Film screening People on Sunday (Menschen am Sonntag)

with live-accompaniment by members of the Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra

Robert Siodmak, Edgar G Ulmer/ Germany 1930 / 1h14min / Silent
Cast: Erwin Splettstösser, Wolfgang von Waltershausen, Christel Ehlers, Brigitte Borchert, Annie Schreyer

The film will be accompanied musically by members of the Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra: Raymond MacDonald (saxophone), George Burt (guitars), Emma Roch (flute).  

George Burt, Raymond MacDonald and Emma Roche are all founding members of the Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra, and have performed, recorded, toured and broadcast together for 15 years. They have worked with Menschen am Sonntag (and numerous other German and international films from the silent era) many times. For this performance they will combine spontaneous free-flowing, in-the-moment improvisations with some specially designed overarching structures and newly written breezy open-ended melodies to produce a unique and captivating sound-world for this charming and wonderful film.

'People on Sunday' is one of the earliest movies to renounce stars, drama and other paraphernalia of commercial cinema in favour of a non-professional cast and an unmomentous, everyday storyline. Most of it centres around a Sunday excursion from the bustle of Berlin to a countryside lake, where a bachelor and his married friend drift in and out of flirtations with two young women. Hardly anything happens, but the play of gazes, emotions and counterpoints becomes deeply engrossing. You end up not only learning a lot about life in 1929, but also realizing how little sexual mores have changed.
 

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