Jason Bailey
It’s important to remember, when contemplating gigantic shifts to film as a medium (and an art), that nothing happened overnight. It’s the nature of the beast; movies are a big, complicated beast, and one that tends to lumber into technical advances, rather than sprinting into them. When we watch something like Singin’ in the Rain (or, god forbid, Babylon), it’s easy to get the impression that one day, all the movies were silent, and a month later, all the movies were talkies. And while the speed with which the bulk of the industry made that changeover is truly impressive (eighteen months, give or take, between the sensation of The Jazz Singer and a movie marketplace were talkies were the majority), there were still plenty of artists making silent movies—great ones, even—well into the sound era.
The most obvious example is Chaplin, who saw sound as a novelty, knew to his bones that the Tramp character would not work with dialogue, and released City Lights in 1931 and Modern Times in 1936. They both used sync sound effects and music (and, in the latter, even some gibberish dialogue) but were still, by most definitions, silent movies. Thumbnail histories will treat him as the outlier, the maverick who could get away with holding out solely because he was CHAPLIN. But one could put together a pretty impressive festival of silent movies released between The Jazz Singer in 1927 and City Lights in 1931, both here and abroad.
If one were programming such a festival, the 1930 production People on Sunday would, at the very least, be its Centerpiece selection. The assemblage of talent here is mind-boggling; the credited directors are future film noir masters Robert Siodmak (Criss Cross) and Edgar G. Ulmer (Detour), with uncredited assistance by Rochus Gliese (later nominated for his art direction of Sunrise, another sound-era silent masterpiece), Siodmak’s brother Curt (whose copious screenwriting credits included I Walked with a Zombie and The Wolf Man), and Fred Zinneman (Oscar-winning director of High Noon and From Here to Eternity). The Siodmaks and Ulmer also contributed to the screenplay, which is primarily credited to “Billie Wilder”—aka the one and only Billy Wilder (The Apartment).
That said, it’s not a conventional case of screenwriting. The opening subtitle indicates this is “a film without actors,” which is accurate; it was an early experimental hybrid of documentary and narrative, featuring five people who had never acted, each playing a somewhat fictionalized version of themselves and their professions. Some work in the arts, but most are blue collar types, and the early passages give us a (beautifully photographed) sense of the daily workings of Berlin. This is not throwaway material, in either its duration nor its intention. These were all filmmakers who would, at one time or another, strive to convey some sort of social realism (or, at the very least, attempt to ground their work in realism and authenticity), even within the confines of genre.
Through their work, we are introduced to them; we learn more about them through their interactions with each other, first through an impromptu date sequence, and then (per the title), a relaxing weekend day in the country. Four of our five subjects head off to an apparently popular lake (the fifth abstains to stay home and be lazy, and folks, representation matters). There is picnicking and swimming — and, side note, let’s not bring back this era in men’s bathing wear — and even when emotions are high and conflicts arise, the filmmaking is gentle and lyrical. And then it’s back to the city and back to work, with titles cueing up “THE WEEKLY CHORES AGAIN” and “Four million people waiting for next Sunday. The End.”
What’s most striking about People on Sunday, at least in terms of what’s onscreen, is the underlying normcore of it all. These regular folks in their regular jobs are treated with love and respect by the filmmakers, and the little bit of story they choose to tell seems of less interest to them than the long and engaging detours into pure sightseeing and anthropology. The value of that perspective has only increased in the years since its production; the picture now stands as a vibrant snapshot of Weimer-era Germany, giving us a clear idea of the social and cultural utopia that was lost when Hitler came to power. And it’s a potent reminder, also, of what was lost when an art form abandoned twenty-plus years of silent creativity and ingenuity so that we could hear what we could previously, and without much effort, imagine.
“People on Sunday” is streaming on the Criterion Channel and Max, and is also available on a Criterion Blu-ray. You can also hear Jason and co-host Mike Hull discuss this film with guest Catherine Stebbins on the podcast “A Very Good Year.“
