Under the Bridges

Two men who work a barge between the Havel and the Spree fall in love with the same woman. Helmut Kautner shot it in 1944, in the middle of the war, away from the studios and largely on the river. It passed censorship in March 1945 and never reached a cinema, since street fighting was about to begin in Berlin; it was released only in 1946. The most striking thing about it is not what is in it but what is absent: no propaganda, no ideology, not one reference to the war or the destruction. Given the year, that is a decision. Kautner builds a small self contained world on the water that nothing from outside gets into, and attends only to what three people want.