Zuflucht

Synopses claim the male lead, Martin, as portrayed by Czech-born would-be émigré to Hollywood Franz Lederer, returns to Germany after nine years of exile in Russia because of the 1918-1919 November Revolution at the end of the First World War and that led to the Weimar Republic, but watching the film, "Refuge," the implication seems to be that after the war and revolution in Germany he soldiered on to the 1917-1923 October Revolution of the Bolsheviks in the creation of the Soviet Union. Point is, he's a bourgeois boy turned disillusioned socialist revolutionary retiring home to, after a brief stint of vagrancy, assume a life of proletariat domesticity with the good woman, as portrayed by star Henny Porten, as opposed to the bad-coded woman who doesn't work and dresses up like a vamp. Meanwhile, Martin's estranged mother is trying to track him down.

I don't agree with a lot of Siegried Kracauer's book "From Caligari to Hitler," namely his Marxist theorizing and the book's presentism throughline of describing every other piece of Weimar cinema as presaging the Nazis, but he may be right in his brief remarks on this title: that it's an insignificant picture masked in a grand style of tragedy, assuming the working-class environs of Soviet filmmakers like Eisenstein or Pudovkin for anti-revolutionary means. Perhaps, some footage is missing, but as is, it's politically vague to the point of being trite. Even the scenes of Berlin, trollies to subways and chauffeured automobiles, tenements and middle-class homes, offers little insight on class, modernity and urbanism.

On the other hand, it looks pretty good. I mean, this film is from the late silent era, of one of the greatest national cinemas, Weimar Germany, in the history of movies, and from one of their most prolific filmmakers, would-be-Nazi Carl Froelich. Hard to believe the same guy produced the truly daring, very non-Nazi "Mädchen in Uniform" (1931), which leads me to guess he may not have had much creative control over that one as he does with "Refuge," which he alone directed for UFA--one of many of the more realist kammerspielfilm (as opposed to the vaunted artsy "Caligari" type fare) pictures he made with national icon Porten.

Not to say "Refuge" isn't artistic--there's a multiple-exposure dream sequence, a bit of flowing trucking shots when characters move, interesting scenes of the building of Berlin's subway system, and remarkable lighting. I'm not especially impressed by Porten and Lederer's acting here, but, boy, they are well-lit and framed at times, especially those low-key close-ups in what were otherwise relatively bright rooms. Lots of shadows in this one. It appears there tends to be an absence of frontal lighting in many scenes, which tend to create silhouettes in the foreground. This is emphasized by some shots that include characters standing in doorways or with background windows creating a backlighting effect. Kudos to cinematographer Gustave Preiss and art director Franz Schroedter. "Refuge" isn't even all that unique in this regard; it demonstrates how beautiful late Weimar cinema was, despite Hollywood poaching talent Lubitsch left and Murnau right, that even a mediocre picture such as this looks so good. Heck, another otherwise unremarkable German picture from 1928 that I saw fairly recently, G. W. Pabst's "Abwege," is even more gorgeous.