Takovy je zivot / So ist das Leben

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)