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THE GERMAN FILM
The names of Paul Czinner and Elizabeth Bergner are closely associated, for until recently, when Herr Czinner came to England to direct Pola Negri, they have been interested in the joint productions of the Elizabeth Bergner Poetic Film Company. Czinner and Bergner 's first film, however, was the now famous Nju, for the Rimax Film Company in 1924, in which the two other parts were played by Emil Jannings and Conrad Veidt. It has not been generally shown in this country. Nju was the essence of story simplification, of contrasted human emotions without irrelevant matter. It came during the transition period from the decorative to the naturalistic productions. Jannings was convincing as the humbly married officeman, childishly innocent and delightfully in love with his wife. She was attracted by the smart young man. She was found out; a dramatic scene; she left the husband. The young man refused her and she threw herself into the river. The husband followed, not understanding. The young man stood alone in the room where the wife had been; the old charwoman swept round him with her broom. He went out.
There was something extraordinary about this film; an indescribable atmosphere of emptiness, of fatality. Elizabeth Bergner, Jannings, and Veidt simply stood about; Czinner caught the interplay of their thoughts. It was a direct representation of facts as they were; there was little attempt to tell a story. One felt that it happened, and was recorded as it happened. It was marred only by the final childinterest, to comfort the bereaved husband. Nju left a feeling, rare in the usual completeness of a German film, that things would still go on. It was an incident that would be left behind by the lover and the husband in the continuation of their lives. It had a feeling similar to that evoked by the last shot in Vaudeville, the wide open prison gates and the sky.
The second Paul Czinner-Elizabeth Bergner film was The Violinist of Florence, made for Ufa (released in England under the ludicrous title of Impetuous Youth), and was outstanding for its lyrical beauty and poetic grace. It revealed an Elizabeth Bergner utterly dissimilar to the Bergner of Nju; a small, elf-like child, with queer, wide-open eyes, watching and wondering; a child whose subtle emotions were revealed by Czinner 's tenderness. Czinner began this film by presenting the reactions of the child to her father (superbly played by Conrad Veidt) and to her stepmother; a tangled mass of human emotions sorted out by the brilliant psychological
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