Street movie

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The street film is a subgenre of the silent film in Germany during the Weimar Republic in the 1920s. In the street films, the street stands for the temptations of the big city, as a visually stylized place where the petty bourgeoisie is exposed to instinctual temptation and danger outside of his safe home. The street milieu symbolizes the opportunities, but also the aberrations of modernity , which the middle-class person faces with fascination, but also fear. Siegfried Kracauer coined the term in his book From Caligari to Hitler .

history

Lotte H. Eisner already counts Leopold Jessner's and Paul Leni's back stairs from 1921, which were still arrested in Expressionism , among the street films, but the first street film that fully depicts the motifs is Karl Grune's The Street from 1923. A petty bourgeois turns criminal on the street Engaged in machinations and arrested when suspected of murder. However, after he is exonerated, he returns remorseful to his home. In Die joyllose Gasse (1925) GW Pabst defines the discrepancy between the social milieus in a much more political way and, thanks to the means of New Objectivity, more realistic. The living environment of the lumpen proletariat is opposed to the world of the nouveau riche with their amusements; In this area of ​​tension, Pabst works on central issues such as guilt and seduction.

In Bruno Rahn's Dirnentragödie (1927), Asta Nielsen plays an aging prostitute whose compassion for someone outcast from home ends in murder and suicide. The demonic quality of the street is stylized here in dreamlike images. Optimistic suggests Joe May in Asphalt (1929) life on the road. The chance for adventure and change is paramount, and through the sincerity of his feelings, the hero finds a happy ending with his beloved despite the dangers of criminal street life. Other street films are Pabsts Abwege (1928), Ernő Metzner's police report robbery (1928) and Erich Waschneck's Die Carmen von St. Pauli (1928).

Visual style

In contrast to the chamber feature film , which relies on close and semi-close shots, half- long and total shots are characteristic of street films , through which the characters are brought into connection with their social environment. Tempting lights and their reflections, hard light-dark contrasts stand for the promises of the street and represent the hectic, constantly flowing life on big city streets. The scenes often take place at night, and for the first time shop and window decorations are used as narrative elements in the film. According to Eisner, the street will be "with its dark corners that seem abruptly deep, its glowing bustle, street lamps pouring out the fog of light, headlights of cars, with the asphalt that has become shiny from rain or wear and tear, the illuminated windows of mysterious houses, the smiles of made-up prostitutes" to the embodiment of fate itself and thus to a main character filled with life in the films.

classification

Kracauer sees authoritarian structures in the street films, despite the implied everyday escapes and rebellious acts against the bourgeoisie, as the “sinners” often return ruefully to their bourgeois world: “The street films propagate the escape from domesticity, but this is still in the name of the authoritarian Behavior. ”This motif is the same in all street films:“ In all of them, the person breaks social conventions in order to get a piece of life, but the conventions prove to be stronger than the rebel and force him either to submission or to suicide. ”Anton Kaes sees the street in the films as an "existential place of modernity in which people have become objects of processes that they can no longer oversee and even less control."

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Eisner: p. 253.
  2. ↑ Kracauer: p. 169.
  3. ↑ Kracauer: p. 133f.
  4. ^ Anton Kaes: Film in the Weimar Republic. In: Wolfgang Jacobsen , Anton Kaes, Hans Helmut Prinzler (Hrsg.): History of German film. Verlag JB Metzler, Stuttgart and Weimar 1993. ISBN 3-476-00883-5 , p. 61.