Posted: Wed Nov 21, 2007 10:46 pm
This notoriously difficult to see film from the (recently ressurected, due to ALEXANDERPLATZ interest) canon of Phil "Piel" Jutzi has made its way into my hands from a fantastically generous source... and despite the old-broadcast quality, the italian intertitles-- I can only urge those who may know someone who knows someone who knows someone who has the rights to this film to beg them to get this thing out there. I could imagine this thing in some ridiculously impossible never-to-appear "Socialist-Humanist Films of Weimar Berlin" box along with THE SLUMS OF BERLIN and couple of other Lamprechts, and BERLIN ALEXANDRPLATZ, another Jutzi.
The film concerns the plight-- from what I could tweeze out of the Italian titles and some foreknowledge of the film-- of an old woman living in the bleak backstreets of the Berlin slums along with her kids, and a prostitute. Mother Krause ekes out a living on her route selling papers every day and trying to keep the family afloat, living in a cramped musty old flat with a tiny kitchen and one other room shared by her extended family (her son a raging alcoholic apparently). This family, with all their strife and plight makes the distressed family unit in PHANTOM look like The Brady Bunch.
WHich is the crux of the biscuit here... we are talking a tough as nails portrayal of the downtrodden and sick and disposessed in depression era Berlin which-- as a time and place-- could put the depths of the NYC Five Points or Dickensian London-Whitechapel to shame. Jutzi populates his tableaux with densely (and very deftly) edited montages (his work on POTEMKIN w Eisenstein for its Berlin debut clearly left its mark, and his sympathy w the Soviets is well established anyway) of Berlin's underside, taking his camera deep into the shit parts of town that BERLIN SYMPHONIE GROSSTADT's Freund and Babaerske probably feared to tread without getting their Debrie stolen. Hard, time-bitten, weatherbeaten faces sitting around jobless, poor, sick, laughing grimly into the lens, bored out of their minds, doing whatever to hustle up a mark-- the film is filled with documentary footage of Berlins underside and as a grim city symphony alone the film is utterly fascinating. Fascinating also in that Jutzi operated the camera himself.
Beyond the heavy and gritty montage Jutzi has employed some of the most incredible crane shots I've ever seen in any film, ever. You know the shot in LA HAINE where the helicopter shot accompanies the piece of hip hop blasting out of the dudes window and across the courtyard? On two or three seperate occasions Jutzi employs what can be nothing else but a gigantic crane that reaches up five or six stories (I didnt count the windows vertically) to the rooftop, and as the narrative kicks off he swoops from one rooftop down thru a courtyard... and finally down from a rooftop, across a court yards open space giving the viewer gods-eye-view vertigo, and zipping square on right up to the window wherein the narrative properly begins. It's as tour de force as anything youve ever seen in the whole of the cinema.
Naturally, owing to the fact that Jutzi belonged to that socialist group of filmmakers who not only pulled no punches but wished to make cold, hard, painful statements, a lot of suffering is on display-- and yet there's not an ounce of sentimentality or exaggeration. Despite the astonishing techniques used, the whole affair feels like a documentary... a grimly sordid, terribly tragic affair where unlike Hollywood there is no god or Happiness Fairy of Fairness who comes in the end to remedy all wrongs. It has one of the most uncompromisingly bleak endings youre apt to encounter in the whole hundred-plus years of the cinema. I CAN'T believe this film lurks this far under the radar, and that the only way to get your hands on any Jutzi is to buy the CC RWF behemoth. See it at all costs.
The film concerns the plight-- from what I could tweeze out of the Italian titles and some foreknowledge of the film-- of an old woman living in the bleak backstreets of the Berlin slums along with her kids, and a prostitute. Mother Krause ekes out a living on her route selling papers every day and trying to keep the family afloat, living in a cramped musty old flat with a tiny kitchen and one other room shared by her extended family (her son a raging alcoholic apparently). This family, with all their strife and plight makes the distressed family unit in PHANTOM look like The Brady Bunch.
WHich is the crux of the biscuit here... we are talking a tough as nails portrayal of the downtrodden and sick and disposessed in depression era Berlin which-- as a time and place-- could put the depths of the NYC Five Points or Dickensian London-Whitechapel to shame. Jutzi populates his tableaux with densely (and very deftly) edited montages (his work on POTEMKIN w Eisenstein for its Berlin debut clearly left its mark, and his sympathy w the Soviets is well established anyway) of Berlin's underside, taking his camera deep into the shit parts of town that BERLIN SYMPHONIE GROSSTADT's Freund and Babaerske probably feared to tread without getting their Debrie stolen. Hard, time-bitten, weatherbeaten faces sitting around jobless, poor, sick, laughing grimly into the lens, bored out of their minds, doing whatever to hustle up a mark-- the film is filled with documentary footage of Berlins underside and as a grim city symphony alone the film is utterly fascinating. Fascinating also in that Jutzi operated the camera himself.
Beyond the heavy and gritty montage Jutzi has employed some of the most incredible crane shots I've ever seen in any film, ever. You know the shot in LA HAINE where the helicopter shot accompanies the piece of hip hop blasting out of the dudes window and across the courtyard? On two or three seperate occasions Jutzi employs what can be nothing else but a gigantic crane that reaches up five or six stories (I didnt count the windows vertically) to the rooftop, and as the narrative kicks off he swoops from one rooftop down thru a courtyard... and finally down from a rooftop, across a court yards open space giving the viewer gods-eye-view vertigo, and zipping square on right up to the window wherein the narrative properly begins. It's as tour de force as anything youve ever seen in the whole of the cinema.
Naturally, owing to the fact that Jutzi belonged to that socialist group of filmmakers who not only pulled no punches but wished to make cold, hard, painful statements, a lot of suffering is on display-- and yet there's not an ounce of sentimentality or exaggeration. Despite the astonishing techniques used, the whole affair feels like a documentary... a grimly sordid, terribly tragic affair where unlike Hollywood there is no god or Happiness Fairy of Fairness who comes in the end to remedy all wrongs. It has one of the most uncompromisingly bleak endings youre apt to encounter in the whole hundred-plus years of the cinema. I CAN'T believe this film lurks this far under the radar, and that the only way to get your hands on any Jutzi is to buy the CC RWF behemoth. See it at all costs.