Summary
Martin Berger’s 'Menschen' serves as a harrowing socio-cinematic autopsy of the human spirit, adrift in the wreckage of a post-war landscape. Far from the escapist fantasies that often dominated early Weimar screens, this 1921 opus delves into the penumbral existence of the disenfranchised. The narrative follows a fatalistic trajectory, where the characters—portrayed with a raw, almost primitive intensity—grapple with the crushing weight of systemic indifference and personal moral decay. It is a film that eschews the ornate theatricality of its contemporaries for a stark, proto-realist aesthetic, focusing on the minute gestures of despair and the fleeting flickers of hope that define the proletarian experience. The plot is less a series of events and more a slow-motion collision of destinies, where the protagonist's descent into the abyss is mirrored by the crumbling infrastructure of the society that surrounds them. Berger uses the camera not merely to record, but to interrogate, stripping away the veneers of civility to reveal the primal 'human' (Menschen) beneath, often caught in a chiaroscuro of existential dread and visceral longing.
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