Crise

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.

"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.)

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.

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'.

Pabst is on the precipice here so it's as good an introduction as any. His next two would be among the great works of the era. At the same time I don't recommend that you seek him out on your first rounds of cinema, silent or otherwise. He's not lyrically emotive like Murnau, nor used to build on a grand scale like Lang. So it might seem like not much is going on after all and that he simply made melodramas with some flourish around women who suffer. Not quite so.

He was one of the most discerning eyes of his time, one of the most intuitively equipped in knowing how to sculpt - not just a story, adorned with visuals but - currents of air that come from a character's soul and carry the creation of that story as it fills the room. His work is full of corridors that spontaneously open places in the imagining. Were we to look for the continuation of his cinema, we would have to look for it in the films of someone like Resnais and even Antonioni.

Look what he does here. On the surface this is the simplest stuff, melodrama about a young woman stifled by thankless marriage. She would like them to go out with friends that night but he's too busy with work and just looks like a very morbid man. A friend asks, "why do you allow yourself to be imprisoned?".

Quick note before proceeding. A few years before, Pabst had made a film - Joyless Street - that captured the despondency of the Weimar era of black markets and hyperinflation, neorealist impulse before the language existed. Here he's unerringly modern, meaning about the life of private vexations that begin after more simple needs have been sated, the life of the dissatisfied mind that we find in Antonioni's time. The film takes place inside a spacious house, a fancy club.

Okay now to see what he does. We have the usual tribulations and ironies of melodrama throughout - she defies him, regrets it, defies again on until the lovingly ironic conclusion where they reconcile outside the court where moments earlier they had just finished divorcing.

But the real mastery - what sets him apart - lies in how the situations are stirred from the soul they stir and animate.

Feeling stifled in her marriage takes shape as a romantic escape with an ex boyfriend painter; he readily takes her back and they plot to leave for Vienna the same night. But her husband, in this oppressive perception of him, foils the plan, possibly paying off the man, and waits at the station to escort her back home to the melodrama.

That very same night she rebels and goes out to a club; it's a bit of a mystery how this happens, an acquaintance visits the house looking for her husband and she walks out the door with him. The point is that everything is presented in a fluid way, with scant intertitles and explanations and long stretches of the camera. You can see Pabst looking for a cinema that would be Antonioni's or even Cassavetes', something discovered in the wandering of how things overlap.

Inside the club, in this urge for enjoying life she laughs and drinks with people she barely knows. There's a long visual stretch of this with complex flow. A flirty banker hits on her friend, no doubt expecting sex, and moments later he's seen disappearing in a backroom with a mysterious girl he just handed money to. Asking about the girl, she's told that she's someone's widow. In a breathtaking touch, she finds the ex-boyfriend in the same club; irate at seeing him she begins dancing with strangers. There's no exchange between them, no "scene", only the furious glimpse of him perhaps as her mind conjures the resentment.

Back home while all of this plays out, the husband is alone in a room, possibly inhabiting what he imagines. More portents: she rushes back home to find him unconscious, as if stricken by what he has seen. Immediately after they fight and she falls unconscious, but now we see that he carries her to the bed and motions to someone who is vacuuming outside to be quiet. The point, lost on us because we began with the story at a certain point, coloring everything through her dissatisfaction, is that he's not just a lecherous villain, probably never was.

Pabst being on the precipice means that I get perhaps half of a great film but the first part that culminates here is fascinating. It's these notions, interleavened dreams of anxiety, that Pabst would extend in his two most famous works with Louise Brooks. See this, if only to prepare you for Diary of a Lost Girl.

The realization he permits is that all we see is filtered by perceptions that carry us into stories whose shape they take, that reality is fluid in this way, the constant playground of impulse.

Sure enough, Murnau gave rise to some marvelous cinema, others from the era. But for me the progenitor of all those who are truly worth knowing, one of them, is this man here.