Celluloid : the film to-day (1931)

THE THREEPENNY OPERA 107 bear unmistakable traces of his brilliant genius, his unrivalled use of the camera as an instrument of expression, and his uncanny ability to reproduce human thoughts and emotions in visual form on the screen. I do not claim that every film of Pabst's direction has been faultless, or that his work is always successful — both Westfront igi8 and The Eva Scandal were lacking in many respects — but certain of his films, such as Jeanne Ney and Crisis in their original forms, reveal his amazing talent at its full measure of accomplishment. Thus, after three years' almost unbroken succession of American and British talking films, it is with the greatest feeling of relief that I observe what real cinematic genius means in The Threepenny Opera, and once again find myself afforded the opportunity of delighting in German craftsmanship and supreme technical skill. As most close observers of the medium are aware, the German cinema has very largely developed within the limits of its studios, and has only on rare occasions — and these only recently — become concerned with material lying outside its studio walls. This particular partiality for studio structuralism, as I have explained at greater length elsewhere, is most probably due to the German's inborn love for craftsmanship combined with his national gift for mechanical experiment. These two qualities, more than anything else, distinguish the German cinema from the films of any other country. They are primarily responsible for that curious air of completeness, of finality, that surrounds each product of the German studios and which causes so many students to reckon the German middle-period as one