Menschen am Sonntag
Robert Siodmak (1930)
I first learned about People on Sunday when I went to the human geographer Matthew Gandy’s inaugural lecture at UCL in 2009. The lecture, entitled ‘Borrowed Light: A Journey through Weimar Berlin’, included excerpts from this silent movie and I was excited when I saw that it was screening at BFI (although in fact it’s possible to watch the whole film online). The BFI programme note included pieces from Sight and Sound and Monthly Film Bulletin (the latter by Richard Combs) and both, as might be expected, situate People on Sunday purely in cinema history. Its place there is assured and deserved but the larger historical meanings give the film huge intrinsic interest and make the experience of watching it exceptional.
The characters are Berliners, enjoying their weekend but with jobs to return to on Monday morning – as a wine seller, a taxi driver, a sales assistant in a record shop, a model and a film extra. The snatched Sunday that the film describes is a record of a way of life in Germany that would also prove to be temporary. You naturally wonder what happened, after the end of the Weimar Republic and during the Nazi regime, to the people who lived in this time and place. Because the actors in the five main roles in People on Sunday were amateurs and, in real life, had the same jobs as the characters they played, they are more than symbols of ‘ordinary people’ living in Weimar Germany: they are those people. Did Christl (the extra), Annie (the model) and Brigitte (the shop assistant) become Nazi supporters? Did Wolfgang (the wine seller) or Erwin (the taxi driver) fight in World War II? Thanks to the internet and IMDB in particular, the fate of the principals turns out not to be quite the unanswered question I expected. Except for the model Annie Schreyer, each of them made a couple more movie appearances although none went on to a career in cinema. It’s not clear from IMDB what happened to Schreyer or to Erwin Splettstösser but Christl Ehlers, who had Jewish ancestry, left Germany in 1933 when Hitler came to power, and died in a plane crash in New Mexico in 1960, aged forty-eight. Wolfgang von Waltershausen, who has film star looks, died, as old as the century, in 1973. Brigitte Borchert lived into the present one: in 2000 she appeared as herself in a television documentary short called Weekend am Wannsee. She was a hundred years old when she died in 2011.
That Brigitte, Christl and Wolfgang aren’t lost in history doesn’t alter the mystery of the other people – whether minor characters or extras or faces in the crowd – in the film. During the Saturday, Wolfgang meets Christl and invites her to a picnic at Nikolassee, a lake on the outskirts of Berlin, the following day. On a beautiful sunny morning, Christl goes to Nikolassee with her friend Brigitte, Wolfgang with his friend Erwin. After a fractious Saturday evening, Erwin’s wife Annie stays in bed and sleeps away her Sunday. (There’s something horrifying about her losing this free time.) The foursome have their picnic, swim in the lake, play records on a portable gramophone, ride on a boat. In the meantime, Wolfgang flirts with Brigitte, causing tensions with his original date Christl. The action is embedded in a documentary description of the city and the lakeside. Some elements are clearly staged. When Erwin and Annie have a row and cut up the photographs on their wall of each other’s movie star idols, the scene, although meant to be comical, has a vicious quality. There’s an odd bit featuring a group of schoolboys mucking around at Nikolassee, and smacking each other’s backsides; and a powerful sequence in which a professional photographer takes pictures of the many and various day trippers. The photos taken form a montage of freeze frames: some of the faces are unmistakably Jewish and the effect is, needless to say, poignant (as is that of the names on some of the shop fronts in the centre of Berlin). Although it’s a brilliant summer’s day, the sunlight – in retrospect at least – seems fragile. The sunshine lasts well into the evening yet this seems only to increase a sense of its eked out transience.
It was especially interesting seeing People on Sunday so soon after Caesar Must Die. In both films, real people are playing themselves but using a ‘made up’ script. The events in People on Sunday might well have happened to the people concerned but may not have happened in exactly the way shown: the players strike just the right balance between being caught by the camera and seeming to give a performance. Even at only seventy-three minutes, the film feels a bit long – perhaps because of the relative lack of to and fro in relationships that you would expect in a conventional drama. This may be why the episode on the pedalo on the lake works well, when the burly, clownish Erwin and the sexually confident and effortless Wolfgang start chatting up the girls in another boat: it’s in character (Wolfgang takes the lead, completely naturally) but briefly promises a development of the story.
The film ends, as it must, with a return to work on Monday morning. The original negative of People on Sunday, which comprised just over two thousand metres of film, is lost. The version shown by BFI, amounting to 1,839 metres, has been constructed mainly from a print from the Netherlands with some other sections acquired from Belgium, Italy and Switzerland. The fate of the people on screen in People on Sunday may be largely obscure but what happened to those behind the camera is a very different matter – although still to a large extent a consequence of the end of Weimar and the rise of Nazism. The director was Robert Siodmak. The producers were Edgar Ulmer and Seymour Nebenzal. The principal writer was Billy Wilder – there are screenplay credits too for Siodmak and his brother Curt. The cinematographer was Eugen Schüfftan. One of the assistant directors was Fred Zinnemann.
11 May 2013
