Austrian filmmaker and cameraman Alex Strasser (1898–1974) started his film career in the 1920s in Berlin before he left Nazi-Germany in the mid-1930s and made government sponsored instructional and documentary films in Great Britain. In 1929, he made the avant-garde short Impressionen der Großstadt (now lost), which is also known as Berlin von unten. Helmut Weihsmann describes the film as an impressionistic approach to the city symphony genre, a neat and uncritical pictorial reportage that presents unusual low-angle shots of hurrying feed, car tires, and traffic movement in the bustling streets of the German capital. The film passed censorship on 6 January 1930, and in his programmatic book Filmgegner von heute—Filmfreunde von morgen, Hans Richter mentioned Strasser’s work as an example of documentary filmmaking. Similarly, Dutch journalist, director, scriptwriter, and Filmliga member Simon Koster praised Strasser’s film and compared his documentary approach to Wilfried Basse’s city symphony Markt in Berlin (1929).
Strasser became affiliated with the avant-garde circles of the interwar period and joined the first meeting of the International League of Independent Film in La Sarraz in September 1929. The same year, he also worked with László Moholy-Nagy on a theatrical production at the Theater am Nollendorfplatz in Berlin, providing the film material to the play Der Kaufmann von Berlin. Together with Lotte Reiniger, he also collaborated on the animation film Grotesken im Schnee (Grotesques in the Snow, 1928), which followed a year after he independently made his animation short Die Landpartie (The Trip in the Country, 1927).
Eva Hielscher
further reading
“Impressionen der Großstadt—Verschollene Arbeiten von Alex Strasser,” Tagesspiegel 13, 353 (28 August 1989).
Goergen, Jeanpaul, “Die Avantgarde und das Dokumentarische,” in Klaus Kreimeier, Antje Ehmann, and Jeanpaul Goergen (eds.), Geschichte des dokumentarischen Films in Deutschland: Band 2: Weimarer Republik. 1918–1933 (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2005), 493–526.
Roepke, Martina, “Crafting Life into Film: Analyzing Family Fiction Films from the 1930s,” in Ryan Shand and Ian Craven (eds.), Small-Gauge Storytelling: Discovering the Amateur Fiction Film (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 83–101.
Weihsmann, Helmut, “The City in Twilight: Charting the Genre of the ‘City Film’ 1900–1930,” in François Penz and Maureen Thomas (eds.), Cinema and Architecture: Méliès, Mallet-Stevens, Multimedia (London: BFI, 1997), 8–27.
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