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The Neue Sachlichkeit provided a return to objective reality, paying a pure attention to the world, free from the sentimentalism and idealism of Expressionism, from which it attempted to detach itself. And like any artistic movement, this current too, in its albeit short life, managed to span several disciplines, leaving its mark in all fields, from graphics to film.
Reconsidering reality
In a seminar with LUISS students a few years ago, Italian director and actor Carlo Verdone talked about the time when his father Mario, a famous essayist and university professor, asked him to postpone his film criticism exam to the next session. The reason? Carl Theodor Dreyer and Georg Wilhelm Pabst, who at the time were already considered the greatest exponents of their respective countries. The young Carlo claimed, in fact, that he had not yet delved into that current of European cinema that, between the two wars, found its greatest expression in the then Weimar Republic, called Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity).
As a term made famous by the German historian Gustav Hartlaub, who organised an innovative exhibition in Mannheim in 1925, the Neue Sachlichkeit considered a return to objective reality, providing a pure focus on the world, free of the sentimentalism and idealism of Expressionism, from which it attempted to detach itself. And like every artistic movement, this current too, in its albeit short life, managed to span several disciplines, leaving its mark in all fields, from graphics to film.
Precisely in the latter art, efforts were made to be as realistic as possible not only in the writing, but also and above all in the filming, where script, acting and finally the film set became an objective and authentic black-and-white picture of reality. While Karl Grune’s Schlagende Wetter (1923) had opened, so to speak, a door, it was only with Pabst’s film Joyless Street (1925) that the critique of expressionism became more evident and clear.
Closely linked to the German history of those years, this new realism was able to depict stories of poverty and despair through a clever combination of reality and fiction, effectively qualifying the works as ‘authentic and genuine’. Of great importance for the German Neue Sachlichkeit is the theme of the street as a place of perdition, greedy for those human lives already tormented and impoverished by the misery that characterises every post-war period. In this regard, worthy of note is Kühle WampeKühle Wampe, a work by Slatan Dudow and Bertolt Brecht, who in 1932 showed the drama of a worker who committed suicide by mixing scenes shot on set and long documentary-style shots of Berlin and of the accommodation centre for homeless people.
In Austria, the greatest input came from the work, with its theatrical flavour, of the very Pabst who was initially ignored by young Verdone. More in line with the realism of his German colleagues, the director from the now dissolved Austro-Hungarian empire was able to pursue a critique of the society of the time with films totally based on the reality of the 1920s, such as the dramas, both from 1929, starring Louise Brooks, Pandora’s Box and Diary of a Lost Girl. In both films, we are told of a reality that is too harsh to be accepted and of a protagonist who tries at all costs to “escape”, with almost always tragic consequences.
Having never identified itself as a cohesive movement, the Neue Sachlichkeiteit had a relatively short life, without, however, failing to make its contribution, especially in film, to the rejection of exoticism and the passionate subjectivity dominant in post-war Expressionism. On the contrary, its ability to observe the world around it with different but sober and simple styles ensured a certain continuity between the different arts, be they photography, painting or film. All agreeing in placing the discomfort and isolation of the moment, made up of loss and existential bewilderment, at the centre of the narrative, these arts experienced an early end with the outbreak of national-socialist feelings, marking an unbridgeable distance between being an avant-garde movement and those who called them, wrongly, ‘degenerate arts’.
Sitography:
https://www.moma.org/s/ge/curated_ge/styles/new_objectivity.html
https://www.lacma.org/sites/default/files/New%20Objectivity%20-%20Didactics_0.pdf
https://www.criterion.com/shop/browse?director=w-pabst-g
https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-new-objectivity-artists-exposed-decadence-hypocrisy-german-society
https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/glossary-terms/neue-sachlichkeit-new-objectivity
https://www.theartstory.org/movement/new-objectivity/