KAMERADSCHAFT

New Zealand Listener, Volume 18, Issue 456, 19 March 1948, Page 23

KAMERADSCHAFT

(Nero-Film). O attempt a critical estimate of Kameradschaft to-day, seventeen years (and two swings of the international pendulum) after it was produced, is to discover how difficult it is to be wise after the event. The leitmotiv of the film-the brotherhood of mansounds faintly through the uproar of the intervening years, and some may even find its accents insincere, but as a piece of film-making Kameradschaft has some superb moments. I saw it last week, at the invitation of the Wellington Film Society-and' I understand that it will be seen by film society members throughout New Zealand-but I wish it could be shown to a wider audience. Kameradschaft was made in 1931 by the German director G. W. Pabst and tells the story of a mine disaster in the Saar, Briefly the story is this: Running through the centre of one major coalseam is the Franco-German _ frontier. On the one side are the French miners, on the other the Germans. Suddenly, on the French side of the seam, where a slow fire has been burning in some sealedoff workings, an explosion occurs and 600 men are entombed by falls of rock. German rescue teams are thereupon organised, packed into trucks, and after crashing through the dividing frontier posts help in the saving of their comrades, The film’s avowed theme of comradeship is, therefore, obvious enough, but I found Pabst’s treatment of it a good deal more difficult to understand. As it stands the film seems designed primarily for German audiences of 1931, but what need is there to preach the gospel of international co-operation to a defeated nation? If Pabst sought to win over the French, why commit the egregious psychological blunder of staging his disaster on the French side of the fron-tier-particularly on such -~ delicate ground as the Saar? Why, in such a film, underline the little things which divide nations-the rivalries of small boys, the frontier posts with their contrasting uniforms and their artificial barriers, the differences of dress, of language, of temperament, even of gesture? The cumulative effect of all this is to suggest that French and German miners have little more in common than the hazards of their calling. But if I failed to discover what Grierson called Pabst’s "fierce international idealism," except in a form vitiated either by conflicting motives or by intellectual doubts, I found his handling of film and sound both exciting and impressive. Kameradschaft, made at a time when the influence of the silent film was still strong, is primarily a visual experience-it is a moving picture, comprehensible through the eye alone. The German dialogue slips unnoticed in at one ear and out at the other, and even the English sub-titles are rarely necessary. A characteristic of the film which I found interesting in its effect is the slow speed of the shots and the consequent deliberate development of scenes, In particular I remember the sequence

which followed the explosion and which showed the French townspeople running through the streets to the mine-gates, This sequence seems to go on and on, and in. its effect on the audience resembles that form of nightmare in which one tries to fly from something but remains inexorably rooted to the spot. The sound, too, is handled with all the exciting qualities of a new medium. Great blocks of noise assail the ears as the French workings cave in and tongues of blazing gas roar through the galleries, then just as suddenly there is silence as the clouds of coal-dust blot out the anonymous bodies of the dead. The dialogue is on the whole incidental, but one word of it-the name Georges sobbed out by an aged Frenchman seeking his grandson in the very bowels of the pit-sounds as if it might have come straight from Dante. Kameradschaft may have been propaganda for international brotherhood-or it may have been propaganda against French control of the Saar, but what it brought home to me most forcibly was that the price of coal is paid in blood and tears as well as toil and sweat,