Weltstadt in Flegeljahren: Chicago in 1931 is gross and great

If you have an hour to spare and you want to see what a city looks like when it is growing too fast for its own good, you should probably watch this. It is definitely for people who like history that feels lived-in and a bit smelly. If you want a clean, pretty postcard version of the past, you are going to absolutely hate this movie.

It was made by a German guy named Heinrich Hauser. He calls Chicago a "world city in its awkward years," and man, he wasn't kidding.

The first thing that hits you is how much movement there is. It is not like those boring educational films like The Story of Petroleum where everything is explained to death.

Hauser just lets the camera sit there. Sometimes it feels like he is just standing on a street corner, letting the crowd almost knock him over.

There is this one shot of the elevated train tracks that looks like a giant ribcage over the street. It is dark and kind of scary.

I found myself squinting at the background of every shot. You see guys in flat caps just leaning against walls, looking like they have nowhere to go.

The movie doesn't tell you to feel bad for them. It just shows them there, next to these massive, shiny buildings that look like they belong in the future.

Then we get to the stockyards. Oh boy.

I hope you didn't just eat. The scenes in the slaughterhouses are... well, they are a lot.

There is no hiding the blood or the carcasses. It is just endless rows of meat moving on hooks.

It is weirdly mesmerizing but also makes you want to look away. The workers move so fast, like they are part of the machinery themselves.

It reminded me a little bit of the energy in Kino-pravda no. 23 - Radio pravda, but less about politics and more about just stuff happening.

Everything in this Chicago feels heavy. The smoke, the steel, the giant piles of coal.

There is a sequence where they are unloading a ship and the sheer amount of grain or whatever it is looks like it could swallow a person whole.

Hauser has this way of filming the architecture that makes the buildings feel like they are breathing. Or maybe they are just looming.

I noticed that the kids in the street never seem to be playing. They are just sort of... hanging out, looking older than they should.

One little boy stares right into the lens for a second too long. It is the kind of moment that makes you realize these were real people, not just ghosts in a grainy film.

The pacing is a bit all over the place. Some parts go on forever, like the shots of the water in the lake.

I guess Hauser really liked the way the light hit the waves. It is pretty, sure, but after three minutes I was ready to go back to the dirty streets.

The whole thing feels like a report someone sent back home to say, "Look at this crazy place I found."

It is not trying to be art, really. It is just witnessing things.

Sometimes the camera shakes. Sometimes the framing is a bit off.

But that is why I liked it. It feels like someone actually held this camera and walked through the mud.

It is way more honest than something like Constantinople, the Gateway of the Orient, which feels like a guided tour for tourists.

Chicago in 1931 was clearly not for tourists. It was for people who wanted to build things or break things.

There is no music in the version I saw, which makes the silence feel really heavy. You can almost hear the clanging of the metal in your head anyway.

By the end, you feel kind of exhausted. Like you just walked ten miles through a construction site.

It is a strange, rough-edged little film. I'm glad I found it, even if I never want to see a hot dog being made ever again.

Why it works (mostly):

• The raw footage of the Loop is better than any history book.
• It doesn't try to make the Depression look "noble." It just looks tiring.
• The industrial scale of everything is genuinely terrifying.

Anyway, if you like looking at how the world used to be before everything got sanitized, this is a good one. Just maybe skip the slaughterhouse bit if you have a weak stomach.

It is definitely better than most of the stuff from that era that tries to be "important." It just is.