People On Sunday 2010

Prof. Becky Smith:

I’m reading another biography of Billy Wilder – “On Sunset Boulevard The Life and Times of Billy Wilder” – by Ed Sikov, Hyperion Books - and came across the following excerpts about “People on Sunday”.  I thought they might provide you more to think about…

“(In Germany) ersatz documentaries known as “cross-section films” (came into popularity).  Eric Pommer…was helping to spur a broad push toward a kind of street realism.

Cross-section films were… compilation films fashioned out of vignettes of what was (or at least could be passed off as) the common man’s common life.  Cross-section movies…were trying to capture the flavor of industrialized urban life through montage.  Rien que les heures (1926), The Man With the Movie Camera (1928) and The Bridge (1927) were conscious attempts both to stylize the documentary form and to make the form more real – to bring out the essence of urban reality by splicing fragments of it together creatively on film.

Structurally, the films were supposed to be loose.  What might seem to be a mistake in a tightly planned, slickly photographed fiction film could come across as a fortuitous accident in a fake documentary – a glimpse of real life in all its messy glory…”