Beyond the street

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Movie
Original title Beyond the street
Country of production Germany
original language German
Publishing year 1929
length 74 minutes
Rod
Director Leo Mittler
with the help of Albrecht Viktor Blum
script Jan Fethke
Willy Döll
production Willi Munzenberg for Prometheus-Film , Berlin
music Pasquale Perris
camera Friedl Behn-Grund
occupation

Jenseits der Straße is a German silent film melodrama from 1929 by Leo Mittler .

action

In the Hamburg harbor environment in the late phase of the Weimar Republic . An aging beggar finds a pearl necklace on the street that an elegant lady has lost. A prostitute watches him and follows him in the hope of being able to unbutton this seemingly valuable find again. The beggar lives with a young unemployed man. The whore tries to win the young naive for herself, and he actually falls in love with her quickly. But the whore has only one thing in mind: she wants the boy to steal from the old man, his roommate. Times are bad and everyone is next to himself.

Believing that the woman has a serious interest in him, the unemployed is ready for anything, including violence. And so the young man tries with all his might to remove the seemingly valuable piece of jewelery from his roommate, which he carefully guards in his neck pouch like a treasure. But the old man proves to be tougher than believed. The beggar flees from the rabid boy, falls into the water and drowns, clutching the supposedly precious piece of jewelry tightly. Soon after, a tiny piece of news was published in the newspaper: An old man was fished out of the water and he had carried a worthless imitation jewelry with him. As a result, the deeply desperate boy has become irrelevant to the whore, and so she immediately gets a patron for the next night: a very fat man.

Production notes

Across the street , the film was shot in June and July 1929 in the Jofa studios as well as in Rotterdam and Berlin (exterior shots) and was censored on September 20, 1929. The premiere took place on October 10, 1929 in the Berlin atrium. The following year the film was u. a. also shown in France and Portugal.

The working title was beggar, prostitute and sailor . Albrecht Viktor Blum , sometimes named as co-director , only shot the Dutch scenes. When he fell ill, he was replaced by Leo Mittler for the rest of the film. The buildings come from the hands of Robert Scharfenberg and Carl Haacker , the Russian Dimitri Roschanski was the production manager.

For leading actress Lissy Arna , at that time already a star of the entertainment film cinema, Jenseits der Straße was the only excursion into the artistically ambitious and socially relevant quality film.

Reviews

The contemporary reviews were mixed to tolerably positive.

In the Berlin Börsen-Courier you can read: “Contents of the time, such as the unemployment problem, are taken up. That is a good thing. Are they really represented? Not from the manuscript, which still haunts excessively old social pity paintings and the romance of prostitutes. [...] It is different with Leo Mittler's direction. He puts the misery novel in a real world, he gives it real documents. ”Later it says:“ The film is also very enjoyable in terms of acting. [...] Excellent Siegfried Arno in a Mackie knife role: here you can see how the style of representation of the 'Threepenny Opera' has already made school. "

Hanns G. Lustig came to the following conclusion in the publication Tempo : “Mittler shows what he learned from Pudowkin. He still copies the individual means too much without having mastered the composition. In the last third of the film, which is unusually effective, he shows the Russians' famous "short cut". [...] The end of the film is so excellent that it has no equal in the new German film production. "

Durus (di Alfréd Keményi) praises in Die Rote Fahne : “An unusually serious, artistically mastered film that wants to pack and shape a rag-proletarian milieu, a work with socially critical intentions. [...] This Prometheus film is one of the best that has been shot in Germany so far. Clarity and conciseness of the direction, a ballad-like rousing rhythm with motifs that recur like a refrain; a visually memorable work that was successful in assembly. The director Leo Mittler, gifted in form, quite original, varied the formal elements of the great Russian films. The film also has individual strong physical and milieu-wise moments, but the “milieu” is seen too formally, the “cinematic” suppresses - in spite of individual socio-critical accents - the time-critical. Ideologically, Beyond the Road lags far behind the best Russian films. "

Bucher's encyclopedia of the film sums it up: “The title of this feature film, produced by the proletarian Prometheus-Film GmbH, says it all: It makes critical reference to the genre of street films made in Germany, in which the city and the street represent fateful temptation and danger for the individual. [...] But the unemployment and the social misery that the film shows are not just a picturesque background for the rather conventional fable. This gets its credibility from the fact that it is deeply embedded in the description of life on the street and in the harbor district, the ambience of which is described realistically and in detail. This connection is also established through the expressive photography and the montage, which in some cases is clearly based on Soviet models. "

The lexicon of international film wrote: "The film from 1929 (still silent) is an example of the attempts of the labor movement in the Weimar Republic to use the medium of film for their concerns."

literature

  • Gero Gandert (ed.): The film of the Weimar Republic. 1929. A Handbook of Contemporary Criticism. Berlin / New York 1993. p. 324

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. according to a report from Film-Kurier No. 158 from July 5, 1929
  2. Berliner Börsen-Courier No. 479 of October 13, 1929
  3. ibid.
  4. Tempo, No. 238, October 11, 1929
  5. Die Rote Fahne, No. 203, of October 12, 1929
  6. Bucher's Encyclopedia of Films, Verlag CJ Bucher, Lucerne and Frankfurt / M. 1977, p. 383.
  7. Beyond the Road in the Lexicon of International FilmsTemplate: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used , accessed October 10, 2013.