The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, January 11-18
Variety (1925)
Directed by E.A. Dupont
Variety was made towards the end of the German Expressionist movement, at a time when increasing advances in film technique could be used to tell disturbingly simple stories. Dupont and his celebrated cinematographer Karl Freund employ a web of complex camera movements to depict people who are fundamentally entrapped. Their filmic adaptation of a novel by Felix Hollaender focuses on the lumbering and volatile Hamburg-based “Boss” Huller (played by Emil Jannings), who abandons his wife (Maly Delschaft), infant child, and carnival organizer’s work to resume his once-abandoned life as a trapeze artist in partnership with a foreign younger lover christened Bertha-Marie (Lya De Putti). The duo becomes a triangle with the entrance of Artinelli (Warwick Ward), an entrepreneur and fellow acrobat who forms a new act with them at the heights of the Berlin Wintergarten and strives to seize Bertha-Marie’s affections when the group is back on the ground. Vertiginous circus-set scenes give way to compositions framed tightly around Jannings’s expansive face as Huller realizes with twitch-and-glower-filled horror that he might lose his passion’s object once again.
This tragedy told in flashback form (with the possibility present, nonetheless, of redemption for sinners who seek it) was edited down on its initial U.S. release and will screen at Film Forum in a new digital restoration from the Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Foundation. The restoration offers the complete Variety in crisp, gold-and-bronze-tinted images that evocatively suggest the dangers of pursuing material success. Both Film Forum screenings will feature live piano accompaniment by silent film score composer Steve Sterner. Aaron Cutler (January 17, 6pm; January 29, 1pm at Film Forum)