(Helmut Käutner, Germany 1945, 100 min., 35mm nitrate, sound, b/w)
Print source: Österreichisches Filmmuseum, Vienna, Austria
Unter den Brücken..., a tale of two disenchanted coal-barge workers, who both fall in love with a young woman of “questionable virtue,” gracefully balances heavy naturalism and lyrical comedy. It was shot almost entirely on location on various rivers and canals in and around Berlin. Premiering at the first Locarno Film Festival in 1946, it appears to fit well into the picture of post-WWII European cinema, blending the last wave of French poetic realism with the flourishing Italian neo-realism.
What’s remarkable is that the film was actually made from 1944 to 1945 in Nazi Germany. It was not released by the Reichsfilmkammer, and the German audience only got to see it in 1950. Later, when Helmut Käutner’s other films from the war period became widely available through clubs and cinematheques, he would often be called the best filmmaker of the Third Reich, the honor Käutner himself denied, as he preferred not to talk much about those years.
Nazi-era cinema produced many escapist works: melodramas, costume films, musical comedies. Some were fairly innocent, but almost all had a superfluous quality to them. While avoiding the official rhetoric and ideological conventions of the regime, Käutner took much greater risks with his escapism. He preferred to set his bitter films in small nineteenth-century towns, or, better, in Maupassant’s Paris, yet the characters were of meat and bones: imperfect, neurotic, unsettled, and poignantly recognizable. Whenever he took on contemporary German material, the dissonance between Käutner’s works and the general repertory became striking. Hugely popular with the audience, his films were particularly disliked by Joseph Goebbels, and the fact that Käutner occasionally poked fun at the official aesthetics (e.g., by showing the ridiculously massive paintings of Teutonic nudes in Unter den Brücken...) didn’t help.
Unter den Brücken... was filmed under heavy bombardment. While documenting the sites, many of which would soon cease to exist, and yet deliberately avoiding any mention of war or politics, Käutner created his most optimistic work. “What we did,” he explained years later, “arose from the filmmakers’ stubbornness to allow any of the horror which surrounded us to seep into our work.”
This original release print has a wide but manageable shrinkage range of 0.5% to 1.25%. Its high warpage leads to some sound issues, but the image quality is excellent.
– Peter Bagrov
This screening is free for passholders of the sold-out 10th Nitrate Picture Show. A limited number of single-screening tickets may be available for purchase in person at the Dryden Theatre box office on a rush-line basis. Rush tickets will be sold only if seats remain after the film’s spoken introduction has begun.