Police report robbery

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Movie
Original title Police report robbery
Country of production Germany
original language German
Publishing year 1928
length 21 minutes
Rod
Director Ernő Metzner
script Ernő Metzner, Grace Chiang
production German work film, Berlin
camera Eduard von Borsody
occupation

Police report robbery is a short film by Ernő Metzner from 1928. It is included in the film avant-garde.

action

A man finds a coin on the street and is run over by a car when he tries to pick it up. The coin rolls into the gutter. Lots of people walk by until another man finds it and picks it up. He enters a cigar shop and wants to buy cigarettes, but the seller does not accept the coin, it appears to be counterfeit. The man finally goes into a pub and takes the coin as a stake in a game of dice with two pub guests. Another guest watches the man consistently win at the game. With two other bar-goers, he arranged an attack on the man (symbolized by an egg painted with a face, the shell of which was smashed with a knife).

With his winnings, the man leaves the pub; his beefy observer follows him. Recognizing the danger, the man flees and first finds refuge with a prostitute. She gives her pimp (or lover?) A sign in the room before entering with the man. The pimp is hiding behind a curtain. When the man in the room sees a still smoking candle, which has obviously just been extinguished, and a knife that has disappeared on second inspection, he wants to flee. The prostitute holds him back, and the persecutor from the pub is waiting outside.

Back in the room he is served coffee and sees the woman making signs in the mirror on the chrome-plated coffee pot. She charms him to stay, immediately gags him together with the pimp who is jumping out from behind the curtain and steals his wallet. At the same moment another woman enters the room and leaves it again with a smug smile on her face.

After a scuffle with the pimp, the man is thrown into the street where his pursuer is still waiting for him. A coin rolls out of his pocket and the stout man knocks him down with a club.

Caricature images reflect the action and the people involved; The focus is on the coin. The man wakes up in the hospital bandaged. A doctor and a policeman are sitting by his bed. The sentence appears on three sub-title cards: "The perpetrators have been arrested ... are you already strong enough to be confronted with them ... to tell us who the culprit is?" The man closes his eyes and it a rotating coin appears.

Film technical means

What is striking is the consistent use of various film-technical means when narrating the action without text - highlighting details by means of close-ups (coin, stick, knife, candle, faces of the people, etc.), symbolism (the "decapitated" egg), optical distortions (representation of the unconscious Anxiety). The dynamically accelerated sequence of cuts of the chase on the street, which alternately show faces and the faster and faster running feet of the two men, is similar to the scenes of the driverless locomotive in Abel Gance's Das Rad (1921) or the stair scene accelerated by increasingly shorter cuts in Eisenstein's armored cruiser Potemkin (1925).

Remarks

The film was banned by the film inspection agency in April 1929 on the grounds that it was "brutalizing and demoralizing". The complaint of the producers against this decision was rejected by the Oberprüfstelle.

Regarding this, the director Ernő Metzner in Close Up , Switzerland, May 1929: “I just can't understand why the censors interpret my film as a crime film. All scenes in the film ultimately aim to create a feeling of fear, the consequence of which is the psychologically unassailable fearful dream. One should investigate to what extent the film's effects of creating fear led the censors to misinterpret this effect by attributing this ability to "brutality." Such a psychological distortion of the facts is all too understandable. "

Despite its brevity, the film was included by Gerhard Lamprecht in his catalog of German feature films that fill the program.

Reviews

“The experimental short film ÜberFALL is one of the most radical German films. He neither glorifies the petty bourgeoisie as rebels, nor does he turn the chaos of the street into a haven of true love. ÜberFALL goes far beyond any other film of the time in that it rejects the police, the reassuring symbol of authority in German films. RAID shows chaos, but without accepting submission to authority as a way out. The truly heretical character of this film is confirmed by the sharp reaction of the censors. ” Siegfried Kracauer in Von Caligari zu Hitler , 1947

literature

  • Klaus Lippert police report robbery . In Günther Dahlke, Günther Karl (Hrsg.): German feature films from the beginnings to 1933. A film guide. Henschel Verlag, 2nd edition, Berlin 1993, pp. 185 ff. ISBN 3-89487-009-5

Web links