For those in a position to appreciate it (and although we sometimes seem many I think we are in reality still very few), to be alive at this time is rather like being alive at the time of the Renaissance (again for those very few who appreciated it). It has in my lifetime been the case in two quite different areas of the arts - in classical music (with the "rediscovery" of the baroque) and in cinema with the rediscovery of that hitherto submerged part of the iceberg represented by the films of the silent era.
Not a year, not a month seems to go by without the opportunity for new discoveries and for me, this month, the work of Lamprecht has been a wonderful revelation. This film is in many ways the most exciting because it is the beginning for a whole series of films (later examples are Die Unehelichen 1926, Menschen Untereinander 1926 and Unter der Laterne 1928), social realist films inspired by the work of German caricaturist Heinrich Zille. For these films Lamprecht used the same scriptwriter (Luise Heilborn-Körbitz), the same fine cinematographer, Karl Hasselmann and the same art director, painter Otto Moldenhauer, many non-actors and a brilliant ensemble of professional actors and actresses. Pter Bildt and the fine Norwegian actress Aud Egede-Nissen often appear; the excellent Eduard Rothauser invariably plays a Jewish character (invariably also the most sympathetic character in each film). Rothauser would end his life, having fled Germany, running a chicken-farm in Switzerland but, if this seems a terrible waste of a fine actor, it was a better fate than that of his opera-singer sister who perished in Theresienstadt.
Before watching this film, I would strongly recommend anyone to acquaint themselves with the work of Ziller (Det war Zille sein Milljöh - ein Künstlerportrait is a good starting-point and, while it is in German, language here is not too much of a barrier). The film can still be appreciated without of course but it is particularly useful for this first film in the series which is more specifically based on Ziller's work than the later films. Ziller is shown at work in a prologue and many short scenes, actually quite separate from the story although well integrated with it, are, when one knows, quite clearly based on quite specific captioned Ziller cartoons. It adds to one's enjoyment of the film.
The style of the Ziller films - (they wer also known as Milljöh"-Filme after Zille's 1913 book "Mein Miljoh/My Milieu") - is somewhere between the apolitical "neue Sachligkeit" (new objectivity) of a film like Menschen am Sontag and the highly committed Brechtian style of Kuhle Wampe. One can quibble. There is sentimentality (though nothing to compare with what one finds in US films) and a tinge of aestheticism. Lamprecht and Hasselmann seem sometimes rather reluctant to allow their heroine to look too decrepit however dire their state is supposed to be, which detracts from the realism. The "social realist" politics is not as overtly propagandist as the Brechtian (or Russian social realist) variety but can nevertheless be a trifle over-palpable in its intentions. Nevertheless these are, by and large,superb examples of one important aspect of Weimar cinema (we are a long way here from "expressionism") at its best and Weimar cinema, as well as being indisputably (it seems to me) the finest of its time, is arguably the finest cinema of all time. Hitler committed crime against cinema as well as against humanity.
The English poet John Dryden once spoke of the great artists who had gone before him as "the giants before the flood". Rediscovering silent cinema is to rediscover the giants whose work, along with that of many minnows, it is true, was allowed so disgracefully to sink beneath waters in 1929. Hitler, alas, was not the only one to commit crimes against cinema. Until recently virtually the only Lamprecht film that received any kind of recognition was his (definitive) version of Emil und die Detektive of 1931 (and even this - look at the IMDb site - was often quasi-attributed to Billy Wilder (who wrote the screenplay) but it is quite clear to see how the experience of the Ziller films also feeds in to that great classic of the early talkies.
For anyone on the same wavelength, I would strongly recommend Luigi Commencini's 1953 film La valigia dei sogni - a very moving account of a lone man's attempt to save precious celluloid and keep alive the memory of silent film during those Dark Ages - the "pre-Renaissance" Italy of the fifties.
