From morning to midnight (film)

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Movie
Original title From morning to midnight
Country of production Germany
original language German
Publishing year 1920
length 65 minutes (18 fps)
73 (16 fps) minutes
Rod
Director Karlheinz Martin
script Karlheinz Martin ,
Herbert Juttke
production Herbert Juttke
camera Carl Hoffmann
occupation

From morning to midnight is an expressionist German silent film by Karlheinz Martin from 1920. It was based on the play From morning to midnight by Georg Kaiser .

action

A lady comes into a bank to withdraw money from a second-hand dealer to buy a painting. The bank manager refuses to pay her. Stimulated by the idea of ​​a glamorous life, similar to that of the lady he adored, the cashier of the bank steals away with a large amount of money to help the lady. But she laughingly declines his offer of money - she can also afford the painting (a naked Venus painted in the style of Expressionism ). His theft is now discovered in the bank. The cashier goes home where he meets his dreary family. Aware of the danger of discovery, he flees onto "the street" in the night blizzard; then the bank director turns up with the police in vain at the cashier's house. An animated subtitle of a telegraph pole proclaims: “Cashier fleeing”.

While window shopping, he discovers elegant clothes in a shop and buys them. Then he goes to a six-day race (bicycle race) and plays the bon vivant. On the road again, he ends up in a bar and dance hall and soon with a woman and champagne in a private room . He is dragged into a pub by a seaman, where he wins a card game. He has now been put out to the police for a wanted man.

A Salvation Army chapel passes by and he joins them. Memories of his family are awakened in him, and the fear of prison eventually makes him tell his story to a Salvation Army girl. He distributes the money among the poor, who greedily pounce on and off. Shortly before midnight, the girl from the Salvation Army reports him to a passing policeman. Before he was arrested, the cashier shot himself.

background

The theater director Karlheinz Martin filmed the play From morning to midnight by Georg Kaiser from 1912 after he had already staged it on stage. The film equipment comes from Robert Neppach . Stylistically, they used the forms of expression of expressionism . Especially the stage-like, painted decorations and costumes and the expressive play of the actors form an artistic unit and are characteristic of this style. In the year of the premiere of Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari originated, the acting characters are - as is typical of Expressionism - nameless (only typified), but in addition to these formal characteristics, the action is freed from irrationality and obscurities.

From morning to midnight there is also one of the first German films to address the lure of “the big world” and “the street”. This makes him the forerunner of the so-called street films , such as Karl Grune's Die Strasse (1923) and Georg Wilhelm Pabst's Die joudlose Gasse (1925).

The premiere of the film is undetectable and it was likely only shown in a few cinemas. It was considered lost for a long time until a copy was found in Japan in 1962 that was acquired by the GDR State Film Archive. In 1963 the film had its Berlin premiere in East Berlin .

literature

  • Manfred Lichtenstein: From morning to midnight. In: Günther Dahlke, Günter Karl (Hrsg.): German feature films from the beginning to 1933. A film guide. 2nd Edition. Henschel-Verlag, Berlin 1993, ISBN 3-89487-009-5 , p. 44 f.
  • Fritz Göttler: The obscure object. "From morning to midnight" by KH Martin 1920. In: Peter Buchka (Ed.): German moments. A sequence of images to a typology of the film (= off-texts. Vol. 1). Belleville, Munich 1996, ISBN 3-923646-49-6 , p. 24f., P. 25: Scenography, (first in: Süddeutsche Zeitung , 1995).

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