On The Edge: European Cinema in 1939 Program

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EUROPEAN CINEMA IN 1939 5-6 APRIL 2019 | WHITNEY HUMANITIES CENTER | YALE UNIVERSITY

Generously Sponsored By The Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund, the European Studies Council at the MacMillan Center, Films at the Whitney, supported by the Barbakow Fund for Innovative Film Programs at Yale, the Department of French, Molière and Co. Fund in memory of June Beckelman Guicharnaud, the Department of the History of Art, the Film & Media Studies Program, the Judaic Studies Program, the Department of Italian Language and Literature, the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures.

Acknowledgements The 15th Annual European Cinema Conference was made possible by the hard work of many people. We would like to thank the members of the faculty committee from Film & Media Studies who selected the films to be screened this weekend: Professors Katerina Clark, Dudley Andrew, Marta Figlerowicz, John MacKay, Charles Musser and Katie Trumpener. Foremost, our gratitude to Pierre Folliet, Ph.D. student in Comparative Literature and Film & Media Studies, for organizing the conference and curating the films and program notes. Christina Andriotis, the Programs Coordinator of the European Studies Council, has been more than instrumental in planning and navigating the intricate logistics of the conference. We are grateful for Tony Sudol’s expertise as a projectionist. Leana Hirschfeld-Kroen, former graduate curator of the conference, offered invaluable advice over the past three months. Carlotta Chenoweth, Ph.D. candidate in Slavic Languages and Literatures, designed our beautiful publicity materials.

Multiple FIAF archives loaned us 35mm and 16mm prints, as well as, DCPs to be screened this weekend, including (by screening order) the Danish Film Institute, the Deutsches Filminstitut, the Kansallinen audiovisuaalinen instituutti of Finland, Gosfilmofond, and the EYE Filmarchief. Finally, many thanks to all introducers and panelists who turn this screening series into an ongoing discussion.

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FRIDAY APRIL 5

1:30pm Children of Divorce 3:15pm Water for Canitoga Introduced by Lorenz Hegel

5:30pm Department Store

Introduced by Professor Francesco Casetti

7:00pm Opening Reception

Whitney Humanities Center, Room 108

8:15pm Daybreak

Introduced by Professor Dudley Andrew

10:00pm Night Train to Munich Introduced by Leana Hirschfeld-Kroen

SATURDAY APRIL 6

8:30am The Activists 10:30am Tractor Drivers Introduced by Ana Berdinskikh

12:15pm Panel Discussion: Propaganda Cinema Professor Katerina Clark, Professor John MacKay

1:30pm Mamele

Introduced by Yahel Matalon

3:30pm There's No Tomorrow Introduced by Maxfield Fulton

5:15pm Wilton's Zoo Introduced by Professor Oksana Chefranova

7:15pm Panel Discussion: Émigré Cinema Professor Katie Trumpener, Professor Margaret Olin, Professor Angela Dalle Vacche (Georgia Tech)

9:00pm The Rules of the Game

Introduced by Pierre Folliet Post-Screening Discussion Led By Professor James Prakash Younger (Trinity College, Hartford)

CHILDREN OF DIVORCE Skilsmissens børn Dir. Benjamin Christensen Denmark, 1939 | 91 min | 35mm In Danish with English subtitles After a ten-year hiatus from filmmaking, Christensen returned to his Danish-cinema roots. Children of Divorce was a critical and popular success, establishing Christensen as Denmark's most socially engaged and serious director a quarter of a century after his initial breakthrough. The film's framing story opens in New York City, where (in a long flashback) a young Danish woman confesses her sexual victimization as a fifteen-yearold. Adapted by Christensen from Alba Schwartz's 1935 novel, Children of Divorce portrays contemporary Copenhagen teenagers and the moral irresponsibility and selfabsorption of their single parents. Banned for children in Denmark because of its adult themes, the film was considered by several critics the best Danish sound film made up until that time. Meyer and Holmer are particularly fine as the artist-father and daughter whose close relationship hints at repressed, incestuous desire. Watch for Christensen's unbilled cameo as a menacing, bearded ship's captain who barks in English, “Get the hell out of here!”

—Arne Lunde, “Shades of the Master: Benjamin Christensen,” BAMPFA, 1999

Print courtesy of the Danish Film Institute.

WATER FOR CANITOGA Wasser für Canitoga Dir. Herbert Selpin Germany, 1939 | 117 min | 16mm In German with English subtitles Similar to the popular genre of the mountain film, the appeal of Nazi Westerns like Water for Canitoga lay in primal nature explored with advanced technology, in premodern longings mediated by modern machines. In fusing the centerpiece of American popular culture with the mythological agendas of the mountain film, German Westerns of the 1930s simultaneously distracted through exotic adventures from distress, yet also hoped to blur the boundaries between cinematic spectacle and everyday experience. Providing a dramatic, elaborately controlled choreography of images and sounds – at one point the film’s hero even turns into a singer and performer – films like Water for Canitoga sought to elevate their flow of images and ever-shifting perspectives to the status of a total work of art, a spectacle of affective enthrallment that not only hoped to address popular tastes and captivate emotions but shape them in the first place in order to promote an aestheticizing vision of a new man in the service of a new political order. Deeply enmeshed in what Walter Benjamin described as fascism’s “efforts to render politics aesthetic” … the production and success of German Westerns like Water for Canitoga therefore do not simply indicate a merely curious and literally eccentric moment of German cinema history during the 1930s. Instead, they speak for a comprehensive redefinition of the location of culture under the historic condition of fascism, while they at the same time remind us of the fact that Nazi Culture was far less homogeneous and autochthon as its proponents in the past and most historiographers still today would like to suggest.

— Lutz Koepnick, “Siegfried Rides Again,” Cultural Studies, 1997

Print courtesy of the Deutsches Filminstitut.

DEPARTMENT STORE I grandi magazzini Dir. Mario Camerini Italy, 1939 | 85 min | DCP | In Italian with English subtitles The department store in Grandi Magazzini is a symbol of elegance, however artificial. It depicts a superficial splendor which people of Italy during that time could hardly have afforded. While it is ostensibly a film about the working class it certainly is not a working class in which the people's hands get very dirty. In a sense, then, the Camerini films are more adolescent dreams than depictions of daily life. They parody the daily life that most people have to pursue.

—Ted Perry, Italian Quarterly, 1980

A circular narrative is prevalent in the telefono bianco romantic comedies of the 1930s and ‘40s, particularly in the films of Mario Camerini starring Vittorio De Sica. In Camerini’s films comedic elements derive from a masquerade in which roles are exchanged between different economic classes via the theft of a class-identifying object. … In I grandi magazzini, Lauretta steals a set of clothes to impress Bruno. In each film, the plot is centered on the theft of a class-related object (car, camera, outfit), which makes the breaking of class boundaries credible. The imbalance is restored when the masquerade is discovered and the object returned for the preservation of class status quo. These films were party to a narrative current whose storylines featured an affected fatalono whose xenophile attitudes threaten a virtuous but naïve male protagonist who eventually resigns himself to his original class status.

—Carlo Celli, “A Master Narrative in Italian Cinema?”, Italica, 2004

DCP courtesy of Luce Cinecittà.

DAYBREAK Le Jour se lève Dir. Marcel Carné France, 1939 | 93 min | DCP In French with English subtitles Le Jour se lève may be said, in the first place, to be Prévert’s film. Rhetorically it is compact but elaborate, since the words and the images combine to use alternately three narrative tenses—the present, the past perfect and past imperfect. This subtle use of the flashback, actual or imagined, is further strengthened and complicated by the symbolic accumulation of the hero’s various personal belongings in the room in which he is finally shot while the crowd assembles outside.

Spectators were taken aback by this narrative method when the film was first shown, which may or may not explain why they were not when they saw Brief Encounter, another first-class example of subtle and complex film narrative, some years later. The other main characteristic of Le Jour se lève was obviously the exceptional importance of the sets. They are not there simply for the sake of atmosphere: their importance in the drama is probably unrivaled, even in Welles’ Citizen Kane and some other noteworthy American films in which the use of deep focus photography emphasizes objects and décor. This is particularly notable in the last sequence, in which the teddy bear, the brooch, the electric light wrapped in a sheet of newspaper, the packet of cigarettes, the empty box of matches, the photographs, all contrive to point up the hero’s character and situation with obsessive vividness as we approach the dramatic climax of his life.

—Jean Quéval, Marcel Carné, 1950

DCP courtesy of Rialto Pictures.

NIGHT TRAIN TO MUNICH Dir. Carol Reed UK, 1940 | 90 min | DCP If The Lady Vanishes is the best known of Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat's trainthriller screenplays, this quasi-retread is no slouch in the entertainment stakes either.

While there's an occasional whiff of formula, few will complain about the resurrection of Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne's bumbling cricket buffs Charters and Caldicott, or a fiery relationship between Czech exile Margaret Lockwood and preening British spy Rex Harrison (looking remarkably dapper in a Gestapo uniform) that includes such stiletto put-downs as: “If a woman ever loved you like you love yourself, it would be one of the romances of history.” It's also a fascinating snapshot of the British mindset during 1940’s ‘phoney war,’ with the Nazis ridiculed in a way that seemed a lot less funny just a few months down the line. But this naivety can certainly be forgiven today – as can some wincingly dodgy model work during the final cable-car confrontation.

—Michael Brooke, Sight and Sound, 2010

DCP courtesy of Criterion Pictures.

THE ACTIVISTS Aktivistit Dir. Risto Orko Finland, 1939 | 110 min | DCP In Finnish with English subtitles The Soviet invasion of Finland on November 30, 1939, the temporary peace signed in Moscow on March 12, 1940, which marked the end of the 105-day Winter War, the resumption of hostilities, on June 25, 1941 between the USSR, Finland and its now cobelligerent, Nazi Germany, triggered a wave of nationalist propaganda of which The Activists constitutes the unchallenged prototype. For Peter Cowie, the film “betrays Orko’s right-wing views, as it celebrates the endeavors of the young bourgeois ‘activists’ who seek to weaken the Russian hold on Finland in the early years of the 20th century, and who became the ‘Whites’, or rightists, who would win the bloody civil war that divided Finland after the Bolshevik Revolution.” A view shared by Anna E. Mrozewicz: “The 1930s in Finland were marked by rightist radicalism, persecution of communists and strong anti-Soviet views sanctioned by the authorities. Towards the end of the decade, Finland’s relations with its eastern neighbor became increasingly strained as the Soviet Union applied political pressure on Finland. On-screen Russophobia escalated, and a number of manifestly anti-Soviet pro-nationalist propaganda films were produced, offering a retrospective view of Finland’s relations with its eastern neighbor, such as The Activists ... set in [a] historical perio[d] of increased Russification in Finland (1908-1917)." The Activists was “banned shortly after WWII and re-released only in the mid-1980s, with the thawing of the Cold War,” an effect, of course, of the pressure exerted by the USSR following their victory in the Continuation War. —P. Cowie, Scandinavian Cinema, 1992 & A. E. Mrozewicz, Beyond Eastern Noir, 2018

DCP courtesy of Kansallinen audiovisuaalinen instituutti.

TRACTOR DRIVERS Трактористы [Traktoristy] Dir. Ivan Pyryev USSR, 1939 | 88 min | 35mm In Russian with English subtitles Tractor Drivers is a fascinating work that manages to combine three Soviet obsessions of the 1930s: the enormous popularity of musical films, the Soviet glorification of technology, and the preparations for an impending war ... With music by Dmitry Pokrass, Tractor Drivers became the template for a considerable number of girl-boytractor romances, as well as the subject of innumerable parodies.

—Richard Peña, “Envisioning Russia: A Century of Filmmaking,” Film Society of Lincoln Center, 2008

Apart from tractor modernism (art about the people, but not exactly by the people or for the people), there were plenty of tractor-inspired musical comedies, which made a subset of socialist realism, characterized as “boy meets girl meets tractor.” By far the most popular was the 1939 Tractor Drivers by the director Ivan Pyryev (featuring the classic song “Three Tank Drivers, Three Merry Fellows”). Set in a fairy-tale universe with no direct reference to the awful famines, gulags, and purges that were killing millions at the time, it tells the story of a veteran tanker who travels to one of Ukraine’s collective farms, where he falls in love with the ablest female tractorist but wins her heart only after he proves his own skill as a mechanic in a Stalinets-S65.

—Dimiter Kenarov, “A Threat to Public Order,” The Virginia Quarterly Review, 2011 Print courtesy of Gosfilmofond.

MAMELE Mateczka/‫מאמאלע‬ Dir. Joseph Green & Konrad Tom Poland, 1938 | 97 min | DCP In Yiddish with English subtitles

New digital restoration and new English subtitles by The National Center for Jewish Film, www.jewishfilm.org

In March [1938], Vienna welcomed the incorporation of Austria into Germany with a burst of anti-Semitic terror and brutality. Polish nationalists too endorsed the Anschluss; despite the Polish Corridor dividing East Prussia from the rest of the Reich, there was as yet little fear of war. In any case, Hitler’s attention had turned to the Sudetenland and the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia. That summer, as British prime minister Neville Chamberlain made the first of three trips to Germany to discuss the crisis, the Nazis began expelling all Jews who were Polish nationals. Such was the climate when Joseph Green returned to Warsaw. Green needed only three months to shoot both Mamele and A Brivele der Mamen. While Poland was helping to carve up Czechoslovakia, annexing the border area of Cieszyn on October 1, 1938, Green was editing and mixing all the films. Postproduction work was still going on when the Nazi regime orchestrated Kristallnacht, the largest and most savage pogrom against German Jews to date.

Convinced that war was imminent, Green arranged for the Polish release of both movies and in December left Warsaw, closing his office and taking his papers with him. … Green’s negatives were shipped to New York, where Mamele opened at the Continental on Christmas Eve. … As an event, it was largely overshadowed by A Brivele der Mamen, which Green held back until September 1939—two weeks after the Nazi invasion of Poland.

—J. Hoberman, Bridge Of Light, 1991

DCP courtesy of The National Center for Jewish Film, Brandeis University.

Copyright: National Center for Jewish Film

THERE’S NO TOMORROW Sans lendemain Dir. Max Ophüls France, 1939 | 82 min | DCP In French with English subtitles Sans lendemain, a film born from a commitment to realism, does not eschew formulaic exposes, contrived explanations, or functional back-and-forth. Quite certainly, the film mainly owes those aspects to its scenario, which conforms to a specific genre ... but also to a mise-en-scène which rarely seeks the simplest expressive solution. The découpage, in perfect harmony with the film’s décors and lighting, insists on the ponderousness of gestures, the weight of bodies, and the mediocrity of attitudes.

Eugen Schüfftan, the director of photography, who comes from expressionism, something that was then still labelled “poetic realism,” did not really do any work on fluidity. Much as he manages to create the most complex and heavy of atmospheres, he remains well within an aesthetics of the closed frame, which has little to do with what he would later achieve in The Hustler (Robert Rossen, 1961) through light dispersion. All of this is coherent: the heroine is caught up in a situation that her lies and dreams—by contrast—only further weigh down. Deep down, she is in a position akin to that of Werther’s Charlotte: promised to a destiny from which she does not know how to untie herself, she only has one evening left to convince herself—in all lucidity; without the euphoria of intoxication—that she can love he whom she loves.

To be precise, Sans lendemain constitutes the underside of Werther—impossible love as seen through the prism of the impossible, and not through that of sentiment.

—Vincent Amiel, Positif, 1992

DCP courtesy of Gaumont.

WILTON’S ZOO Boefje Dir. Douglas Sirk Netherlands, 1939 | 108 min | 35mm In Dutch with English subtitles Boefje, which means brat in Dutch, is basically a good boy who is almost invariably regarded as a juvenile delinquent by the authorities of the state, simply because he comes from a particular environment. The prejudices encountered by Boefje as a member of the Lumpenproletariat reflect the situation of German Jewish refugees in Europe in the 1930s. Often without passports, residency permits, or working papers, they were literally hounded from country to country like common criminals. Always under the unforgiving eyes of the police, refugees were at times assaulted by Nazifriendly authorities, unable to find a safe haven, at least on the European continent. … But Boefje is also an outsider and outcast in a psychologically more subtle way, simply because the audience sees a young woman playing a boy, a classical “Hosenrolle” which nevertheless must lead to continuous cognitive dissonance on the part of the audience because the actress's true gender is never revealed. We can read the film as a narrative about isolation at the borders of class and gender preference, as a subtle comment on Nazi prejudices against gays, who were also marked for death in concentration camps. Boefje was to be Sirk's last feature film until the formation of a group of German émigrés, this time in Hollywood, would lead to the production of another German exile film.

—Jan-Christopher Horak, “Sirk’s Early Exile Films,” Film Criticism, 1999

Print courtesy of EYE Filmarchief.

THE RULES OF THE GAME La Règle du jeu Dir. Jean Renoir France 1939 | 106 min | 35mm In French with English subtitles To grasp the subtle organization of The Rules of the Game we have to go from the general to the specific, from the action to the plot and from the plot to the scene. To grasp the scheme of the film, we must see the music boxes, the bearskin which gives Octave so much trouble, the agony of the little rabbit, and the game of hide-and-seek in the corridors of the château as the essential realities of the film from which unroll the dramatic spirals of each particular scene. This accounts for the integrity and independence of each scene relative to the scenario as a whole. But it also explains the unique quality and orientation of these scenes, which develop cinematically in concentric layers, much like the grain of sand within an oyster gradually growing into a pearl. It is precisely this treatment that makes The Rules of the Game Renoir’s masterpiece, for in it he has succeeded in dispensing entirely with dramatic structures.

The film is nothing more than a tangle of reminders, allusions, and correspondences, a carrousel of themes where reality and the moral plane reflect one another without disrupting the movie’s meaning and rhythm, its tonality and melody. At the same time, it is a brilliantly constructed film in which no scene is unnecessary, no shot out of place. The Rules of the Game is a work which should be seen again and again. As it is necessary to hear a symphony more than once to understand it or to meditate before a great painting in order to appreciate its inner harmonies, so it is with Renoir’s great film.

—André Bazin, “French Renoir,” Jean Renoir, 1974.

Print courtesy of Janus Films.

NOTES

Generously Sponsored By The Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund, the European Studies Council at the MacMillan Center, Films at the Whitney, supported by the Barbakow Fund for Innovative Film Programs at Yale, the Department of French, Molière and Co. Fund in memory of June Beckelman Guicharnaud, the Department of the History of Art, the Film & Media Studies Program, the Judaic Studies Program, the Department of Italian Language and Literature, the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures.

europeanstudies.macmillan.yale.edu