Time problems: how the worker lives
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| Original title | Time problems: how the worker lives |
| Country of production | Germany |
| original language | German |
| Publishing year | 1930 |
| length | 12 minutes |
| Rod | |
| Director | Slatan Dudow |
| production | Willi Munzenberg |
| camera | Walter Hrich |
Time problems: how the workers' lives is a short - documentary from 1930 of Slatan Dudow , one of the most important communist filmmaker. The film is one of the early works of the “proletarian reportage film” and shows the dramatic living conditions in Berlin's tenement houses and slums . The film cartel "Weltfilm" acted as the production company .
content
Dudow blends the views of working-class life with impressions of noble residential areas and thus demonstrates the irreconcilable contrasts in Berlin in 1930. The juxtapositions include, for example, the depiction of a commoner washing his dog, while an exhausted worker is threatened with eviction and is finally seized and harassed by police for resistance. The film thus addresses the merciless practice of homeowners towards the poorest sections of the population. At the end, a police helmet is shown in close-up as a symbol of the rule of the upper class.
background
After Dudow came to Berlin to study in the early 1920s, he sat in on the shooting of Fritz Lang's film Metropolis and was active in the proletarian agitation theater. In 1930 he was able to make his first short film for the communist media entrepreneur Willi Munzenberg and his production company Prometheus with time problems: How the Worker Lives . The feature film Kuhle Wampe or: Who Owns the World?
In the post-war years, Dudow developed into one of the most important DEFA directors. He always placed his films at the service of socialist construction, whereby his “socialist realism mostly, despite all the ideological message, neither slips into the clumsy illustrative nor the simple pedagogical”.
In the film Zeitprobleme: As the Arbeiter lives , subtitles were largely dispensed with, as these mostly fell victim to censorship, or they were formulated harmlessly or ironically, for example "Our Baltic Sea" (approx. At 05:47), whereupon children playing in a splash. The camera work was almost avant-garde for the time; the distribution of light and shadow, of light surfaces and dark masonry indicate a stylistic proximity to the Bauhaus. In the detailed depiction of the poor interiors of the worker's kitchens and stairwells, however, approaches of realism and parallels to the contemporary drawings by Heinrich Zille appear .
Web links
- Time problems: how the worker resides in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Time problems: How the worker lives at filmportal.de
- Film copy at Vimeo
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c Slatan Dudow. In: dhm.de. German Historical Museum Berlin, accessed on May 23, 2016 .
- ↑ a b c d Time problems: How the worker lives. In: werkleitz.de. Retrieved May 23, 2016 .
- ↑ a b c d film data sheet. In: berlinale.de. Berlin International Film Festival, accessed on May 23, 2016 .
- ↑ a b Jan-Christopher Horak: German communist Kinokultur, pt.1 . In: Jump Cut . No. December 26 , 1981, pp. 39–41 (English, online ).