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People on Sunday was made in the summer of 1929 by a group of enterprising and talented filmmakers at the start of their careers – Billy Wilder, Edgar Ulmer, Robert & Curt Siodmak, Fred Zinnemann and Fritz Lang’s inventive cinematographer Eugene Schüfftan. The result was a unique mix of documentary and fiction almost cavalier in the style and simplicity of its storytelling and full of the life of the streets in 1920s Berlin. It proudly proclaimed itself to be ‘a film without actors’ and the lives of the characters in the film were conflated with the real lives of the people who assumed those characters, even to the extent of them only being filmed on their day off, Sunday.

The storyline is a simple one of boy meets girl then prefers her friend, but this is beautifully weighted with a joyful look at people relaxing, sunbathing and picnicking on a Sunday by the Nikolassee. Society as a whole is the subject of the film, which still offers a genuinely fresh vision, and is enraptured by the beauty of the everyday.

 

Graeme Hobbs on 1st April 2005
View all 252 of Graeme Hobbs's reviews

People on Sunday was made in the summer of 1929 by a group of enterprising and talented filmmakers at the start of their careers – Billy Wilder, Edgar Ulmer, Robert & ... more >

People on Sunday was made in the summer of 1929 by a group of enterprising and talented filmmakers at the start of their careers – Billy Wilder, Edgar Ulmer, Robert & Curt Siodmak, Fred Zinnemann and Fritz Lang’s inventive cinematographer Eugene Schüfftan. The result was a unique mix of documentary and fiction almost cavalier in the style and simplicity of its storytelling and full of the life of the streets in 1920s Berlin. It proudly proclaimed itself to be ‘a film without actors’ and the lives of the characters in the film were conflated with the real lives of the people who assumed those characters, even to the extent of them only being filmed on their day off, Sunday.

The storyline is a simple one of boy meets girl then prefers her friend, but this is beautifully weighted with a joyful look at people relaxing, sunbathing and picnicking on a Sunday by the Nikolassee. Society as a whole is the subject of the film, which still offers a genuinely fresh vision, and is enraptured by the beauty of the everyday.
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View all 49 of John Davies’s reviews