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the sense of the rooms of the boarding-school as they might even nowadays exist in Potsdam ; as well as the figures of the Frederician headmistress and of her body of teachers; never caricatured but portrayed in minutest detail, so that people antipathetic to such persons can think them disgusting and ridiculous, and others consider them just as comprehensible and correct as they do their living models.
This objectivity of representation has helped the film to gain its unquestioned success both with the press and the public ; a success with which we might readily agree, the more since this success secures the remuneration of the artists through whose collaboration the film was created. It is the first German film made on such a collective basis. It is also the first film of the first German woman-director of importance : Leontine Sagan. The names of the chief actors should be remembered : Dorothea Wieck, Hertha Thiele, Ellen Schwannecke.
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In the same census Kameradschaft by G. W. Pabst occupied only the fourth place.
Kameradschaft was made under a particularly inauspicious star. The unsettled conditions of weather of the last summer caused an extraordinary delav, and the resistance of the mineowners whose courtesv had to be depended on, brought about fresh difficulties from scene to scene. So, after all, the premiere took place at an exceedingiv unfavourable time to the subject and tendency of the film.
The film in question concerns the mining disaster of Courrieres where German miners crossed the frontier to bring help to their imprisoned French comrades.
The scenes of the catastrophe and rescue which take up two thirds of the action, are full of the most complicated, subtle and effective shots ever made in a German studio.
And especiallv the scene in which full visual and acoustic possibilities are used in the expression of profound psvchologic interpretations. One of the French miners has been imprisoned for hours, the signals he hammers become more and more apathetic and infrequent. But when at last the sound of far-off voices interrupts his desperate waiting, his hammering' turns into rapid drum-beats and suddenly resembles the sound of machineguns, with which the vr)ices of the Germans now also mingle; until the gasmask and helmet of the German rescuer who forces his wav through the wall completes the war-time vision of attacking Germans in steel-helmets and the rescued miner — on the edge of insanity — furiously rushes at his rescuer.
Yes — but such distinct allusions to the senselessness of war, the internationalitv of labour and of frontier-guards, such piercing and therefore sceptical aspects of to-dav and the future are not very popular in these times.