Karl Heinz Martin's Von Morgens Bis Mitternacht (From Morn to Midnight, 1920) comes on like a parody of a German Expressionist classic, so archetypal are its distorted, hand-painted sets and distorted, hand-painted actors. Undeniably beautiful, it throws in the whole rhomboid kitchen sink, attacking what appears to be a fairly naturalistic, if melodramatic, story with theatrical artifice and painterly style until it fringes on the animated cartoon. It's an exciting way to render real life stories cinematic.
Unfortunately, the film is without English translation at present, which leads to two thoughts, slender things to suspend this lush series of images from, but hopefully just strong enough to do the job without this article fluttering to the floor like a pack of cards.
Thought 1: it's quite restful and interesting to watch films with no translation, even talkies. Von Morgens Bis Mitternacht is silent, and therefore a lot of the plot comes across clearly without language,...
Unfortunately, the film is without English translation at present, which leads to two thoughts, slender things to suspend this lush series of images from, but hopefully just strong enough to do the job without this article fluttering to the floor like a pack of cards.
Thought 1: it's quite restful and interesting to watch films with no translation, even talkies. Von Morgens Bis Mitternacht is silent, and therefore a lot of the plot comes across clearly without language,...
- 5/26/2011
- MUBI
Production stills have played a large and peculiar role in my movie-watching life. Seeing a haunting image from some unfamiliar film can set me off into reveries, and make me crave the opportunity to see the mystery movie itself. I guess this explains my otherwise bizarre quest to watch every film illustrated in Denis Gifford's A Pictorial History of Horror Movies, but it doesn't stop there.
I must have seen the above image from Karl Grune's 1923 Die Straße (The Street) in some ancient volume on expressionist cinema, and it stuck in some dusty corner of my brain ever since. It may have also gotten aligned with the dream sequence from Wild Strawberries where Victor Sjostrom observes a watchmaker's sign, a clock without hands. (Along with movie stills, such signs have an inexplicable atmospheric value of their own.) Maybe the book was Siegfried "laugh-a-minute" Kracauer's From Caligari to Hitler,...
I must have seen the above image from Karl Grune's 1923 Die Straße (The Street) in some ancient volume on expressionist cinema, and it stuck in some dusty corner of my brain ever since. It may have also gotten aligned with the dream sequence from Wild Strawberries where Victor Sjostrom observes a watchmaker's sign, a clock without hands. (Along with movie stills, such signs have an inexplicable atmospheric value of their own.) Maybe the book was Siegfried "laugh-a-minute" Kracauer's From Caligari to Hitler,...
- 11/25/2010
- MUBI
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