Harry Potamkin
Related: Louise brooks - German cinema
Pabst and the Social Film
"Pabst and the Social Film," by Harry Potamkin, originally appeared in Hound and Horn in 1933. It was one of the earliest extended works of criticism on Pabst published in the United States.The war was over, defeat its German portion; the inflation was still within the raw feel of the Kleinburger. That class looked upon itself pathetically; its cinema plainted self-pity in films like The Last Laugh, New Year's Eve and The Street. "Die Strasse" of brothels has been a favored milieu for German pseudo-tragedy, and among its outstanding photodramas is Die freudlose Gasse (Joyless Street), Georg Wilhelm Pabst's first film.
Joyless Street (or Streets of Sorrow) is a picture of the famineridden Viennese clerk class, die Angestellten, that fringes on the proletariat, dovetails with it, and ultimately is part of it. Abject in its position, this functionary and small-merchant class could be understood in the terms of Pabst, a middle-class Jew from a middle-class city, Vienna, the head to a nation that has no torso. Pabst set a mood of hopelessness, the descending and enveloping oppression of hunger, of pittance and dread. He was as yet the humanitarian, and not the "psychologist," in the "freudlose GassGasse" (the street without Freud). His sensitiveness placed this picture of the stricken above each other such recital by the more typical German directors: he was not moralistic. His Viennese origin substituted delicacy for delikatessen; he did not compound the pathos on the recipe of "Mehr! Mehr !" This same delicacy, finesse, becomes, we shall see, a distraction later. --http://www.geocities.com/louisebrookssociety/potamkin.html
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