That's Life (1929)

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Movie
German title So life is
Original title Takový je život
Country of production Czechoslovakia
Germany
original language German
Czech
Publishing year 1930
length 80 (approx. 90 in the audio version) minutes
Age rating FSK 12
Rod
Director Carl Junghans
script Carl Junghans
production Carl Junghans, Berlin
Star Film, Prague
music Zdeněk Liška (Czech sound version from 1959)
camera László Schäffer
cut Carl Junghans
occupation

This is Life is a Czechoslovak-German silent film from 1929 by Carl Junghans with the Russian actress Vera Baranowskaja in the leading role of an old laundress.

action

Prague , towards the end of the 1920s. The living environment is that of the little people, for whom every day means a struggle for survival. The central figure in the story, a grief-stricken laundress, can only manage to support her family with great effort. Her husband, who recently worked in a coal shop, has lost his job and cannot find a new one. Her daughter, who was just doing a manicure, is, since she had read the riot act to a rather intrusive customer, now without wages and bread and, to top it all, unintentionally pregnant by her boyfriend.

As if the overall situation wasn't bad enough, the unemployed man laughed at a younger friend, an animation waitress, and drowned with her the money that was actually intended for the outstanding rent payment. In order to make the catastrophe perfect, the washerwoman also made a terrible mishap: She saw the neighbour's child playing at the window and wanted to keep it from falling into the depths - in doing so, she knocked over the washing tub with the boiling water that was falling on her rustles. Finally the laundress, the last remaining moneymaker in the family, dies from the scalds she has suffered.

Production notes

The prehistory to This is Life goes back to 1925. As can be read in Reclam's 1973 film guide, Junghans had already written the script at this point and has since struggled to raise the money for the production. Originally, it was planned that Junghans wanted the film to be shown in his hometown of Dresden . Since no one in Germany agreed to finance the film, the inexperienced director turned her to the Czech comedian Theodor Pištěk and offered him the first tragic role of his life - albeit without a fee. Pištěk accepted and other actors followed him. The German production company of the communist Willi Münzenberg finally showed itself ready to contribute 40,000 RM for the realization of the film. His Prometheus film was then to produce two more socially committed films in the same year 1929: Beyond the Road and Mother Krausen's Journey to Happiness .

Junghans shot the film in Prague in a few weeks from April 1929. The film was shown for the first time in Germany on March 24, 1930 in Berlin , in Prague it was shown on May 9, 1930. The film was not successful not least because the sound film had largely prevailed at the time of the premiere.

The main actor Pištěk was also involved in the production management. For many of those involved in this film, above all director Junghans, Pištěk and cameraman László Schäffer , So is life should be the most artistically significant work of their entire oeuvre. For the leading actress Baranovskaya, Life is the most important film since leaving the Soviet Union a few years earlier.

In 1964, Carl Junghans produced a sound version of his silent film with only noises and music.

Reviews

Kay Less called the film in Carl Junghans 'biography a “masterpiece of Czech film realism” and remarked: “ This is life - created almost at the same time as Piel Jutzi's socially critical masterpiece“ Mother Krausens Reise ins Glück ”- was based on the Zille' different 'Miljöh' descriptions of the Berlin backyard world. The film clearly showed Junghans' origins from socialist documentary films and is one of the most important works of proletarian cinema. "

Reclam's film guide wrote: “ Life is still impressed today by its unpathetic realism, which neither poetically glorifies everyday life nor misuses it for ostensible agitation. The highlights are the washerwoman's birthday party, at which supposed happiness actually reveals the confinement of her existence particularly clearly, the scenes in the pub and the end - funeral and funeral feast with coffee and cake to the sound of a pianola. The Prometheus wanted to persuade Junghans to come to a “positive” conclusion with class-struggle slogans. But Junghans was more interested in giving his trampled and battered laundress a quiet dignity, which Baranovskaya achieved excellently with a very controlled game. The director was less happy in all the scenes that dealt with the clash with the world of the rich: in the beauty parlor, on the coal field. Here it was not entirely without caricature exaggeration and exaggeration. "

Jerzy Toeplitz said: This silent film was “a real sensation in the best sense of the word. This work shows a close relationship to the German school from the late twenties, to the so-called Zille films such as Mother Krausen's Drive to Happiness . The atmosphere was depressing, the milieu perhaps naturalistically exaggerated, but Junghans was able to turn the apparently unimportant note from the chronicle column of the daily newspaper (a laundress scalded herself and dies) into a classic tragedy by introducing excellently designed figures and one A chain of inexorable consequences built. [...] The film So ist das Leben is the swan song of the Czechoslovak silent film. It is also a good testament to the artistic maturity of Prague production, and it shows that even under the unfavorable conditions resulting from the pressure of cosmopolitan tendencies, it was possible to make honest and good films that did not aim at cash-in had."

Bucher's encyclopedia of the film summed it up: “ This is life is a passionate indictment against all those who are responsible for the living conditions of the working class in Prague in the 1920s. [...] The expressiveness of the film is based on its bitterness and the lack of sentimentality, which place it in the tradition of the PROLETARIAN FILMS of the 1920s. "

The Lexicon of International Films writes: “The film directed in Czechoslovakia by Carl Junghans, the former Berlin film critic, based on his script“ The Washerwoman ”is a famous work from the end of the silent era, which reveals the connections between individual behavior and social situation; precise in detail, masterful in assembly. "

In filmblatt.de it says: “With his still silent film SO IS LIFE, Carl Junghans succeeded in 1930 in a modern description of time conditions, episodically, rhythmically cut and without combative pathos. There are typified characters from the interwar period, all of whom come from the lower petty bourgeoisie and whose social decline until the catastrophe is mapped out. […] In seven chapters, over seven days, the tragedy takes its course. The death of the laundress is followed by a long, dramatic sequence of homage; the mourners remain as a united community of fate. Not only with the proclaimed hope of resurrection, Junghans confessed to Christian values ​​and kept SO IS LIFE away from communist actionism, made the film distinguishable from "proletarian classics" such as MUTTER KRAUSENS FAHRT INS GLÜCK (1929) and KUHLE WAMPE (1932). "

The online cinema service briefly called the film a "milestone in silent film cinema ."

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Kay Less : "In life, more is taken from you than given ...". Lexicon of filmmakers who emigrated from Germany and Austria between 1933 and 1945. A general overview. ACABUS Verlag, Hamburg 2011, ISBN 978-3-86282-049-8 , p. 635.
  2. ↑ Reclams Filmführer, by Dieter Krusche, collaboration: Jürgen Labenski. P. 117 f. Stuttgart 1973.
  3. ↑ Jerzy Toeplitz: History of the film, Volume 1 1895-1928. East Berlin 1972. p. 489.
  4. ↑ Bucher's Encyclopedia of Films, Verlag CJ Bucher, Lucerne and Frankfurt / M. 1977, p. 723.
  5. ↑ Klaus Brüne (Red.): Lexikon des Internationale Films, Volume 7, P. 3499 f. Reinbek near Hamburg 1987
  6. ↑ That's life in Filmblatt.de
  7. ↑ That's life on cinema.de

Web links