© 2010 William Ahearn
The year is 1925 and the film is “The Joyless Street” (“Die freudlose Gasse”) starring Asta Nielsen, Werner Krauss and – in her second feature role – Greta Garbo. What director GW Pabst did was to take a lurid novel about the poor in postwar Austria and turn it into the beginnings of the Die Neue Sachlichkeit or “new objectivity” or new reality movement. Pabst essentially gutted the theatrical style of the German expressionists and tossed out the gods and monsters and inserted real people in dire straits. In the film, it is the poor – the lumpenproletariat, as Karl Marx defined them – that suffer from the mistakes of the corrupt wealthy and this is what “postwar disillusionment” actually looks like. Pabst muted and diffused the shadows, creating cinema instead of mise-en-scène. The term mise-en-scène has evolved over the years into an expression that means the totality of a production, as say “gestalt” was used in the 1960s; it was used in German expressionist film to actually mean theatricality and that ultimately was the downfall of the genre. It was way too limited and while its influences found a home in horror films, other filmmakers soon abandoned it. Fritz Lang’s “M” owes more to “The Joyless Street” than any of the films of German expressionism.
FW Murnau – perhaps the most important of the German expressionist filmmakers – took the turn to realism and by the time he arrived in Hollywood and made “Sunrise” in 1927, all traces of expressionism were gone. Murnau – disappointed with Hollywood – took off for Bora Bora with Robert Flaherty to make the neo-realist film “Tabu” in 1931. Flaherty soon left and Murnau turned out a film very close to a film noir shot in the sunlit south Pacific. “Tabu” undoubtedly inspired or influenced the French poetic realists and Jean Renoir’s “Toni” (1934) – with Luchino Visconti as his assistant – took a similar approach using location shooting and non-professional actors.
“The Joyless Street” would be censored and mutilated by numerous governments and studios around the world. The story centers on murder, stock manipulations, corruption, prostitution and the abject poverty of the postwar Viennese. The prostitution in the film isn’t the work of gussied-up tarts but merely women who need food. The French cut it up and added new scenes and in the US, Asta Nielsen’s part would be minimized to bring Garbo to the fore. The film was recently restored in Germany, adding at least 55 minutes that had been censored.
In Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, Otto Friedrich wrote in a contemporary review:
“[Pabst] achieves his goal in great style, does not tread on well-worn paths, presents new ideas which are uniquely his own, and with this achievement gives us a new hope. He captures the atmosphere of an idea, keeps redrawing it on the surface in ever more intensive images, in contrasts of action that make an ever stronger impression. He illustrates the down-trodden souls of the era and the manic lust for pleasure of its people who are trying to do nothing more than escape for a few minutes from the terrible truth of the present.”