On Friday night, Icelandic electronica duo Múm brought their live soundtrack for People On Sunday – a rarely seen classic of German experimental silent cinema – to the Howard Assembly Room in Leeds. Words by Neil Mudd.
In their Hollywood careers, Billy Wilder, Edgar G Ulmer, brothers Curt and Robert Siodmak, created a sharply cynical body of work which mapped the dark contours of the post-war American landscape. As young filmmakers starting out in their native Germany, however, it was a different story. The world dazzled with light and optimism: people went about their daily lives, mostly insensible to the deluge which was poised to engulf them.
People On Sunday is an untypical collective effort, a beautiful, ravishing, vital work of art – the product of auteurs learning their craft, drunk on the possibilities of cinema. A rare screening, at the Howard Assembly Room in Leeds, of this most warm-hearted and innovative of films, was accompanied by a warm and inventive electronic score performed live by Icelandic band Múm.
A slice of social realism, People On Sunday is also intensely erotic thanks to an impish screenplay from writer Billy Wilder. Cast with non-actors playing themselves, it’s a surprisingly frank tale which unfolds against a backdrop of real Berlin locations. The film has a generous freewheeling spirit, unencumbered by sound. It’s as if the filmmakers never expect to make another film again.
Shot cheaply with an urgent ready insistence by cameraman Eugen Schüfftan, the film uses handheld camera, together with a proto jump cut technique later appropriated by Godard, to follow four young Berliners as they frolic in the park on a glorious summer Sunday. They flirt, they fall out, they kiss and make up. The restless camera delights in faces, lingering lovingly on countenances forgotten by today’s filmmakers, framing each smile, each grimace in a tight-cropped, sensuous embrace. The narrative’s extrusions – its observations of Berliners let off the leash for one day of the week – suggest more in common with John Grierson’s documentary scribblings than with the arch, leaden symmetry of Fritz Lang and UFA Studios.
This sinewy new score by Múm’s Örvar Smárason and Gunnar Örn Tynes coils about the action as it shifts and tumbles. With saturated washes of piano and wonky electronica, it resonates in natural frequency with the film’s spontaneous visual combustion. The gorgeous space of the Howard Assembly Room, with its ornate vaulted ceiling, imbues the duo’s performance with an intuitive, intimate grace born of long association and a close comradeship that borders on telepathy. The tone is exultant and joyful, the music honeyed and dissonant. At times what they create together threatens to transcend the tragic weight of history bearing down upon the flickering nitrate ghosts onscreen – a triumph over will if you like. Perhaps this last notion is merely fatuous: it is not possible to watch the scene where small children splash innocently in a pool, for example, without being minded of the coming conflagration.
Earlier this year, Múm’s Örvar Smárason told Culture Vulture that part of the reason for bringing People On Sunday to Leeds was its largely unknown condition among cinema audiences. The rapturous applause which greeted both it and the duo’s performance as the credits came up hopefully signals the beginning of a new and proselytising appreciation. ‘It’s such a beautiful film,’ he said afterwards. ‘I felt the audience really responded to it.’
People On Sunday is a charming, humane film that both demands and rewards repeated close attention – perhaps now in 2017 more than ever.
Read Culture Vulture’s interview with Örvar Smárason here.
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