Unexpected Messengers: Cinematic Portrayals of Text in The Joyless Street
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film studies
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published 03/06/2008
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SummaryA significant yet easily overlooked element of G.W. Pabst’s film The Joyless Street is the cinematic representation of text. In the film various crucial developments in the narrative are determined by characters’ reactions to information conveyed by text. In each case text becomes a disruptive part of the scenery, a distraction which first catches the attention of a character and is then brought to focus for the viewer in the form of a close-up which isolates it from the rest of the background. It is this disruptiveness, coupled with the urgency and import of the new information conveyed by text which the film effectively uses to portray inflation-era Austria in 1923: in a world where most news is bad news, but where people are desperate for any information, even if it is incomplete and comes on a tiny slip of paper, the visual representations of text show how the lives of Austrian citizens were in constant flux and fatally hinged on the receipt of information which came from outside sources and which was outside of their control.
Table of Contents
- The Joyless Street opens with slow-moving figures in the dark, shuffling along Melchiorstrasse they have nothing to look forward to.
- The flimsy piece of paper pretends to be no more than the announcement of a possible business transaction.
- The Joyless Street portrays its entropic world-view by contrasting the innocuous images of text.
- The cinematic depiction of textual exchange is an important element of The Joyless Street because it portrays visually, how dependent the lives of the characters are on chaotic forces outside of their control.
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