Determined to win the heart of a young woman named Erna Bergman, Herman Weinberg approached her about appearing in a film he planned to make. Bergman agreed, and Weinberg cast her as one of the star-crossed lovers in the romance that became Autumn Fire, a silent film that studiously avoids the use of intertitles. A sparse narrative tells the story of an estranged couple—the woman living forlornly in the countryside somewhere, the man living in a state of melancholy and ennui, apparently in New York City—who are separated by geography, as well as by the inherent tensions between the country and the city, or so it seems. The film cuts back and forth between the two characters, each apparently caught in their own surroundings without any hope of a rapprochement, the shots of the country being handled in a lyrical manner reminiscent of Sergei Eisenstein and Grigori Aleksandrov’s Romance Sentimentale (1930), while the shots of the city highlight its modernity, focusing on its activity, its fragmentation, and its dizzying qualities. Much of this metropolitan material, with the exception of the shots of the man wandering its docks and streets, was taken from Weinberg’s own A City Symphony (1930).
The stalemate is broken only when the woman writes a letter to the man, telling him that she forgives him (for what, the audience never knows) and instructing him to meet her at “Central Station” on Wednesday at 5:00 p.m. It is a train that finally brings the lovers together again, following a dramatic arrival into the city whose inventiveness is matched only by Ruttmann’s famous introduction to Berlin (1927). This sequence in particular is a showcase for Weinberg’s modern style, which features extreme high- and low-angle shots, unusual perspectives, canted angles, rapid pans, and even flourishes of negative imagery.
While Weinberg’s film has generally been understood as part of the New York cycle, it actually incorporates shots of both New York and Baltimore, where Weinberg worked as a manager at the Little Theater for a period of time, and thus constitutes a rare composite city film (alongside Vertov’s 1929 Man with a Movie Camera).
In any case, Weinberg’s ploy was apparently successful. Bergman became Mrs. Herman Weinberg soon after the production was completed. While Weinberg, of course, went on to become one of the leading American film critics of his time, as well as a legendary translator of foreign films.
Anthony Kinik
further reading
Posner, Bruce (ed.), Unseen cinema: Early American Avant-garde Film 1893–1941 (New York, NY: Black Thistle Press and Anthology Film Archives, 2001).
_________________________