Der neueste Stern vom Variété

Inside the smoky gaslight of a Berlin Variété, a patchwork family of misfits—aging clown, orphaned aerialist, and a ventriloquist whose dummy knows every secret—watch the velvet curtain rise on Reinhold Schünzel’s Der neueste Stern vom Variété, a 1917 phantasmagoria stitched from greasepaint and pre-war dread. A forgotten starlet, Rosa Porten’s weary soubrette, staggers back to the footlights clutching a pawn-ticket for her last ostrich-plume; she bargains with a moon-faced impresario for one final billing, only to discover that the new constellation he promises is a human cannonball—Helene Voß’s wide-eyed country girl—whose trajectory will blast the old order to smithereens. Between cabochon spotlights and blackout sirens, the film pirouettes through mirrored corridors where identities swap like paper dolls: Schünzel’s rakish magician seduces both women, yet himself becomes the sawn-in-half body, his torso vanishing into the orchestra pit while his legs keep bowing. Porten’s screenplay, razor-sharp and nicotine-stained, peels the spangles off stardom: contracts signed in absinthe, applause that smells of copper pennies, the trapdoor that opens beneath every encore. When the cannon finally roars, the shot propels not flesh but celluloid: the film itself seems to fracture, its final reel flapping like a wounded dove against the projector’s moon, leaving the audience clutching only afterimages—yellowed handbills that read: "Tonight only! The newest star!"—a cruel joke, because the sky above the Friedrichstraße is already dark.