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"The old chorus of racial hatred," a premonition set in Russia but filmed in Berlin. It opens on a pastoral vista for the benefit of Dovzhenko, the little Jewish girl is received at the local school and bathed in scorn for not knowing how to cross herself. Time passes, the heroine (Polina Piekowskaja) is expelled due to gossip, she has an idealistic beau (Thorleif Reiss) and a converted brother in St. Petersburg (Vladimir Gadjarov). The 1905 Revolution is brewing, the boyfriend joins the rebels ("Let me throw the first bomb!") and becomes a pawn of Tsarist agents. A multiplicity of plot strands, life in the shtetl and espionage in the city, Carl Theodor Dreyer pulls them together in a brutal crescendo. (Omens along the way include a dancer in a roadside chalet who keels over mid-spin, bleeding from the mouth.) "Happy are those who can contribute to shaping the future." The quotidian build-up is not without jokes—the matchmaker advises a hapless suitor to carry a sugar cube near his heart for weeks and then drop it in the cup of his intended, who simply walks away from the table upon hearing his proposal. Double exposure in the brother's nightmare anticipates Keaton in Sherlock Jr., the grinning skull behind the shawl goes into Psycho. The bogus monk (Johannes Meyer) ambles into town to inflame the "true believers," he whispers like Iago and points the bloodthirsty crowd toward the ghetto. Horror of the pogrom, a memory of Broken Blossoms with trembling maiden and chopped door, Dreyer cuts sharply as a hatchet comes down on a bearded elder. Preminger nearly forty years later updates the last image. With Adele Reiter-Eichberg, Sylvia Torf, Hugo Döblin, Elisabeth Pinajeff, and Richard Boleslawski. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |