Joaquim da Silva Fontes, Significação e Estabilidade do Género no ...

a figure of authority maintains it” (Monaco 1976:137-8). Just as in various noir films in
which the word “street” appears in the title (see p. 411) and takes on a particular spatial
and emotional dimension in the characters’ lives, the power that these films of the street
had on the German public partook of an ambiguous glamour as much as it served the ends
of bourgeois revulsion.
The street film was also part of what is usually recognised as Neue Sachlichkeit, a
“New Objectivity” which arose in the early twenties as an outgrowth of Expressionism.
This art movement came to an end in 1933 with the fall of the Weimar Republic and the
rise of Hitler to power. This “New Dispassion”, as the movement was termed, intended to
show the social realities of contemporary German life, its hardships and again illustrates
the life of the street. This cycle of films started with films also with the word “street” in
their titles, like Karl Grune’s Die Straße (The Street, 1923) or G.W. Pabst’s Die freudlose
Gasse (The Joyless Street, 1923). The former is a silent film recounting the life of a
respectable but bored middle class man who leaves his sober life for the city streets at night
where he expects to have adventures but instead gets into trouble. The latter film (also
silent) is a perfect example of the “ new objectivity”, in which Greta Garbo incidentally
plays an effective role as a young woman trying to make ends meet during the difficult
economic years of hyperinflation.
To a certain extent, one might affirm that this type of film - showing the
chiaroscuro of the urban street as a place where violence subsists, casting underworld
characters (black marketers, gamblers and conmen, and above all, the femme fatale who
emerges as seducer and provoker of illicit desire) – aroused such a racy image of urban
deterioration that it might be to thwart the original intention of these films to be
“educational” or “enlightening”. However, in my opinion, the purpose of these “new”
films is to show that although the hero breaks away from the welfare of a traditional home,
in search of adventure on the street (seen as a world of temptation and peril), he usually
returns to a conventional life. Some other titles might be mentioned here, like Joe May’s
Asphalt (1928), produced by Erich Pommer, 30 in which a naïve policeman (Gustav
Fröhlich) from a good family falls in love with a prostitute, Else (Betty Amann), who also
has stolen a precious stone from a jewellery store; or Bruno Rahn’s Dirnentragödie
30 Erich Pommer was responsible for producing several films by directors including Fritz Lang and F.W.
Murnau, as is explained later in this chapter. Moreover, this Joe May 1929 drama provides a “stylised look at
Berlin nightlife” and was an inspiration for many noir films to follow.
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