After eighteen years away and vast changes in the blockbuster landscape in which it once broke incredible new ground, the Matrix series is back with a fourth film, The Matrix Resurrections. Keanu Reeves’ Neo is once again plugged into the Matrix as Thomas Anderson, but having trouble separating reality from dreams of events that happened twenty years ago… if dreams are what they are.
We discuss Resurrections‘ endless self-reflexivity, how it uses motifs and themes of the previous films, updating them where necessary and bringing more out of them (Mike is glad of the much improved use of mirrors). We also consider the film’s inclusivity, which is key to the Wachowskis’ work, and an uncomplicated joy here – it’s not difficult for people from a range of ethnic backgrounds and situated in different places along sexual and gender spectra to coexist in a blockbuster with no particular importance placed upon their identities, as Resurrections proves. You just have to want to do it, and the world that results is beautiful. And, at heart, it’s a middle-aged romance – for which José swoons!
Resurrections isn’t without its issues, and we consider those too – Mike asks whether the sense of wonder associated with the special effects of the original films is simply gone forever in a world in which literally anything can be done, and is, with all-powerful CGI, and we agree that the action is a Bourne-inflected disappointment, especially so in a series that itself spawned so many imitators of its own action scenes two decades ago.
But seen in its entirety, The Matrix Resurrections is an imaginative and interesting continuation of the story begun twenty years ago, and a holistic triumph of well-intentioned, positive and effortless representation. Whoever thought we’d get a fourth Matrix? And that it would be this different, and this good?
In 1992 Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run) and Gunter Romesch (owner of the Notausgang cinema, famous for showing To Be or Not to Be continuously for many years) wanted to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Lubitsch’s birth and decided on a comprehensive retrospective of his films. At the time American Lubitsch was already much appreciated but German Lubitsch remained largely unknown even in Berlin. The retrospective would be an opportunity to gather, get to know and disseminate the German work. They needed, however, something that would propel media interest and help publicise the event. Their first thought was to have the street where Lubitsch was born, originally Lothringer Strasse but renamed Wilhelm Pieck Strasse by the GDR, rechristened once again as Ernst Lubitsch Strasse. But the city of Berlin turned them down in favour of Torstrasse (Gate Street). Tykwer still seems astounded by this refusal.
François Truffaut famously entitled his appreciation of Lubitsch, ‘Lubitsch was a Prince’[i] but we know of more modest beginnings albeit not, as Nicola Lubitsch insistently reminds us, as modest as legend would have it. In Fischer’s Lubitsch in Berlin: From Schönhauser Allee to Hollywood we’re told that Lubitsch’s father immigrated to Berlin in the 1870s from Vilnius, in what is now Lithuania but was then Russia, in order to escape the pogroms.
In a short biography of Lubitsch published by Cahier du cinéma in 1985, Hans Helmut Prinzler tells us instead that Lubitsch’s father Ssimcha (Simon) was born in 1852 in Grodno, Russia whilst his mother Anna Lindenstaedt was born in 1850 in Wriezen an der Oder, Germany[ii]. Scott Eyman in Ernst Lubitsch: Laughter in Paradise, concurs with Prinzler and adds that ‘Grodno was largely settled by Jews expelled from Lithuania between 1000 and 15000. It was, in turn, the site of several major pogroms in the seventeenth century. By the early nineteenth century, Grodno was part of the Jewish Pale of Settlement, the mandated residence of five million jews’.[iii]
In Jonathan Sperber’s magisterial biography of Marx, Karl Marx: A Nineteenth Century Life, Sperber recounts how ‘For Europeans of the eighteenth century, Jews formed a nation whose members were spread all across Europe. This Jewish ‘nation’ should not be confused with its modern namesake, in a world of nation-states, since pre-1789 European states were the patrimony of their rulers, not the product of nations. Rather, it was one of may groups within the society of orders, whose place was guaranteed by its own charters, although these tended to contain more obligations and restrictions than right and privileges.’[iv] According to Sparber, Napoleon’s invasion of nations to the East of France and the imposition of the Napolenic Code on them had the effect of simultaneously freeing Jews from the concept of the Society of Orders and allowing them to become citizens. But according to Sperber, ‘The Jews’ identification with the new regime, which for all of its problematic features promised an improvement in their conditions, meant that opposition to the Napoleonic rule would be focused on the Jews’. [v] Thus in the broader context of European history, Lubitsch can be situated between a moment of emancipation and a moment of anninhilation that luckily for him and for us would come once he was safely ensconsced in the United States.
Lubitsch’s siblings
This first section of Ernst Lubitsch in Berlin: From Schönhauser Allee to Hollywood shows us how Lubitsch grew up as the fourth child, second son and youngest child of a well-to-do family of taylors. His siblings were Richard (born in 1882), Marga (1884) and Elsa (1885). There was thus a ten year difference between Ernst and his elder brother. They grew up in the Jewish ghetto around what was then Bülow Platz and is now Rosa Luxembourg Platz. For more than twenty years Lubitsch lived in this neighbourhood, he was formed by it and the culture of the milieu and its ‘structure of feeling’, is everywhere evident in his early films. This is the world of Pinkus and of Meyer. A world of apprentices trying to get a job and get the girl in the face of all kinds of barriers, a world where one has to learn about appearances that don’t come naturally, about manners not one’s own.
Lubitsch with his father Ssimcha (Simon)
In 1900 Lubitch’s father has a tailoring business specializing in ladies’ coats with eight employees plus jobber. According to Prinzler in his Cahiers biography, he’s also got a business associate, Max Friedländer. They’ve got a phone, a considerable marker of status in the Berlin of the time. Berlin itself, according to the 1900 census, had 1.88 million inhabitants, 2.48 million if you include the 20 surrounding independent communities of Charlottengurg, Wilmesdorf, Schöneberg and others that would now be considered part of Berlin. By the1910 census Berlin has 3.4 million inhabitants with the ‘independent communities’ now incorporated into Berlin proper. There are now 30 permanent theatres and many seasonal ones. In Nollendorfplatz, a concert hall is transformed into a cinema, the biggest in Germany: the Mozartsaal-Lichtspiele seating 1200 spectators. The theatre belongs to one of the greatest film trusts, ‘Allgemeine Kinematographen Gesellschaft m.b. H, founded in 1906 by Paul Davidson, a figure that would become central to the history of German cinema in general and to Lubitsch’s career in particular.[vi]
Lubitsch’s mother Anna who ran the business and the family
From 1899 to 1902 Lubitsch went to prep school, after which he was admitted to a very reputable high school; The Sophien-Gymnasium, Weinmeistertrasse, not far from Alexanderplatz. An old syllabus tells us that he was taught German, Latin, French (from the seventh year) Greek (from the eight year) history, geography, math, arithmetic[vii]. There’s a wonderful scene in Schuhpalast Pinkus, where Lubitsch playing Sally Pinkus is sweeping the floor and the intertitle tells us, ‘I learned Latin for this?’, a refrain that’s probably been echoed in different variants through the ages and up to now.
Walking in the ‘kiez’.
In 1900 there were only 92,000 Jews in a total Berlin. According to Scott Eyman, ‘Like many of their Jewish brethren in Berlin, the Lubitsch family was assimilated and not at all religious. The synagogue was a place for an obligatory visit on the high Holidays and little more….Overall the family’s specific identity was as Berliners not as Jews.’[viii] According to Gottfried Reinhardt, Max’s son and later famous Hollywood producer (The Red Badge of Courage) and director (Town Without Pity), ‘‘Berlin ignored the anti-Semitism towards its indigenous ethnic groups. The Viennese knew their ‘Jews’; for the Berliners, the Jew was a Berliner, though as strange as any other’.[ix]
A culture that shaped Lubitsch, was central to Berlin in the Weimar era, and was destroyed by the Nazis.
Lubitsch was born in Germany and he was a Berliner but he was also a Jew. This whole culture that we’re shown, the diasporic milieu of Lubitsch’s childhood, the culture of the kiez, the small community within the larger town that was the Jewish neighbourhood in Berlin; and of Schönhauser Allee; both so integral to Berlin culture and indeed to German culture as a whole, was completely destroyed by the Nazis. Thus it is right that the film and Tykwer attempt to reclaim at least part of Lubitsch. He was a Berliner and as the film will argue, central to the German cinema of that age. But one can also understand why the city of Berlin might want to refuse to name a street after a Berliner who also happened to be one of the great artists of the 20th century: Berlin would be reminding itself that it had just sat by or worse whilst an integral chunk of itself had been destroyed. But then again, perhaps it should. Well, no perhaps about it. It should. But as we can see from The Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, in certain ways it does. Could it be that they didn’t think he was worthy of the honour? If so, they should definitely watch the ‘Lubitsch in Berlin’ boxed set available in the Masters of Cinema Series.
A young Lubitsch wearing a dark hat.
According to Sabine Hake, ‘categories like nationalism/internationalism and conformism/ marginality are crucial for understanding Lubitsch’s marginal position as a Jew in Germany and an immigrant in the United States’ [x]. Moreover, Jewish culture is central to Lubitsch’s early works with ‘Jewish humour providing a main source of inspiration'[xi]. The tension between diaspora and belongingness, the push and pull, the claiming and the kicking out, are all underlying tensions in Ernst Lubitsch in Berlin: From Schönhauser Allee to Hollywood and are clearly critical contexts for what ‘Lubitsch’, the person and the work, grew out of and are key to understanding what helped shape him and it.
José Arroyo
[i] François Truffaut, ‘Lubitsch was a Prince’, The Films of My Life, trans by Leonard Mayhew, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978, pp.50-53.
[ii] Hans Helmut Prinzler, ‘Première partie: Allemagne (1892-1922)’, eds. Bernard Eisenchigtz and Jean Narboni, Ernst Lubitsch, Cahiers du cinema, Cinémathèque Française, Paris, 1985
[iii] Scott Eyman, Ernst Lubitsch: Laughter in Paradise, Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, John Hopkins Paperback Editions, 2000, p. 19.
[iv] Jonathan Sperber, Karl Marx: A Nineteenth Century Life, London: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2013, p. 5.
[v] Sperber, ibid., p. 12.
[vi] Prinzler, op.cit, pp. 11-12.
[vii] Prinzler, ibid., p. 11.
[viii] Eyman, op. cit., p. 24.
[ix] Cited in Prinzler, op.cit., p. 14.
{x} Sabina Hake, Passions and Deceptions: The Early Films of Ernst Lubitsch Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992, p. 7
Ernst Lubitsch in Berlin: From Schönhauser Allee to Hollywood is everything one could hope for in a documentary on a great film directors. First and foremost it shows us excerpts from films (Der Stolz der Firma, Schupalast Pinkus, Meyer aus Berlin) that one had a vague knowledge of but had never seen and makes one long to see them. Lubitsch’s Berlin films are prodigious in number – between 1913 and 1922 he acted in at least 30 films and directed over forty — amongst them extraordinary achievements in film art that deserve to be better know. Some can now be seen in the Lubitsch in Berlin boxed set currently distributed as part of the ‘Masters of Cinema’ series and which includes Ernst Lubitsch in Berlin: From Schönhauser Allee to Hollywood as one of the discs. Fischer’s film on Lubitsch is succeeds in making us learn about Lubitsch’s early career as a whole as well as demonstrating the what, where, when and some of the how of some of his greatest films in this period. It leaves us eager to seek them out or to be once more charmed by their riches. If you have a Lubitsch addiction, Ernst Lubitsch in Berlin will stoke it.
The film’s objective is to restore Lubitsch’s German work to its rightful place in the Lubitsch oeuvre and to argue that that place is an important one. In order to do so, the film draws on the riches of film museums, the ones in Munich and Berlin are particularly well represented, not least through the expertise of their former directors, respectively Enno Patalas and Hans Helmut Prinzler. The use of a wide array of archival resources enable us to see Berlin at the beginning of the 20th Century, fabulous film posters, images taken on the sets of various production, what film studios were like at the time of the First World War, etc.; and we also get to hear the voices of legends like Henny Porten, Dietrich’s idol when a teenager and the great German star of the era, or Jörg Jannings reading the writings of his father Emil on Lubitsch. These words and voices — soft, romantic, hyper-emotional — evoke an era of filmmaking, an attitude to it, and even a whole tradition of German Romanticism that’s as rich as anything we get to see.
Tom Tykwer next to a statue of Lubitsch
The film uses talking-head interviews to narrate Lubitsch’s story in Berlin but also to illustrate, contextualize and learn to appreciate that which we’ve seen. Thus, interspersed with clips from the films, archival footage and a whole array of images from a variety of sources, the film also deploys the knowledge and insights of some of the most celebrated writers on Lubitsch and his time in Berlin (Michael Hanisch, Jan-Christopher Horak); some of the most famous German filmmakers of the time in which the film was made (Tom Tykwer, director of Run Lola Run, Wolfgang Becker of Goodbye, Lenin, Dani Levy, Go for Zucker!); and members of Lubitsch’s own family: his daughter Nicola, his granddaughter Amand Goodpaster, and the smart and trenchant voice of his niece, Evy Bettleheim-Bentley.
Did the Berlin Lubitsch suspect the Hollywood career that awaited him? Ali Hubert draws out the prospect.
Nicola Lubitsch was invited back to Berlin to help celebrate her father’s centenary in 1992 and her discovery of the Berlin culture of her father’s era and of his very great and unique contributions to it becomes the film’s central narrative and the viewers’ jouney. It’s as is if in telling us of her experience, in finding out new things about her father, his world and his art, she also helps us to discover and begins to set a context in which to appreciate this particular world and these particular works, guiding the viewer familiar only with the American Lubitsch into these silent treasures and the social, cultural and political contexts that helped create them. One couldn’t have asked for a better introduction to Lubitch’s pre-Hollywood life, career and work.
****
Lubitsch’s daughter Nicola kissing a statue of her father.
