In his documentary film about cinema making in the Weimar Republic the film critic Rüdiger Suchsland has put together an impressive abundance of material to create a dazzling, varied and exciting panorama of an epoch. Film had just been invented and started to blossom of all times in a crisis-filled postwar Germany and its emerging, fragile democracy. Filmmakers experimented, came up with genres, revolutionized the camera, and understood film as art and as spectacle. From action thriller to neo-realism – everything was already there. Using countless examples Suchsland invokes the cinematic richness of the era, and mentions of course the big names such as Murnau, Lang, Ruttmann, Wilder. Yet he steers his focus to lesser known film makers well worth discovering, such as Werner Hochbaum and his fantastically photographed socialist Hamburg workers’ dramas or Robert Reinert, who captures the feverish restlessness of the time in his film NERVES, or Marie Harder, one of the forgotten women in film history.
In the different images and stories Suchsland searches for traces of an epoch in its films, for afterimages of the First World War, for the spirit of optimism in the “golden” 1920s, for the in the foreshadowing of dictatorship. He finds them in the distorted faces of DOCTOR CALIGARI, in the hopeful sober urban stories in PEOPLE ON SUNDAY and in the network of crime hanging over the city in M. FROM CALIGARI TO HITLER is a homage, a declaration of love, an evocation and death wail. Again and again Suchsland’s narration calls out to the pioneers as if he could call them back. But he can’t. The closing credits with the comments “emigrated from Germany 1933, 1936, 1939..." make it pretty clear that 70 years after the end of Nazi Germany: Germany annihilated itself in 1933.

Hendrike Bake