reasons for this, as Grune works with many of the genre's set pieces. The face of a prostitute is transformed into a skull through a dissolve. The elements of metropolitan life rotate before our eyes in a kaleidoscopic multiple exposure. The scenery alternates between realism and stylization. The sign above the door of the police station is adorned with meaningless symbols and an optician has placed an oversized pair of glasses in front of his shop, the eyes of which appear to be critically observing what is happening in the street.

However, this accumulation of stylistic elements contrasts with a rather banal and unoriginal story. From the moment the petty bourgeois leaves his flat, it is easy to guess that the street of the title does not only have positive experiences in store for him. Basically, the protagonist follows a programme familiar from plays, novels and other films: he plunges into a world unknown to him, is humiliated and gets into danger. The outcome of the whole thing is unknown at times, but it is almost disappointingly inconsequential for the petty bourgeois, because not even the soup has got cold.

'The Street' is a rather simple allegory. The characters and situations are all clichéd and the film doesn't offer enough expressionistic elements to be convincing on this level. What lifts it is the performance by Eugen Klöpfer, who at times adds tension to the plot and at least gives his character his own flavour. As a philistine in a three-piece suit with a stiff collar, he always carries an umbrella with him, and the way he carries it could - if one were inclined towards Freudian theory - be seen as an expression of an unrealised petty bourgeois lust, which would logically be identified as the driving force behind the entire plot. In 1983, Volker Schlöndorf spoke about the film in an article for Deutschlandfunk about the 'eternally pubescent, who briefly rebel and then submit'. This describes the protagonist of 'Street' exactly.

Karl Grune's direction offered a heavy dose of German Expressionism in November 1923's "The Street." What's unique in the Austrian director's co-written script is how two seemingly separate stories merge in the finale while large anonymous city streets take on as a character unto itself. The street is one big expressionistic nightmare, serving as a catalyst for danger and chaos to the movie's protagonist (Eugen Klopfer).

In an unique dual aesthetic rare in cinema, "The Street" was filmed showing both expressionistic visuals of a city's bustling activity while at the same delving deeply into our protaganist's feelings and thought by capturing symbolic impressionistic images. The focal point of "The Street" is on a restless married man whose drawn outside to the excitement of the metropolitan avenues by looking from the inside of his mundane domestic quarters with his one-dimensional wife. We see his point-of-view looking out the window through dreamy, kaleidoscopic-layered split screens. Also, once on the street, he sees a streetwalker, whose head turns into a skull, foretelling the potential fatal adventures that's awaiting him.

While Klopfer walks the streets, an old blind man, (Max Schreck, the actor who was the vampire in 1922's 'Nosferatu') is guided by his young grandson. "The Street" oozes with symbols: a neon sign boldly leads Klopfer to a cabaret where he gets snared by a hooker, while a sign in front of an optometrist office with gigantic eyes, pointing out the street sees everything. Klopfer is eventually brought to the blind man and his grandson's apartment. A murder takes place, with Klopfer, who started out in the movie just looking for a little fun in the streets, being accused of the killing.

"The Street" served as a template for future German 'street films' where the main or pivotal explanatory action takes place on city venues. "The Street" became Jewish director Grune's pinnacle achievement. When the Nazi's came into power, he left Germany in 1933 , immigrating to England, where he directed three films. He later turned to producing movies, remaining in England until his death in 1962.

This excellent piece by Karl Grune, yet another of Max Reinhardt's gifted pupils, is arguably this director's most important contribution to Weimer cinema. Forms and genres in Germany during this period were often intermingled and although very much a template for 'Street' films it shows the influence of Carl Mayer's 'Chamber' films and it is in fact Mayer who has provided the original idea.

The studio sets are magnificent and depict the milieu that defines the characters' lives, the crowd scenes are well choreographed and Grune's brilliant cinematographer Karl Hasselmann provides the expressionist lights and shadows that represent what the poet Shelley called 'the twin destinies of Hope and Fear'. The visual element and storytelling are such that few intertitles are required.

None of the protagonists is named but the characterisations are superb, notably Eugen Kloepfer as 'middle-aged man', Aud Egede-Nissen as 'the prostitute' and Max Schreck of 'Nosferatu' fame as 'the blindman'.

We are happily spared the 'specially composed score' that blights so many silent films and great use has been made of Dvorak's Eighth Symphony, at least in the version I saw.

All-in-all, another gem from what is indisputably the Golden Age of German cinema.

The plot is broadly similar to Murnau's more upbeat 'Sunrise' a few years later, which also centred upon a stylised city teeming with prostitutes and spivs elaborately recreated from scratch. Although superficially a 'realistic' subject, Karl Grune's fanciful direction emphasises what would now be called the 'noirish', and on the strength of this one would have expected him to have ended his days in Hollywood rather than Bournemouth.

(Since German films were popular with sophisticated American audiences at the time, it's quite possible that F.Scott Fitzgerald saw the film - or at least stills from it - hence the reappearance of the enormous spectacles that famously dominate one scene in the book he was working upon at the time, 'The Great Gatsby'. The deathshead makeup worn by a lady of the night early on also anticipates the yuppie aliens in John Carpenter's 'They Live'.)