Silent Films, Starry Night
Berliners love the summer. It’s the season when beer gardens spring up in the middle of the city, when groups travel en masse for bathing in the lakes, when grill parties dot the landscape of every public park, and when films are screened in the open air. The city-wide “Freiluftkinos” (“open-air cinemas”) show a mix of new hits and old classics and attract an equally varied crowd nearly every night of the week. Last Saturday, underneath the cool Berlin night sky, a friend and I saw two silent films from the 1920s accompanied on live piano music by renowned silent-film accompanist Carsten-Stephan Graf von Bothmer.
While freely mixing themes from classical, jazz and pop music, Graf von Bothmer perfectly improvises along to the film and matches his playing to the story. I observed him as he played: not for a single second did he take his eyes of the screen. He seemed to want to absorb himself into the film—his eyes glowed in euphoria as he trilled and clanged away, adding musical color to the black and white images on screen. As the audience laughed, he laughed along too. The whole time I couldn’t help thinking (well, other than the sound-synths from his computer and the DVD-projector), this must have been similar to how audiences in the Twenties enjoyed their silent movies.
The first short film was called “The Mysteries of a Hairsalon” from 1922, directed by Erich Engel and Bertolt Brecht and starring Karl Valentin, famed for his exaggeratedly long nose and macabre wit. In the film he plays a hairdresser who cuts off the head of a client, but then fastens it back on with a bit of tape. Foil-sword duels and pop-gun shoot offs ensue. A touch of the vaudeville comes through the hinted-at love story between an angry client and the hairdresser’s female apprentice. I was kind of unnerved by the slightly racist overtones of the film though (the aforementioned angry client is angry because he's been made to look like a Mandarin, with a two-pronged beard and has had his beard moved to the top of his bald head. What's wrong with having a topknot??), but I suppose I'm just too 21st Century PC.
I found the second film much more entertaining: “The Oyster Princess” from 1919, directed by Ernst Lubitsch (the Jewish filmmaker who later emigrated to Hollywood and made the classic anti-Hitler comedy “To Be or Not To Be”), is a riotous comedy of errors set against a visually opulent mansion ruled over by a profligate patriarch, Mister Quaker. His spoiled daughter, played by Ossi Oswalda, threatens to throw a tantrum big enough to tear the mansion down if she doesn’t get to marry a real live prince. An old matchmaker ferrets out the dingy quarters of impoverished Prince Nucki—a cocky gambler and drinker who keeps one loyal servant by his side, the incorrigibly simple Josef. Jam-packed in this gloriously low-brow slapstick are, amongst other things, a female boxing match, a phalanx of masseuses, an outbreak of the “foxtrot epidemic”, and a wedding so large and fabulous that it would make J.Lo's seem paltry. Through a series of not-too-sober misunderstandings and naughty hints of innuendo, the happy couple finally gets together and everyone goes home happy. Lubitsch’s sets and scenes were spectacularly designed, and he kept the tempo quick and the atmosphere light as in an opera buffa, with a bite of satire to boot.
Somehow the evening hearkened back to an era I had only read about in books, when Berlin was carefree and risqué and fast living was the order of the day. The Twenties were the short-lived summertime in Germany before the winter specter of Fascism set in. Now at the height of the summer almost ninety years after the films were first shown, Berliners were enjoying a valued cultural inheritance from that era. And the fact that such a large audience showed up to a silent film shows that the spirit of the Golden Age is still very much alive.
posted by joyce @ 9:17 PM
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