Joyless Street

Georg Wilhelm Pabst's 1925 film is set during Austria's postwar hyperinflation and treats poverty as a mechanism rather than a moral lesson. In a poor Viennese neighbourhood two women, Marie and Grete, try to improve life for themselves and their families, caught between the butcher's queue, the rent, and the last object left to sell. That Asta Nielsen and a then-unknown Greta Garbo appear in the same film makes it a meeting point of two acting generations. It was censored in many countries almost immediately: scenes were cut, sequences reordered, the account of poverty softened. For years only fragmentary prints circulated. The Munich Filmmuseum carried out a restoration in 1999, and the fuller version watched today rests on that work. Who it's for: viewers interested in Weimar cinema and in the roots of social realism in silent film. Who it's not for: anyone who will be bothered that the print is still incomplete and that some transitions are bridged with intertitles.