Menschen am Sonntag (People on Sunday)
The resounding success of this Weimar-era film is based entirely upon the utter normality of the lives of everyday people on a Sunday in Berlin. The film is celebrated for its early forays into realism, using five amateur actors with no prior acting experience who each had the same name, and the same job, as their fictional counterparts. These five characters enjoy overlapping relationships with one another, and take a trip to the countryside to escape the hustle and bustle of metropolitan Berlin, a landscape somehow so futuristic with its elevated railways and whizzing trams. The picture’s mundanity is part of the charm and was a surprise hit with contemporary audiences who enjoyed the blissful midsummer haziness and petty squabbles of the characters, whose interlocking sexual tensions provide entertaining light drama. However, rather sadly, we modern audience members are painfully aware that this sort of ‘everyday Sunday’ - with picnics and swimming and discussions about whether or not to go to the cinema - were about to become the kind of Sundays about which the German population could merely dream.
This ‘magical blend of documentary and fiction’ as the watershed puts it, can therefore be seen as occupying that nether-zone which even brilliant cinema sometimes struggles to occupy - that space in between a dream-like vision and a relatable, albeit melancholic, reality. The film itself prompted many reflections on my part: not just about how nearly 100 years later the sense of impending doom that curls around Menschen am Sonntag seems curiously familiar to a modern audience, whose everyday lives are coloured by apocalyptic scenes of Amazonian fires and depleting ozone, but also how important celebrating the everyday; the normal; the mundane, is, for no other reason than that our everyday lives quite probably deserve just as much inspection as the current exhibition in the Tate.
For if the everyday lives of Berliners can today prove themselves to be curious and fascinating - from the types of clothes the characters wear in bed, to the adjustment of a clunky buckle on a shoe, from the gender relations between the characters, to the heavy coins in their pockets - then is it not our duty to preserve and categorise the everyday of the here and now, so that generations in 100 years’ time can too feel the joy of the everyday?
Perhaps the value of the Public Role of the Humanities can be seen, somehow, as some kind of permission. Permission to pause, to reflect, to think about how we might not be that different from our Berliner counterparts; with a silver-tinged sense of doom, but for the moment, still dancing under the everlasting Sunday sun.