Die Freudlose Gasse (The Joyless Street), silent, 1925.

People watch film for many different reasons. One of the reasons I watch film, though by no means the earliest or the most underlying of reasons, is to understand cinematographic decisions and (i) their philosophical implications for the film itself and for various categories to which the film may arguably belong, and (ii) their emotional impact upon the viewer. The close relationship, the synergy, of these elements, as well as the treatment of some of my most favored themes, in German Expressionist film and the American film noir it influenced constitutes one of the main reasons why I am so enamoured of these two film genres. Upon watching Die Freudlose Gasse for the first time (in its original cut of 150 minutes), I have to say that I was not left with much of an emotional impact but was still suitably impressed with the film, directed by another favorite of mine, G.W. Pabst, who brought the great Louise Brooks to the screen for one of her most searing performances in Die Büchse der Pandora.

The love for sideline characters that I mentioned in my New Year's post about Frank Capra is seen in a darker version in Die Freudlose Gasse: take the most amusing cameos in a Capra film and twist them ugly ... a withered old peg-leg navigating a filthy alley instead of a black man energetically selling hot dogs. One of many beautiful aspects of this cinematic style is that it allows these characters to wear their moral disfigurement on their sleeve with exuberance, as evidenced in Werner Krauss’ butcher Josef Geiringer, and Valeska Gert’s Madame Greifer, both of whom are thoroughly delighted with themselves as they orchestrate heinous acts in a Vienna that is a straight vision of corruption. Asta Nielsen as Maria is most impressive as a single performance, moreso even than Greta Garbo who looks sexily tranquilized throughout the film and achieves in her own right an ironic perfection in this role. Maria, whose every curve manages to be masculine, commits murder with a face blanched by jealousy. It is sublime. Incidentally, this film is part of a Weimar cinéma vérité series at the Edinburgh Filmhouse, meaning that the film is to be interpreted within the broader context of the Neue Sachlichkeit in which Expressionist poetic devices are shed in favor of a realist exposé of the darker truths of society that in this particular instance led to the film being cut to the point of inefficacy or completely censored in countries outside of Germany. While I am not certain enough to say that it should not be characterized as cinéma vérité, I think this film has strong expressionist elements.

I look for windows and mirrors in this sort of film. There are two scenes that made a deep impression on first viewing. The first scene – I say first although I believe it takes place later in the chronology of the film – involves Greta Garbo’s character Greta Rumfort and her exposure as a prostitute, as in the film-still to the left. Her dress is a scandalous piece of glitter, but you don’t see her in the dress at first. The exposure is done in the tri-panel mirror.

The second scene: the butcher Josef, as played by Werner Krauss, is a man who abuses his power without a second thought as all good sadists do. He loves the women who crawl to him for a pound of meat to feed their starving children. They come to him as surely as Lana Turner will collapse in your arms, as he waits and lasciviously assesses their figures (from the ankles up) through his basement window. He does not treat them with reverence, to say the least, bringing a slab of raw meat into the room where the women are waiting and hacking off a piece in front of them, blood flying as he goes through the bone with an axe that is as faithful a companion to him as his dog, who is pacing in the corner with anticipation of a leftover hunk of meat. As to be expected from a brute, Josef does not wrap up the meat and politely hand it to the women, but takes it in its raw and bloody state and slaps it into their desperate hands. This vicious and disgusting man is given his medicine at the end of the film, very quickly I might add, in a flash of a scene. On Melchior Street an angry crowd gathers under the Merkel Hotel and begins to throw rocks through the hotel window. The partiers scatter and flee from the building. A starved mob gathers outside of Josef’s butcher shop. A woman breaks into the shop after being denied meat for the last time and kills Josef. You can see him through the basement window, his face, that slaughtered look in his eyes, disappearing into his own fate.

I am still uncertain why these two scenes (and I have seen plenty of scenes of that ilk before) were so effective, in the sense that I find it strange and natural that an indirect viewing of either the exposure of or the instantiation of something taboo should be so – if not luridly – exciting.

Certainly loads have been said on this topic and its cousin “voyeurism”, but I have not systematically read up on it, so I have some extra reading cut out for me in the weeks ahead. I wonder about this even as I admit my bias in believing this to be more often than not an aesthetically superior choice compared to a direct move on the director’s and cinematographer’s part. (It is in part a bias because I arrived at this belief about the indirect generally being aesthetically superior before I could articulate my reasons for why the impact of the indirect should be so exciting for the viewer. That is not the correct order of things, and still many a worthy aesthetic judgment can probably be formed this way. Another cause for pondering for another time.) An example of a direct move that I believe to be successful would be the extreme high-angle shots, often termed “god shots”, as used by Alfred Hitchcock’s director of photography Robert Burks in Marnie. These shots still have me baffled because they strike me as a direct manifestation of the psychosis, cinematographically speaking, and I cannot figure out how it is the case except through these shots that the psychosis itself should be driving the film, as opposed to the character – who is nothing compared to the force of the actual psychosis, which seems to have chosen to land itself upon the cursed Marnie and would have had a life of its own without her blonde virgin body and mind to torture. Why are those shots so Hitchcock, so powerfully disturbing? Perhaps this is nothing at all to think about and simply reveals my most scattershot intuitions. But getting back to the “indirect” choice: there is something about seeing these violent and debasingly erotic revelations take place through or in glass. The fascination cannot be as extreme (or as extremely modernist, I would like to say) as in Marnie – definitionally, I think. The sort of fascination that occurs in the two scenes I have highlighted in Die Freudlose Gasse requires that slender bit of distance, which is explicitly rejected in Marnie. Maybe it has a softer implication, that there is a choice on the viewer’s part to fixate on what is being shown through or in the glass, whereas in Hitchcock you are thrust into the centre of the fixation – all the same, the viewer will fixate, however indirectly the invitation was sent. Does the fact that it was done indirectly make the viewer feel a heightened excitement because of having been given access to something that would otherwise be a private occasion, which sounds very much related to voyeurism (though voyeurism is tethered to an unwarranted access to the forbidden and we have yet to determine whether the access given here is actually unwarranted), or is there some other reason? Why should the abstraction – if indeed this is abstraction – of visceral things be so alluring? I end with these questions as I do not yet have the answers, but the fact that these are the questions I am raising, regarding how optical abstraction should result in a particular psychological effect, shows that there are expressionist leanings in Die Freudlose Gasse that should not be overlooked due to the overall cinéma vérité schematic. It may be structurally cinéma vérité, but it is procedurally not insensitive to expressionist technique.

The butcher says hi.