Legs legs legs and then some! While Miss Bitc… err Rich (Claire Dodd) chats with Nan's boss Chester Kent (James Cagney), Nan (Joan #Blondell) absent-mindedly puts on two #stockings on one (lovely) leg, removes it, then slips it onto the other.

“Meow!”

A goodnight #kiss on the lips was all it takes for 14-year old Manuela to fall for her teacher, Fräulein Von Bernburg. Then, while celebrating her rousing performance as the male lead in the play Don Carlos, Manuela gaily blurts out that yes, she indeed is in love with her teacher! This lack of discipline can't go unpunished, with devastating results.

“What you call sin, I call the great spirit of love, which takes a thousand forms.”

– Fräulein Von Bernburg

Mädchen in Uniform with its all-female cast was, no… is!, a daring sapphic romantic drama based on a wildly popular play by Christa Winsloe. After multiple well attended screenings the film got banned in Germany because of its anti-authoritarian undertones, and almost banned in the US because of its lesbianism. Thankfully one of the picture's admirers – Eleanor Roosevelt – stepped in, resulting in a limited release.

I took a long time considering what to nominate for today's topic. This is not an easy one. And frankly, barely qualifies as as film.

 

In the 1930s, three films (2 British, 1 American) portrayed Jews in a positive light, as victims of persecution through history. When in 1938 the Novemberpogrome took place in (Nazi-occupied) Germany (the term “Kristallnacht” is a horrible euphemism and I won't use it), media was not unanimously jubilant about it. Understanding that violence is not the way to popular consensus, plans were made to change people's thinking about the Jews, using widely available visual media.

 

In 1939, the faux #documentary Der ewige Jude, directed by the leader of Goebbels' #propaganda film department Fritz Hippler, started production. Scenes shot in Jewish ghettos in occupied Poland were intercut with real, but out-of-context documentary footage, giving it a false sense of authenticity./

“Where rats turn up, they spread diseases and carry extermination into the land. They are cunning, cowardly and cruel, they travel in large packs, exactly the way the Jews infect the races of the world.”

– narrator

A recurring theme in Der ewige Jude is disease. Not merely to suggest “the Jew”'s unclean life and religion, but as a synonym of people as a vermin, a parasite to decent (read: Aryan) society. In a chilling demonstration of the Kuleshov Effect, footage of a large group of #rats coming out of a sewer is followed by a crowd of Jews in the Łódź Ghetto, filmed without their consent or knowledge of where this footage would end up.

In the small East Flemish villages inhabited by non-actors, where the story takes place, one day, a vagrant shows up. The villagers say he has the evil eye. Mills burned and harvest cursed, they say. The man is cursed, by a deep sense of guilt, over something from the past that slowed down time.

De tweede politieagent: “Jean, hebt ge ze?” [het spel vertraagt]

– Herman Teirlinck, De vertraagde film (1922)

Het kwade oog occupies that small frozen moment between sound and silence. With an acute sense of what's possible in cinema, even more than in literature and theatre, Dekeukeleire applies what he had Eisenstein seen do to with his interpretation of Brecht's episches Theater (“epic theatre”).

“War is declared! Down with monitors and punishment! Long live rebellion! Liberty or death! Hoist our flag on the school roof! Stand firm with us tomorrow! We'll bombard them with rotten old books, dirty tin cans, smelly boots and all the ammo piled up in the attic! We'll fight those old goats on commemoration day! Onward!”

– Tabard, one of the students

“Grand Hotel… always the same. People come, people go. Nothing ever happens.”

– Flaemmchen

“The Chair recognizes… Senator Smith!”

– President of Senate

“People in love are said to be more alive than others. Is it true?”