Abwege

Just before his two masterworks with Louise Brooks, Pabst directed this provocative study of an upper-class woman's sexual frustration. Neglected by her work-obsessed husband, Brigitte Helm falls in with a fast crowd of Berlin nightclub denizens (the "wrong turn" of the title), toying with an artist and a boxer as potential lovers. Pabst sketches this milieu in terms of consumption of cigarettes, liquor, and drugs, but it looks considerably more realistic than the garish cartoon decadence of CABARET and its imitators. A highlight of a lengthy nightclub sequence is some amusing play around the erotic impact of a backless evening gown. If Helm writhes with coiled intensity in almost every scene, she still creates a credible psychological portrait. While the plot devolves into a can-this-marriage-be-saved? formula, Pabst sustains interest through expert framing and shrewdly chosen gestures: thus, the act of dividing a pastry comes to represent the possibility of divorce. An intelligently adult resolution, offering no easy answers, adds to the film's stature.

"Abwege," literally translated as "Astray," but usually given the English title of "The Devious Path," and otherwise known as "Crisis," seems as if director G.W. Pabst took the sort of comedy-of-remarriage scenario that his emigrated compatriot Ernst Lubitsch was inventing in Hollywood ("The Marriage Circle" (1924), "Lady Windermere's Fan" (1925), "So This Is Paris" (1926)), but filmed it as though it were a somber and claustrophobic psychological melodrama, or "Kammerspielfilm" (chamber drama). The result, consequently, is jarring, but entirely gorgeous. Pabst would achieve his greatest artistic success the subsequent year by teaming up with flapper icon Louise Brooks in "Pandora's Box" and "Diary of a Lost Girl," and while his earlier achievements, such as "The Joyless Street" (1925) with Greta Garbo and Asta Nielsen, also tend to overshadow this film, "Abwege" is further evidence, even with its smaller budget, that Pabst was already a technically proficient filmmaker.

The dolly shots are probably the most flashy technique, which are extraordinarily intimate when tracking Irene (Brigitte Helm) through a crowded nightclub dance floor or after her and her husband (Gustav Diessl) fail to reunite one night and are as effective when employed for quick, zoom-like effects to bridge from establishing shots to highlighting character interactions. But, the entire picture is exquisitely photographed and edited. The booze and drug fueled romp of the nightclub sequence might usually get the most attention, but the scenes in the couple's swanky home are also extremely well put together, including the moody lighting effects, cutting to follow figures between rooms, and the middle-class set designs. Even the train station sequence looks stunning with the low-key lighting. Almost everything must've been done in a studio.

Helm provides a sultry look throughout much of the proceedings and strips to her negligee in one scene to make a spectacle of her body, although the comedy-of-remarriage plotting undermines her character's image early on as a proto-feminist turned flapper amidst the glorious decadence of the Weimar Republic, to escape the housewife's gilded cage. Meanwhile, her husband intermittently surveils her, and, otherwise, the film's system of looks is maintained by some dolls sold at the nightclub. Diessl looks absolutely deranged much of the time. While Irene demonstrates concern at one point that her husband will kill himself; with that look on his face and the chiaroscuro effects wherever he went--even the wind gushing through the door when he enters the home of his wife's suspected lover, I thought it more likely he was going to murder someone else. I also like that the other man in the love triangle is an artist, for art-within-art, although the stuff with the boxer is less effective. It's suggestive that the artist spends all his time drawing Irene when he can't have her, but as soon as it seems he might be able to, he's sketching the portrait of some strange old man. Also interesting to note is that sound effects are hardly needed (and there were none in the score by Mauro Colombis for the Pordenone Silent Film Festival screening): views of a phone intercut with characters suddenly looking at it are enough to inform that it's ringing, and the aforementioned gust of wind requires no noise, either.

Although "Abwege" seems to have been circulating for a while now, the restoration presented for Pordenone is my first viewing of it. The recreated tinting/toning adds a lot, too, to an already practically pristine restored print. The entire narrative isn't much ado about anything, really, but it's usually worth it to just look and, if need be, forget the story of these late silent films made by the masters of the art form, and Pabst, indeed, was one of the great filmmakers.

(Note: Incomplete 35mm camera negative from the German Film Archive combined with a reel from a foreign print from the Swiss Film Archive, restored with added tinting/toning and title cards, and now housed in the Austrian Film Archive.)

Brigitte Helm glides draped in a variety of killer outfits through an escapist fantasy of love among the loaded, far from the gritty realism one usually expects from G.W.Pabst.

Introduced by her chic, worldly and bobbed-haired friend Hertha Von Walther into a world of swingers in which everyone is immaculately dressed and has limitless amounts of money to squander on sex, drugs and rock & roll, Helm herself throughout remains nobly aloof, like Giulietta Masina in 'Giulietta deli Spiriti'.

"Abwege", a film directed by Herr G. W. Pabst, demonstrates the most representative and important artistic merits of the oeuvre of this great German director during his silent period. Expressionism and Psychology are both intertwined without distinction in this film so we could say that the film is an Expressionistic film as well as a profound study of the psychology of the main characters, or a film about a marriage in crisis in which the troubled relationship of the couple is worked out in an oppressive setting.

In its visual aspects, "Abwege" is an astounding film with important and decisive cinematography by Herr Theodor Sparkuhl. The different settings that are showed in the film superbly illustrate the different moods suffered by its main characters. This is demonstrated in an astonishing early scene when Herr Thomas Beck ( Herr Gustav Diessl, perfect as the boring and upset husband ) is depressed, sitting on the sofa the in their bedroom in front of an open window waiting in vain for his wife, Dame Irene ( Dame Brigitte Helm, more feline and cold than ever ) The different way of lighting the apartments of the various characters or those wonderful and thrilling shadows in the stairs, are a good examples of the virtuosity of Herr Theodor.

Complicated, controversial and at the same time, successful, is the psychological study of the different personalities of that marriage, a couple in crisis characterized by continuous ups and downs, incomprehension, monotony, and lack of understanding. They are two very different people with different ways of living and they must take on the hard task of finding common ground, an effort that seems to doomed to fail. Herr Pabst falters at the end of the film when he resorts to an unconvincing happy ending as well as doing some unnecessary moralizing.

There is a part of "Abwege" that this German count especially loves and it is the one that happens in the Klub… can you imagine, this film gives the chance to watch a genuine, decadent German night-Klub of the Weimar era!!!... It's is a great present for decadent Teutonic aristocrats who in this way can remember the crazy nights of their youth, where many good times were spent in such gorgeous dens of iniquity. There the vicious and idle clients could find the vice of their choice: alcohol, drugs, tobacco and, the most terrible of all, Latin dancers!… And now, if you'll allow me, I must temporarily take my leave because this German Count must return urgently to the Klub.

Herr Graf Ferdinand Von Galitzien http://ferdinandvongalitzien.blogspot.com/

The years 1925 to 1931 were creatively rich for G.W.Pabst. The film under review comes between 'Loves of Jeanne Ney' and 'Pandora's Box'. Siegfried Kracauer maintained that this film would be of no account at all but for the nightclub scenes but I think in this he has judged it too harshly. Pabst does not waste any time on preliminaries as we are intrigued by and attracted to the main characters from the outset whilst the final reconciliation is beautifully understated. Technically the film is faultless. This is one of three films that Pabst edited himself and he has the services of Theodor Sparkuhl whose camerawork in the nightclub sequence is breathtaking. The images in this sequence are both intoxicating and erotic. A truly fascinating cast both on screen and off. Herta von Walther would eventually make a speedy exit to Brazil via Portugal rather than be a Gestapo agent whilst the eventful life of aristocratic Jack Trevor, including wrongful imprisonment for alleged collaboration, would make a film in itself. Gustav Diessl alas was taken far too early at only forty eight and the wondrous Brigitte Helm, greatly admired by Hitler, quit films in the mid 1930's never to return. Although this would generally be regarded as 'minor' Pabst it is wonderfully stylish and a further example of this director's mastery of the visual and his talent for getting the best from his actors.