The chronicle of a fearful day. After five years in prison, Robert is set free. His wife Marie means to pick him up, but coincidence intervenes. They search for each other, they repeatedly miss each other, and along the way, Robert comes to doubt Marie’s fidelity and the promise of a better tomorrow. One everyman, one everywoman, and the joys and accidents of modern city life: director Hochbaum and scenarist Carl Behr tap into the vein of contemporaneous city films like Paul Fejos’ Lonesome (1928) or Gustav Machatý’s From Saturday to Sunday (1931), but their outlook is much darker. Arriving in German cinemas the summer after the Nazi takeover, their film has been fruitfully read as “a symptom of transition, an expression of the general anxiety neurosis of 1933” (Karsten Witte). From Robert and Marie’s experiences, Hochbaum weaves sophisticated montages of image and sound, inner and outer world, impressions and recollections. Rather than being content with showcasing late-1920s avant-garde film techniques, Morgen Beginnt das Leben’s tour de force of sequence shots, rhythmic editing and wordless storytelling achieves a purposeful, fierce portrait of disturbance and disorientation. Instead of the working masses, an escalating montage collects the ex-convict’s vicious, gossiping neighbors. When the camera is attached to a merry-go-round, the result is not exhilaration à la Jean Epstein, but an eerie gliding movement prying Robert. The door at home won’t open, the streets are full of noise and sinister whispers, and in the cafe where he used to work, Robert is overcome by memories of the manslaughter he committed on impulse.
As witnessed by Hochbaum’s “chained camera” (Bert Rebhandl) breathlessly trailing its protagonist, select moments of blissful oblivion stand out all the more: a waitress warbling a hit song, a bellhop bobbing to background music. Such reprieves provide the film with its pockets of light, rather than the fortunate lastminute resolution that follows desperation – the first in a string of untrustworthy happy endings in Hochbaum’s œuvre.

Joachim Schätz