Review of The Street (1923)
Seen in 2026.
I saw the restored 2023 Filmmuseum München version with excellent live piano accompaniment by Stefan Wingefors.
A middle-aged man with bright eyes is drawn out by the power of the street instead of sitting down to another quiet dinner with his wife. This night, he will end up betting his wedding ring and more.
Highly international, with no legible street signs, no intertitles, and a multi-language poster that could be put up practically anywhere to advertise screenings. Its subject is similarly international: The freedoms, pleasures, anonymity and exploitation of urban society everywhere.
Everywhere? No, like the nameless man of the script, the filmmaker doesn’t get away easily. The sign in front of the local police constabulary is three nonsensical characters, like a swear word in a self-censored children’s comic. The Street itself was censored for expressing the cultural hangups of its origin. The production was so distinctly German that Siegfried Kracauer, in 1947, would call it a central film in the development he imagined “from Caligari to Hitler”.
The surrealist set dressing, miniatures, dancing, tumultuous traffic, and curious light shows are all wonderful, but the story is extremely thin. That’s not because of the constraints of having no intertitles. The second half reveals a series of coincidences that are not necessary to tell the story. They add up to undermine its credibility without addding to its suggestive power.
References here: Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927).