THE CRIMSON PLAYGOER

The foreign films are still coming to Boston. Some are intended for the French-speaking and German-speaking population of Boston, while others transcend the language of their origin and recommend themselves to any intelligent audience. Such a film is "Das Lied vom Leben," with which the Fine Arts Theatre is relieving that vacation surfeit of Hollywood happy-endings and Grand Rapids repartee.

Somewhere in Germany, in the year 1919, three young painters and a camera-man hatched an idea for a new film. They wanted to use that impersonal and reportorial tool, the camera, to tell a tale from a madman's brain and show the world through a mad-man's eyes. They wanted to becloud the lens, to forsake realism to gain artistic reality. In 1920 this film was finished, and "Dr. Caligari" made his crooked bow to Europe. In those days nothing like it had been seen. Devotees of the arts went to marvel, and there was talk of the cinema coming of age. "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" gave the impetus for a brilliant series of European films which included Murneau's "Dracula" (1922) and "Faust," and Eisenstein's "Ten Days That Shook the World" and "Old and New." To the imaginative force of "Caligari," Eisenstein added his technique of film assembly, or "montage," in which short bits of seemingly unrelated scenes are intercut and interposed to produce a visual counterpoint.

And now comes "Das Lied vom Leben." On the strength of this film, director Alexis Granowsky takes his place beside Murneau and Eisenstein. This "Song of Life" is the story of a young girl's escape from a worldly bridegroom, the last of a dying line, and of her marriage with a young man who typifies the creative spirit, with a future of his own making before him. Merging as it does into symbolism, the story can hardly be more closely described without making it seem either recondite or sentimental. Just as there is no verbal transcription for a symphony, so there is no literary parallel for this cenematic symphony. The playgoer might single out the banquet scene, where brilliant montage conveys the sense of hollowness and hypocrasy: or he might mention the marvellous hospital sequence, where the activity of the doctors is punctuated by recurring close-ups of the nurses' eyes, competent, steadily watching. But these citations do no justice to the total effect of the film.

Perhaps it is better merely to recommend "Das Lied vom Leben" with enthusiasm, and to assure everyone that ignorance of German is no reason to stay away.