A double-bill of the Slatan Dudow (1903- 1961), a Bulgarian working in Germany (before 1933, and then again after the war in the GDR) – one film before and one after the famous Kuhle Wampe, seen at Il Cinema Ritrovato last year. Zeitprobleme. Wie der Berliner Arbeiter Wohnt, is an ironic-satirical documentary (part of an intended series of shorts) that challenges the more conventional laments of the ‘environmentalist’ viewpoint. The accusing eye goes to the heart of the basic structures of bourgeois society, and does so by juxtaposing with tough directness the images (often shot with hidden camera by director himself) of invalid, tubercular or the unemployed poor with images of ab- surd bureaucracy, the mechanics of eviction and – at the top of its visual developments – a bourgeois dog’s bubble bath. Seifenblasen, or more accurately Bulles de savon, is a medium-length film started by Dudow in 1931 but finished only in 1934; completion in Germany by Dudow had become impossible, so it was finished in France with the blessed collaboration of Jacques Prévert. The flow of gags beautifully catches the atmosphere of need and desperation.

The sleazy protagonist, a merchant of 10 pfennig soap bubbles, is a typical bogey man of his times, with plenty of helpless citizens ready to be caught in his net of hallucinations and illusions. It’s a lavish comedy about buying and selling, swindling and pretending, with an eye alert to the mental mechanisms that helped the rise of Nazism.