“You can kill a man with an apartment just as with an
axe.” Heinrich Zille
Mother Krause may well be the most brutally
realistic of the socially concerned films in the BFI’s Weimar series. Grimmer
overall than Kuhle Wampe, less polished than Pabst’s Diary and
with far fewer songs than Threepenny Opera. It’s almost unbearably hard
but with a more polemic agenda this is not surprising with director Phil Jutzi allowing
plenty of improvised naturalism from an excellent cast. You can see why it is
one of Faßbinder’s favourite films.
Mutter Krausens Fahrt ins Glück is set in Berlin’s
politicised “Red Wedding” district the film wanted to show the reality of the
grinding poverty as families lived in pressure-cooked poverty, hand-to-mouth
and month-to month, scrimping for the rent; borrowing to stay afloat and living
on the “never-never” as my grandparents would have said in Liverpool.
These are the kinds of desperate circumstances that lead
to revolution and which can also feed the need for a “strong leader”, but the future was not set in stone and in 1929 Willi Munzenberg,
was the man with the money to finance films offering a Marxist alternative,
through Prometheus-Films, a German subsidiary of the Soviet Mezhrabpom-Film company.
He wanted to show a future possible
through collective action as well as to present “heroic legends” of the new
revolutionary struggle that, as described by Bela Labazs, could present “tempestuous
movement, monumental visuals, surprising entanglements… exceed(ing) anything
the bourgeois film can show.”
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| Alexandra Schmitt |
Mother Krause is certainly a different drama to
the mainstream fare of the time and does provide and intensely-dramatic story
which could only leave the audience in tatters after almost two hours… there
are new heroes and there are the same old villains but Jutzi is careful not to
play the obvious cards: this is not a melodrama but a dramatic serious work
that asks much of the audience.
Take for example Gerhard Bienert as Mother Krause’s dodgy
lodger, he is at turns a nasty piece of work but also a man quick to take
action, sometimes supportive and other times just exploitative, all in a very “negotiated”
way. He’s an anti-hero, survivor, sexual predator who, under other
circumstances, could well be a Chief Executive or politician. His character
gets a lot of screen time and drives a lot of the action as he constantly looks
to impose himself on Krause’s daughter Erna (Ilse Trautschold – who is
excellent), lead her brother Paul (Holmes Zimmermann) further astray and to “help”
his landlady in his own peculiar way.
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| Erna tells him if he doesn't stop staring he'll get a squint. |
He’s a real character of depth and deception and so is
Erna who must resist his attentions and temptation: she is the hope to counter-balance
his resigned criminality but she can’t do it on her own. Trautschold is a
compelling presence and runs the full gamut of despair with a retrained display.
At one point Jutzi moves his camera between her and Bienert’s lodger and then
across to his wife, a prostitute played by Vera Sacharowa: they’re trying to
get her to turn tricks to pay Mother Krause’s debts and her face runs a mixture
of relief and dismay as she weighs up the benefit and the cost…
The Krause family lives off the rent from tehri tenant as
well as mother and daughter delivery newspapers – it’s hard work and whilst Erna
skips up the stairs with the daily news, mother is getting slower and slower.
Widowed long ago by the war, she has raised her two children and it has ground
her down.
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| Paul lets everyone down... |
In such circumstances, you are only one pay day from
disaster and so when her son Paul spends most of her wages on a mad boozy
night, Mother Krause quickly runs out of options: she pawns what jewels she has
but it is not quite enough to pay her rent. NO one will lend her any money and
whilst her lodger gives her some, she is still 20 marks short and facing prison
unless she can raise the cash.
The lodger tries to use this situation to get Erna on the
game and Paul involved in his criminal side lines… bit by bit the situation
gets worse, no one can really help anyone else. The exception here is Max (Friedrich
Gnaß), Erna’s boyfriend who, despite being put off by the lodger’s crass admissions
about Erna, eventually forgives her as she falls into step with a communist
party march. This sequence has a pre-neo-realist feel to it as the camera
follows Erna along the line of the march as she searches for Max and their
re-union, despite his mate chiding him that “we’re on a protest”
As Mutter Krause Alexandra Schmitt gives a performance of
quietly perfect desperation, a woman worn down by misfortune who has not only
reached the end of her tether she’s seen it flash and burn as it flies off in
front of her. She is the heroic figure Bela Labazs wanted and she takes it all
the way: of Susan Sarandon had driven up in an open-topped sports car, she’d
had been right with her.
The camerawork is also very “naturalistic” and, occasionally
hand-held, captures actors and Berlin off their guard much as with Berlin,
Symphony of a City, or, of course, People on a Sunday. I watched it
with Joachim Barenz’ recorded score.
One thing that jarred is the almost gratuitous second
victim in the closing tragedy, I could understand the first but the second
seemed designed to expand on the shock. That said, this is an angry film with
an agenda: the story was supposedly based on true events and you don’t have to
imagine family tragedies in poverty for they are happening now, every hour of
every day in Germany and in Britain.
What is to be done?
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| The painting's on the wall. |
You can still catch lots of excellent Weimar cinema in
the last week of the BFI season - it is ending with a bang!
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