“Dare I say it? It is a kind of film-making that Hollywood wouldn’t entirely understand,” says Neil Brand about People On Sunday, ahead of its screening on Sunday as part of the Leeds International Film Festival. The composer, and early cinema evangelist, who will be performing a live piano accompaniment to the film at the city’s Hyde Park Picture House, is speaking, via mobile phone, as he navigates London’s frenetic public transport system. “Hollywood would have attempted to make it more dramatic, or more sugary. From that point of view it’s a dose of realism: it feels absolutely real.”
People On Sunday, a rarely screened silent documentary-drama gem, was made against a backdrop of worldwide economic unrest in the dying days of Germany’s Weimar Republic – not that either of those things plays a part in the film’s rakish narrative. It follows a quartet of young Berliners – all portrayed by non-actors – as they take a trip out of the city one hot summer Sunday afternoon. “It’s a very small domestic story,” explains Brand. “But what’s brilliant is that there seems to be a tremendous amount going on, a real kind of subtext, particularly a sexual subtext, between the two girls and the two boys.” Exploring the film’s frank sense of exhilaration a little further, he adds, “It’s very adult. It’s a very adult take on what people are like when they hang out together.”
People On Sunday is notable for being the product of an unlikely collaboration between directors Robert Siodmak, Edgar Ulmer, Fred Zinnemann and Billy Wilder – “all great names who would later go to Hollywood and basically change the face of Hollywood itself,” Brand reminds us. The film is something of a one-off, owing little to prevailing cinematic styles, either at home or abroad. “Something worth bearing in mind is that these are film-makers who aren’t part of the film industry in Germany. They’re not trying to follow on from an expressionist idea or particularly a dramatic idea, they really are trying to plough their own furrow.”
The film is a time capsule, a love-letter to Berlin made all the more poignant by the knowledge that every one of its makers, together with film composer Franz Waxman, would be forced to flee to America within a few years of its release. Brand says there is little sense of the directors’ respective trademark later styles in People On Sunday, although Wilder still manages to be wicked “in exactly the same way that Wilder was going to be wicked when he got to Hollywood.”
What makes the film “utterly unique” in Brand’s words – although arguably it does find its echoes in the wartime documentary shorts of Britain’s Humphrey Jennings – is its loose sense of urgency: sweeping long shots of Berlin’s iconic overground transport system, handheld whip pans of the city’s teeming street-life, languorous, floating camera movements; gritty, urban realism gives way to surrealist flights of fancy; and, in one strikingly beautiful scene, ordinary Berliners pose to have their photograph taken, gazing unflinchingly into the camera in a spectacle that would resonate some thirty years later with film-makers of the French Nouvelle Vague.
“It’s a very young persons’ film,” says Brand enthusiastically. “It looks and feels incredibly modern, in fact it doesn’t feel like 1929 at all, it looks like it was shot last year.” Despite its intoxicating sense of freedom and big picture politics, People On Sunday also manages an easy intimacy with its non-professional cast, a tactic which Brand likens to Ken Loach in terms of tone and intention. “The smaller stuff is still epic in a way because of what’s going on, and then the big city – when you get it – has this extraordinary speed and size to it. You come away just feeling like you’ve understood what Berlin was like in 1929, both in work terms and holiday terms.”
A welcome feature of this year’s Leeds International Film Festival programme has been the number of silent film screenings featuring live musical accompaniment. Asked to account for the resurgence of interest in early non-sound cinema, Brand offers a simple explanation. “It’s completely different to any other form of entertainment. The fact that you’ve got live music, and a film that’s ninety or a hundred years old, means that you’re constantly in an interesting world where, you know you’re listening to musicians now, but you’re also deep in a whole thing that’s happening then – and that gives a terrific energy.”
Brand is promising something a bit special for this Sunday’s screening of People On Sunday. “This is one film I play with jazz – I do it with jazz right from start to finish,” he says. “But I play it with a slightly cooler thirties feel. It’s very sexy.” The composer is clearly relishing the prospect of accompanying the film again for a live audience. “It’s a film that I’ve played a lot, so every time I’ve improvised it, I’ve found certain things that have worked.” The intention is to offer something unique. “I wouldn’t call it a score though,” he laughs. “It’s fairly fixed improv.”
People On Sunday with piano accompaniment by Neil Brand is at Hyde Park Picture House on Sunday 16th November at 5.00 p.m.