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

(Tragedy of the Street, 1927, aka Women without Men), a drama about an ageing prostitute,
Auguste (Asta Nielsen), who attempts to settle down with a young man who has broken
with his parents and ventured into her demimonde. This rouses the jealousy of her pimp,
who then deliberately uses a younger prostitute to separate them and so Auguste plans
murder in revenge. As one can see, these heady stories of love and violence hardly endorse
a simple moral.
One later representative example (often seen as the penultimate street film) of a
movie in which Expressionist subjectivity is reserved for culminating scenes where the
characters shrink back in humiliation and repugnance is Murnau’s Der Letzte Mann (The
Last Laugh, 1924). The old man (Emil Jannings), who for so long has been so proud of his
position as a doorman and even prouder to be wearing his golden braids and a brass
buttoned uniform outside the Hotel Atlantic, is demoted because of his old age to a lowly
toilet attendant. When the hotel manager comes and strips the pleading doorkeeper of his
uniform, the viewer feels that the protagonist is losing his carefully constructed identity
and as a result his life is suddenly devoid of any significance. This demotion gains darker
tones in the film to show a man who now feels banished by everybody, losing all his selfesteem
(fig. 20). The city itself works as a strong visual element towering above him,
showing him sink deeper and deeper, with strange shapes and objects (cruel laughing faces
and ghoulish masks) all moving in front of him to accentuate his despair and alienation. In
his nightmarish visions (shot in a vividly Expressionist style with distorting lenses and
canted angles), the glass revolving door of the hotel that had been the centre of his life
(separating the chaos of the outside from the scintillating ambience of the lobby) now
appears as an enormous totem of his ruin.
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