I missed my train and had to wait 20 minutes. At that point, I was way too late for “Pandora’s Box”, but I have managed to come in right when “Berlin” started, so I decided to go for that one.
Berlin, Sinfonie einer Großstadt
Germany 1927, Walther Ruttmann, 65′
Neil Brand is quite a genius. I got a seat very close to where he was playing, from an angle where I could easily see both hands. Some of his maneuvers were quite dramatic, and from how he was massaging his fingers before the performance and how he was sweating after only an hour-long film, I felt confirmed that he was putting an incredible energy into this.
Sadly (or luckily?) I was fairly tired. Despite that, I saw the whole film, but the movie has such an incredible speed that it’s difficult to see whole richness of the many details. Furthermore, I was moved to tears by the weirdest scenes. There was a train entering the nowadays completely irrelevant Anhalter Bahnhof, old trams going for Marienfelde, a bird view of the Berliner Dom full of houses that do not exist anymore…
In fact, I spent quite a bit of effort to try to recognize places, haha. It’s completely futile. The Berlin of this movie is not my Berlin, yet it is. Maybe this is the most beautiful of all.
Objectively, without any story whatsoever, the movie might not really have so much of a merit. It doesn’t give much of a society portrait (I could barely figure out how much the Weimarer Republik differed from the Kaiserzeit except for people’s clothing style) and there are not so many politics. It also barely shows any touristic attraction. Basically, the film sees Berlin a little bit like a normal person like us would see it, making it especially interesting for me. Considering the immense popularity of the screenings – they were always full although they showed it 6 times over the week – I can definitely see how people in Berlin found the same appeal in the film. Apart from that, if you do not have a special relation to Berlin or Germany, what other merit does the film have, I wonder? Personally I was too busy to notice any of it.
A Page of Madness
Japan 1926, Teinosuke Kinugasa, 60′
I hate the Babylon. We had an incredibly horrible copy, worse than a 640×320 video where the picture was practically completely blurry. You could barely make out any facial expressions, and I was heavily annoyed by that.
Apart from that, I must admit that I was inexplicably drawn to the movie. I found the very Japanese depiction of madness very artistic, and since nobody could understand what actually happened in the film, I concentrated all my power on telling my eyes to ignore the bad image quality and on the intriguing aesthetics of the film. I must admit that loved it. There is something haunting yet beautiful especially about the dancing woman, and it didn’t surprise me at all that they brought out No masks in the end. In a nutshell, I find this film to be extremely interesting and precious, and hope to one day see a better, decent version of this. If it had a more comprehensive story, I have a feeling that the movie could have become something great.