Menschen am Sonntag aka People on Sunday (1930)

Filmed in the summer of 1929 Menschen am Sonntag is the tale of four young people who spend a lazy Sunday together in and around Berlin. This late German silent was something of an experimental film and used non actors as its stars and is notable both for being one of the earliest writing credits for future film making legend Billy Wilder (his second writing credit according to IMDb), and for being a notable time capsule of German life just a few years before the Nazi's came to power. It is this latter aspect of the films notoriety that will likely resonate most with modern viewers. Really not that much happens in the film story wise, its a slice life film, mostly lite in tone, and with decidedly independent production values. The film contains many shots done in a sort of early cinema verite style, shot anonymously, often at a distance, and with most of the 'extras' unaware they were even being filmed. In short it was guerrilla film making by people still new to the movie making game, its ambition appropriately restrained but still filled with a sense of wonder, possibility, and youth. This is also what gives the film a tragic edge that it wouldn't have conveyed when first released in 1930.

A viewer of today comes at this film with a perspective that both those behind and in front of the camera couldn't have had. While they did not we do know what happens next, we know what happened after the Nazi's came to power, we know about World War II. When we look at shots of people walking down the street, or playing with their children at the beach, we know that some of these people would have voted for Hitler and his party just a few years later, we know that some of them would have become Nazi's, that some of them would have been killed by the Nazi's, and that many of them would have refused to see the truth of what was going on around them. This quality of foreboding is now inherent in any film made or set in Germany during the years running up to the rise of the Nazi State. I couldn't help but wonder if the hansom male lead became a Nazi solder, he certainly looked like ones mental image of one. I couldn't help but wonder if the sensitive dark haired girl who he spurns for your blond friend (oh the levels of unintended irony) met a dark fate during the years of the Third Reich. Seeing all these Germans, both the films knowing participants and the real world "extras" going about life around them, having a Sunday in the park, on the beach, riding the bus, buying a phonograph, just existing and living in the prelude to history's most iconic horror is a sobering, thought provoking thing. People on Sunday is a simple film, but its also an important document of the calm before the storm that tore through the world in the later decades of the first half of the twentieth century, and that more then anything it accomplished as just a work of independent cinema, is why it should and will be watched and remembered for time to come. ***