Kuhle Wampe

In 1931, in Berlin, the desperate brother of Anni (Hertha Thiele) can not find a job and is pressed by his unemployed father Franz Bönke. He commits suicide and sooner his family is evicted for nonpayment of rent. Anni's boyfriend Fritz (Ernst Busch) helps them to move to the summer camp Kuhle Wampe that had become a homeless camp, in the outskirt of Berlin. When Anni gets pregnant, Fritz promises to marry her, but he calls off the wedding after the party. Anni aborts and moves back to Berlin, where she finds a job with other youths in an association that promotes sports.

"Kuhle Wampe oder: Wem gehört die Welt?" is an interesting film that shows the difficult life of the working class in Berlin in times of the Great Depression. I have just watched this film on a DVD released by the Brazilian Distributor Versátil and I found difficult to understand parts of the narrative. However, the running time of the foregoing DVD is only 68:30 minutes and in accordance with the information of the IMDb, the original version has 80 minutes running time; the German censored version has 76 minutes; and the American version has 71 minutes. Therefore, it would be unfair to criticize the fragmented narrative that was cut from the film of the director Slatan Dudow. I read that this film was censored in 1932 and banned by the Nazis in 1933 accused of communist tendencies. My vote is eight.

Title (Brazil): "Kuhle Wampe ou A Quem Pertence o Mundo?" ("Kuhle Wampe or To Whom the World Belongs")

This is a great film, an early example of fiction film-making that is responsive to social and political circumstances, but that doesn't get bogged down in the naturalist pessimism of, say, Piel Jutzi's contemporary "Mutter Krausens Fahrt ins Glück." The cinematography may not be the most compelling, but it is sensitive, considered, and bears the mark of Dudow's admiration for Eisenstein. Brecht was only one of the collaborators on the script -- together with the reportage-novelist Ernst Ottwalt, even if he was its most outspoken defender in the censorship proceedings; and the idea for the film was Dudow's, a Bulgarian-born theater and film director who had made one documentary prior to "Kuhle Wampe" and would go on to co-found the East German studio, DEFA.

Almost a documentary and a feature film, we find that this is as interesting as it has charm, history and beauty. They tell us of a couple who lose they house and jobs as so many other people at this time as it is difficult for many and in Germany. We know that this has a communist theme but we also realise that the Nazi's are coming. Although just as this film having been put together but then almost lost because it was banned before it had been opened. The writers are Ernst Ottward and Bertolt Brecht, the four separate sections by Brecht, the suicide, the camp site, the sport festival and the train ride on the S-Bahn, which are all great and divided by his music accompanied by images of the apartment blocks, factories and the landscapes with the trees and grasses. Slatan Dudow directed this his first film and he kept it together quite beautifully. The lovely Hertha Thiele is great being this her second film, having earlier made her first the fantastic Madchen in Uniform (1931).