Before becoming one of Germany’s most interesting film directors in the 1930s, Willi Forst was one of the defining actors of late Weimar cinema: The handsome, highly musical and soft-spoken embodiment of Viennese charm, Forst was tailor-made for sound film stardom and for a while seemed to turn everything he touched into gold. Some of his best films were made for Berlin-based Super-Film, with a regular set of collaborators: director Géza von Bolváry, screenwriter Walter Reisch and composer Robert Stolz, whose tunes – like in this case the evergreen Adieu, mein kleiner Gardeoffizier – often proved even more popular than the films themselves.
Das Lied ist aus is the team’s masterpiece, not the least because Forst, for once, is pitted against a love interest who can easily hold her own. Liane Haid, herself immensely popular throughout the 1920s, easily matches his bravura performance by effortlessly marrying movie-starglamour with wacky humor. She plays Tilla Morland, a world-famous singer who, after being asked to perform one of her biggest hits, is humiliated by an audience member who seemingly has no interest in her talent (Forst). Tilla soon develops an obsession for the rude nobody, and a highly self-reflexive (“love is like a sound film”) game of push and pull begins, proving that “playfulness is in fact the mostserious guarantee of authenticity” (Thomas Elsaesser). Starting out as a frivolous barroom comedy, Das Lied ist aus soon develops a more tender, melancholic streak, resulting in the bittersweet realisation that, in the end, it’s not about us singing the songs – but rather about the songs singing us.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                

                                                                                                                  Lukas Foerster