PEOPLE ON SUNDAY (MENSCHEN AM SONNTAG) (Robert Siodmak & Edgar G. Ulmer, 1930)
Film Society of Lincoln Center
Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, Howard Gilman Theater
144 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Aves.
Friday, January 17, 5:15
Series runs through January 17
212-875-5601
www.filmlinc.com
In 1930, a group of young filmmakers from Germany and Austria-Hungary got together to make an extremely low-budget silent picture about men and women just like themselves, the petite bourgeoisie of Berlin. Influenced by such documentaries as Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera and such photographers as August Sander, the men — who would go on to become Hollywood legends — came up with the delightful seventy-three-minute People on Sunday, a light, refreshing mix of fiction and nonfiction about regular life in Germany on the heels of the Great Depression and at the dawn of the rise of National Socialism. A collaboration between directors Robert Siodmak (The Killers, Criss Cross) and Edgar G. Ulmer (The Black Cat, Detour), screenwriter Billie (Billy) Wilder (Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard), writer Kurt (Curt) Siodmak (The Wolf Man, The Beast with Five Fingers), cameraman Fred Zinnemann (From Here to Eternity, A Man for All Seasons), and cinematographer Eugen Schüfftan (Metropolis, Eyes without a Face), People on Sunday focuses on five ordinary folks who had never acted on-screen before, and each of whom returned to their jobs after filming was over: Somewhat goofy taxi driver Erwin Splettsdösser, flirty blond record salesgirl Brigitte Borchert, dashing wine merchant Wolfgang von Waltershausen, snooty film extra Christl Ehlers, and lackadaisical model Annie Schreyer. When Wolfgang comes upon Christl looking lost in the middle of the street, he asks her to join him at an outdoor café, and soon they have a date for the next day, Sunday. Wolfgang decides to bring along his friend Erwin, who is only too happy to leave his sleepy, bored wife, Annie, in bed. Christl, in the meantime, has brought along her friend Brigitte, and the four go on a double-date picnic that takes them to the beach, a lake, the woods, a park, and other outdoor locations. But when Wolfgang starts paying too much attention to Brigitte, Christl is none too happy.
Soon-to-be-legendary Hollywood filmmakers examine a recreational day in the life of Berlin on PEOPLE ON SUNDAY
Directors Siodmak and Ulmer intersperse scenes of real urban life in Berlin with the picnic, giving the film a cinéma vérité quality. The characters both perform from a script and improvise as they get to know one another and their surroundings. It gets a little racy and it’s clearly male-centric, but People on Sunday is a splendid little tale whose place in cinema history is now being reexamined, not merely as a film by so many future superstars but also because it paved the way for the French New Wave and has influenced generations while offering a fascinating view of 1930 Berlin. People on Sunday is screening January 17 at 5:15 as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center series “Edgar G. Ulmer: Back from the Margins,” which runs through January 18. Also being shown on January 17 is Ulmer’s Beyond the Barrier, The Light Ahead (Fishke the Lame), and Murder Is My Beat in addition to Michael Palm’s 2004 documentary, Edgar G. Ulmer: The Man Off-Screen. The series is presented in collaboration with Noah Isenberg, author of the new book Edgar G. Ulmer: A Filmmaker at the Margins (University of California, January 2014, $34.95), who wrote in a Criterion essay that “People on Sunday certainly tested the limits of filmmaking at the time. It broke new ground in the final phase of silent film production, introducing a fresh model of independent cinema (well before the term, as we understand it today, even existed) and a bare-bones realism that had a deep impact both contemporaneously and for many years after.” On January 19, Isenberg will take part in the panel discussion “The Afterlives of Edgar G. Ulmer” with Arianné Ulmer Cipes and Stefan Grissemann at the Center for Jewish History.
After losing his job as a teacher and going through a difficult divorce, Lucas (Mads Mikkelsen) begins working at a kindergarten in a small, tight-knit community and starts dating a coworker, Nadja (Alexandra Rapaport), but his life quickly hits rock bottom when he is falsely accused of child abuse in Thomas Vinterberg’s harrowing drama The Hunt. Mikkelsen was named Best Actor at the Cannes Film Festival for his deeply sensitive portrayal of a gentle man who suddenly finds himself in the crosshairs of virtually everyone in town immediately after little Klara (Annika Wedderkopp), the daughter of his best friend, Theo (Thomas Bo Larsen), claims that Lucas did bad things to her. Grethe (Susse Wold), the school administrator, doesn’t even give Lucas a chance to defend himself before he loses his job and is ultimately arrested, his only supporters being his son (Lasse Fogelstrøm) and his longtime friend Bruun (Lars Ranthe). Mikkelsen (Pusher, A Royal Affair, After the Wedding) goes from utter disbelief to quiet desperation to all-out rage as Lucas, an everyman who can’t believe what is happening to him, not understanding how nearly everyone has turned their back on him, many attacking him in public and private for something that he didn’t do. Dogme 95 cofounder Vinterberg (Dear Wendy, Festen), who cowrote the Cannes award-winning script with Tobias Lindholm (R, A Hijacking), expertly builds the tension as Lucas’s, and the town’s, growing paranoia threatens to explode. He personalizes the drama in a way that avoids blanket statements about child abuse and faulty and repressed memories while instead focusing on how a young girl’s lie can spiral horrifically out of control. The Hunt, which is on the Oscar shortlist for Best Foreign Language Film, is screening January 16 at 6:00 as part of the Scandinavia House series “Nordic Oscar Contenders,” which began January 8 with the Swedish entry for the Academy Awards, Gabriela Pichler’s Eat Sleep Die, and continues January 22 with Iceland’s Of Horses and Men, directed by Benedikt Erlingsson.
After their father (Park Sung-woong) is declared a traitor to North Korea and killed, Lee Myung-hoon (Choi Seung-hyun) and his younger sister, Lee Hye-in (Kim Yoo-jung), are placed in a forced labor camp. When Myung-hoon is nineteen, North Korean agent Moon Sang-chul (Jo Sung-ha) offers him a way out: if he agrees to be a spy/assassin for Kim Jong-Il’s regime, he and his sister will eventually be freed. Accepting the mission, Myung-hoon goes to Seoul, where he attends high school as a cover and makes friends with a loner girl (Han Ye-ri) with the same name as his sister. This Hye-in wants to be a dancer, which brings up memories of Myung-hoon’s childhood dreams of becoming a successful pianist — a long way from being an expert killer, as he carries out his jobs with pinpoint precision. But as Kim Jong-il suddenly falls ill and his son, Kim Jong-un, prepares to take over as supreme leader, all bets are off and it gets harder and harder to know who’s on which side. One day Myung-hoon is messing with a group of tough students who are bullying Hye-in, and the next he is in the middle of a complex plot involving drugs, laundered money, diamonds, and double crosses. Also known as Alumni, Park Hong-soo’s Commitment is an exciting if bumpy thriller about family, loyalty, and friendship. Choi, who is better known as K-pop star T.O.P. of Big Bang, is dark and moody as the teenage assassin who will do anything to protect his sister, while Kim’s character goes through a sudden, hard-to-believe change about halfway through the film. Things get far too convoluted in the final scenes, the plot heading off in all kinds of ridiculous directions, but Choi manages to make it all worthwhile. Commitment, which is playing in several New York City theaters right now, can be seen for free on January 14 at 7:00 at Tribeca Cinemas, kicking off the Korean Movie Night series “Wild Days: Coming of Age in 2014.” Presented by the Korean Cultural Service, the series continues on January 28 with Kwak Kyung-taek’s Friend: The Great Legacy and February 11 with Won Shin-eon’s The Suspect before concluding February 25 with Kang Yi-kwan’s Juvenile Offender.
Director and star Bruce Ramsay strips down and condenses the Bard in his 1940s-set noirish update of Hamlet, but in doing so he also drains one of Shakespeare’s most powerful tragedies of all its poetry and emotion. Trimming the tale down to a far-too-lean eighty-seven minutes, Ramsay cuts out characters and reinterprets scenes to focus on the family-related aspects of the story of betrayal, madness, murder, and revenge, using the original text for the most part while setting the entire film in one large house (actually the University Women’s Club in Vancouver). He fills the cast with veterans of Canada’s Bard on the Beach series, including Gillian Barber as Gertrude, Duncan Fraser as Polonius, Haig Sutherland as Laertes, Martin Sims as Guildenstern, Russell Roberts as the ghost of Hamlet’s father, and Lara Gilchrist as Ophelia; Welsh actor Peter Wingfield plays Claudius, with Stephen Lobo as Horatio and Bret Stait as Rosencrantz. The bare-bones film was shot in three days (for a mere — and rather admirable — $27,000), but it’s taken nearly three years for it to get a U.S. theatrical release, and it’s easy to see why. Ramsay’s Hamlet is more like a failed episode of Masterpiece Theatre, sort of Agatha Christie meets Downton Abbey in postwar London, than a fresh new look at the extremely familiar play, though it is a noble attempt. Indeed, “I must be cruel to be kind. Thus bad begins and worse remains behind.” Hamlet opens at Cinema Village on January 10, with Ramsay taking part in Q&As following the 7:10 screenings on Friday and Saturday night.
