Bryher, writing in Close Up in 1927, noted that ?it is the thought and feeling that line gesture that interest Mr. Pabst. And he has what few have, a consciousness of Europe. He sees psychologically and because of this, because in a flash he knows the sub-conscious impulse or hunger that prompted an apparently trivial action, his intense realism becomes, through its truth, poetry.?
The films of Edgar G. Ulmer have generally been classified as ?B? pictures. However, it might be more appropriate to reclassify some of these films as ?Z? pictures. On an average, Ulmer?s pictures were filmed on a six-day shooting schedule with budgets as small as $20,000. He often worked without a decent script, adequate sets, or convincing actors. But these hardships did not prevent Ulmer from creating an individual style within his films.
There is a sense in which Josef von Sternberg never grew up. In his personality, the twin urges of the disturbed adolescent toward self-advertisement and self-effacement fuse with a brilliant visual imagination to create an artistic vision unparalleled in the cinema. But von Sternberg lacked the cultivation of Murnau, the sophistication of his mentor von Stroheim, the humanity of Griffith, or the ruthlessness of Chaplin. His imagination remained immature, and his personality was malicious and obsessive. His films reflect a schoolboy's fascination with sensuality and heroics.
Erich von Stroheim had two complementary careers in cinema, that of actor-director, primarily during the silent period, and that of distinguished character actor when his career as a director was frustrated as a result of his inability to bring his genius to terms with the American film industry.
In 1928 Fred Zinnemann worked as assistant to cinematographer Eugene Sch?fftan on Robert Siodmak's Menschen am Sonntag (People on Sunday), along with Edgar Ulmer and Billy Wilder, who wrote the scenario for this semi-documentary silent feature made in the tradition of Flaherty and Vertov.
As Annie, a character in Valie Export?s first feature film, Invisible Adversaries, explains, ?images penetrate me like psychic meteors, they frighten me?but they mirror the reality that surrounds me as a paranoid.? Throughout her long career as an artist, Export has emphasized the amazing power of images to shape psychic and external realities, especially when the images depict women?s bodies.
Throughout her long career, most of which was spent as a stage director, Leontine Sagan directed only three films. The latter two were made in England, and are all but forgotten: Men of Tomorrow, chronicling the travails of a rebellious young Oxford University student; and Gaiety George, a biography of Irish-born stage producer George Edwardes (who is inexplicably called ?George Howard? on screen).
But Sagan?s first, M?dchen in Uniform, is a classic of pre-Hitler German cinema, a profoundly antifascist political tract as well as a groundbreaking and liberating depict
