剧情介绍：
Sylvester, by the hugely underrated Lupu Pick is one of the least known films of the silent era, and unjustly so. Pick, the director of the slightly less obscure Scherben (Shattered), is almost as forgotten as this, his masterpiece... a film that without doubt, in it's time, was one of the most important of the German silent era.
This great Kammerspiel is the middle entry in a trilogy written by the master screenwriter Carl Mayer (see here for a web resource for Mayer, as well as a writeup on Sylvester), all three of which were intended to fall under the directorial auspices of Pick: the first was Scherben (Shattered), the second was Sylvester (New Years Eve), and the last was Der Letzte Mann (The Last Laugh), which, as the film went into production, shifted directorial hands-- and was ultimately helmed by another of Mayer's ongoing collaborators, the great F. W. Murnau.
Much has been made about the supposed innovations of Der Letzte Mann/Last Laugh: that it was the first film to be produced without intertitles, and that it was the film to "unchain the camera" via the integration of subjective camera movements. Some attribute these innovations to Murnau completely, others give credit to Karl Freund for innovating the moving camera. Others suggest that it was within the script for Letzte Mann that instructions for the moving camera can be located, and that this innovation, in this film, rests wth Mayer.
As for the intertitle issue, the myth is easy to debunk: in Germany at least, one can, through exploration of chronologically preceding titles written by Mayer, see that this screenwriter had been seeking out this kind narrative-pictorial purity for years already by the time Letzte went into production. Hintertreppe (Backstairs, 1921, directed by Leopold Jessner, assisted by Paul Leni), Scherben (Shattered, 1921), Die Strasse (The Street, 1923, directed by Karl Grune), Sylvester (New Years Eve, 1924, Pick) all ran, in initial, domestic German release, with one-to-no intertitles. That makes Der Letzte Mann the fifth film that Mayer scripted for execution without intertitles.
Putting aside the issue of the preceding use of moving camera by Yevgeni Bauer, Raul Walsh, Giovanni Pastrone, D.W. Griffith, etc-- the issue of who in Germany who first conceived and extensively utilized the subjective moving camera is put to rest with a simple viewing of Sylvester.
Like all Carl Mayer tales-- and like Scherben before it-- Sylvester is an exceedingly simple story... it is New Years Eve, and all levels of the social strata are celebrating. Like a restless deity exploring the substance of his human creations, in all the colliding facets of their existence, the camera comes in out of the rolling waves of the void of nighttime... announcing with a single opening intertitle the inscription from the Tower of Babel: "Go go let us go down and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech."
With this we move in off of the ocean, and i
This great Kammerspiel is the middle entry in a trilogy written by the master screenwriter Carl Mayer (see here for a web resource for Mayer, as well as a writeup on Sylvester), all three of which were intended to fall under the directorial auspices of Pick: the first was Scherben (Shattered), the second was Sylvester (New Years Eve), and the last was Der Letzte Mann (The Last Laugh), which, as the film went into production, shifted directorial hands-- and was ultimately helmed by another of Mayer's ongoing collaborators, the great F. W. Murnau.
Much has been made about the supposed innovations of Der Letzte Mann/Last Laugh: that it was the first film to be produced without intertitles, and that it was the film to "unchain the camera" via the integration of subjective camera movements. Some attribute these innovations to Murnau completely, others give credit to Karl Freund for innovating the moving camera. Others suggest that it was within the script for Letzte Mann that instructions for the moving camera can be located, and that this innovation, in this film, rests wth Mayer.
As for the intertitle issue, the myth is easy to debunk: in Germany at least, one can, through exploration of chronologically preceding titles written by Mayer, see that this screenwriter had been seeking out this kind narrative-pictorial purity for years already by the time Letzte went into production. Hintertreppe (Backstairs, 1921, directed by Leopold Jessner, assisted by Paul Leni), Scherben (Shattered, 1921), Die Strasse (The Street, 1923, directed by Karl Grune), Sylvester (New Years Eve, 1924, Pick) all ran, in initial, domestic German release, with one-to-no intertitles. That makes Der Letzte Mann the fifth film that Mayer scripted for execution without intertitles.
Putting aside the issue of the preceding use of moving camera by Yevgeni Bauer, Raul Walsh, Giovanni Pastrone, D.W. Griffith, etc-- the issue of who in Germany who first conceived and extensively utilized the subjective moving camera is put to rest with a simple viewing of Sylvester.
Like all Carl Mayer tales-- and like Scherben before it-- Sylvester is an exceedingly simple story... it is New Years Eve, and all levels of the social strata are celebrating. Like a restless deity exploring the substance of his human creations, in all the colliding facets of their existence, the camera comes in out of the rolling waves of the void of nighttime... announcing with a single opening intertitle the inscription from the Tower of Babel: "Go go let us go down and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech."
With this we move in off of the ocean, and i