Pre-WWI to Post-WWII German Films at LACMA

“From Caligari to Hitler,” LACMA’s comprehensive survey of the German film from 1913 to the end of World War II, now enters its most controversial phase with some key films of the Third Reich. Screening tonight at 8 in the Dorothy Collins Brown Auditorium is an extraordinary double feature, Slatan Dudow’s leftist “Kuhle Wampe” (1932), co-written by Bertolt Brecht, and Hans Steinhoff’s “Hitlerjugend Quex” (1933), an early Nazi film.

What is astonishing about the two films, one made just before and the other just after Hitler’s rise to power is how much they have in common. Both deal with working-class people responding to the dire consequences of the Depression.

With a jerky, jagged score set to Brecht’s lyrics by Hanns Eisler, who later in Hollywood was to run afoul of the House Un-American Activities Committee, “Kuhle Wampe” is a lyrical celebration of the communist solution to economic woes, as impoverished Berliners, evicted from their apartments, form a tent community in Kuhle Wampe, a camping site about an hour’s drive from the capital. Herta Thiele of “Madchen in Uniform” is the film’s nominal star; one of its singers is Helene Weigel, Brecht’s wife and subsequent partner in his East Berlin theater company.

Of far greater interest (and rarity) is “Hitlerjugend Quex,” which is not nearly the heavy-handed propaganda piece that you would expect (or that the ponderous English intertitles, complete with laughable Freudian interpretations, insist that it is). The unidentified young actor who plays Quex (nicknamed Heini) is remarkable as a serious adolescent who is drawn to the Hitler Youth movement despite his communist parents, a beefy, hard-drinking male chauvinist layabout (Heinrich George) and his care-worn wife (Bertha Drews), holed up in a shabby Berlin apartment.

Steinhoff, a talented director, and his writers present the boy as torn between communist and fascist alternatives. Ironically, the film is tragic viewed from either a Nazi or anti-fascist perspective, although from the Third Reich point of view the boy’s fate is to be regarded as a noble sacrifice and a martyrdom to the anti-communist cause. Curiously, too, the young Nazis and their leaders seem caricatures, rigid and near-hysterical, although that could scarcely have been Steinhoff’s intentions.

Wednesday brings (again in the Dorothy Collins Brown Auditorium at 8) “Jew Suss” (1934) and “Jud Suss” (1940), two extraordinarily different adaptations of the 1925 Lion Feuchtwanger novel, set in the 18th Century.

The first, also known as “Power,” is a British production starring Conrad Veidt in the title role as a clever and ambitious Jew who becomes financial adviser to the high-living, spendthrift Karl Alexander (Frank Vosper), Duke of Wurtemberg. Veidt is marvelous as the reflective Josef Suss Oppenheimer undone by ambition and the profligate evil of his mentor.

In the Nazi version, directed by Veit Harlan, the situation is reversed: it is Jud Suss (Ferdinand Marian) who wickedly undermines the foolish and self-indulgent Karl Alexander (Heinrich George) and becomes a symbol calling for the need to rid Germany of all Jews.

The rabble-rousing, virulently anti-Semitic “Jud Suss” is the most notorious of all Nazi features, yet perversely it is a far better film than “Jew Suss,” which is lethally talky and slow in the manner of most vintage British productions. Both programs will be presented with lectures on propaganda and censorship. For full program: (213) 857-6010.

Filmforum presents tonight at LACE “Get the Drift,” an evening of highly personal experimental films distributed by the New York-based company Drift, highlighted by Su Friedrich’s 48-minute, 26-chapter “Sink or Swim,” a beautiful (and demanding) memoir of childhood centering on the traumatic loss of a father through divorce.

Friedrich’s playing with disparate sounds and images characterizes much of the other work in the program, composed of a series of engaging short films in which their young makers explore the ways in which they can express themselves with a camera. Less experimental is Jana Birchum and Tori Breitling’s lovely “Wind Grass Song: The Voice of Our Grandmothers” (1989), a collection of reminiscences of seven elderly women played against shimmering prairie vistas. (213) 663-9568.