Film
Menschen am Sonntag
- Director
- Robert Siodmak, Edgar G. Ulmer
- Certificate
- PG
- Running Time
- 73 mins
Although credited to Robert Siodmak and Edgar G. Ulmer, this fascinating early silent experiment in realism was in fact the result of a collaboration between several filmmakers who went on to become key players in Hollywood, the others being Fred Zinnemann, Curt Siodmak and Billy Wilder.
There’s not actually much to it: as the title suggests, Menschen am Sonntag (People on Sunday) follows a Sunday excursion from Berlin to a lake in the countryside, where a bachelor and his married chum flirt with a couple of young women. The cast is made up entirely of non-professionals, all of whom returned to their previous lives after filming was complete. As Time Out noted: “You end up not only learning a lot about life in 1929, but also realising how little sexual mores have changed.”
This screening includes live piano accompaniment by Meg Morley and launches the Watershed’s October Weimar Sundays brunch season, marking 100 years since the establishment of the Weimar Republic – the period of economic and political turmoil between WWI and WWII, which also gave rise to a key film movement in the history of cinema. This, in turn, forms part of an epic collaboration between South West Silents, Bristol Festival of Ideas, Cube Cinema, Curzon Cinema and the Watershed celebrating the films of the Weimar Republic as well as the ‘City and Silent Film’. These two seasons run through September, October and November 2019 as part of the Festival of the Future City 2019.
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