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Takovy je zivot / So ist das Leben

Such Is Life
Film still from SO IST DAS LEBEN: A woman and a man kiss and embrace on a sofa.

Thu 21.07.
20:00

  • Director

    Carl Junghans

  • Czechoslovakia, Germany / 1930
    66 min.

  • with

    With Vera Baranovskaja, Theodor Pištek, Valeska Gert

  • Cinema

    Arsenal 1

    zu den Ticketszu dem Kalender
  • Eunice Martins at the grand piano

In July, composer and pianist Eunice Martins provides an accompaniment to Carl Junghans’ sober milieu study TAKOVÝ JE ZIVOT / SUCH IS LIFE, which traces out the almost predestined social decline of a small Prague family across seven chapters. While the father, a coal worker, drinks away the rent money in the pub where his lover (Valeska Gert) works, the daughter loses her job as a manicurist and is awaiting an illegitimate child, the mother, who works as a laundrywoman (an impressive Vera Baranovskaya, who already played the titular leading role in Pudovkin’s Mother) tries desperately and in vain to keep the family afloat. Shot on original locations in Prague and without explanatory intertitles, Carl Junghans’s late silent film succeeded in a creating a modern description of the time between the world wars, episodic, rhythmically edited and without aggressive pathos (mg)

Funded by:

  • Logo Minister of State for Culture and the Media