KAMERADSCHAFT Movie Review
La Tragedie de la Mine
Comradeship
Based on an actual 1906 mine disaster, G.W. Pabst's noble Kameradschaft (Comradeship) is set on the German-French border shortly after World War I. An explosion traps French miners, and German workers come to their aid in an emotional demonstration of human kindness, brotherhood, and solidarity. Kameradschaft is a moving and affecting plea for peace, and a call for the healing of old wounds that the war had only deepened. The suspenseful and sometimes nerve-shattering dramatic structure is concealed just below the movie's surface, which has the immediacy and visual punch of a documentary. Pabst spices that surface up with startling images, such as the sight of a German rescuer in a gas mask causing an oxygen-starved French miner to flash back to the war; in an instant the Frenchman loses his grasp on reality, attacking his would-be savior. The film features no scored music (though an orchestra is heard within the film); the primary sounds are those of frightened men, rumbling machinery, and creaking support beams, threatening to collapse still further. Kameradschaft resonates in another way, of course, when we think of the nightmare in Europe that would follow the film's 1931 release. That doesn't diminish Pabst's achievement, and in fact it makes Kameradschaft's poignant if unsuccessful plea for peace seem all the more noble in retrospect. (Hindsight, however, also brings out an irony that's worth mentioning here. Unlike other European artists and filmmakers who expatriated themselves at the time—Fritz Lang is perhaps the most notable example—Pabst, who had traveled and worked around Europe and the United States before the war, returned to Austria in 1940–41, for reasons of health he claimed, and continued his career under the Nazis.)
NEXT STOP … Metropolis, All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), Ace in the Hole (The Big Carnival)
1931 80m/B GE Ernst Busch, Alexander Granach, Fritz Kampers, Gustav Puttjer, Daniel Mendaille, Elizabeth Wenst; D: G.W. Pabst; W: Laszlo Wajda, Karl Otten, Peter Martin Lampel; C: Fritz Arno Wagner, Robert Barberske. VHS MRV, IHF, NLC