silver nitrate notes

Eugen Schüfftan Faked Metropolis and Then Filmed a Lake

15 aug 2026

The man who invented the mirror trick that built the city in Metropolis spent a series of Sundays in 1929 photographing four young Berliners eating sandwiches at the Wannsee, and did nothing to the image at all. Eugen Schüfftan (1893-1977) had made his name on the Schüfftan process, an angled mirror that let a camera marry a live actor to a scale model in a single exposure. On Menschen am Sonntag he put the camera on the ground in a real park and shot what was in front of it.

The film went out on 4 February 1930, seventy-three minutes, silent, with the subtitle ein Film ohne Schauspieler: a film without actors. That was not a slogan. The five people on screen were a taxi driver, a record-shop assistant, a wine seller, a film extra and a model, credited by their own names and their own occupations, and the opening titles inform the audience that they have all gone back to those jobs.

There is almost no story. Wolfgang picks up Christl on a Saturday. They arrange a Sunday at the lake. Wolfgang brings his friend Erwin, the taxi driver; Christl brings her friend Brigitte; Erwin's girlfriend Annie quarrels with him on the Saturday night and stays in bed, sleeping through the entire picture. They swim, they flirt, they quarrel over a photograph, they take a boat out, they go home and back to work. Robert Siodmak (1900-1973) and Edgar G. Ulmer (1904-1972) directed it. Billy Wilder (1906-2002) wrote it, from reportage by Curt Siodmak (1902-2000). Fred Zinnemann (1907-1997), aged twenty-two, carried the camera as Schüfftan's assistant.

Read that crew list again and you are looking at a substantial part of the next thirty years of American cinema, assembled by accident on a weekend budget. Robert Siodmak would shoot The Killers (1946) and Criss Cross (1949). Ulmer would make Detour (1945) for nothing on Poverty Row. Wilder would write Double Indemnity and Sunset Boulevard. Curt Siodmak would write The Wolf Man (1941). Zinnemann would direct High Noon and From Here to Eternity. Schüfftan would light Le Quai des brumes for Carné and, three decades after the Wannsee, win an Academy Award for The Hustler.

Every one of them left Germany. Most were Jewish; all of them were gone within a few years of 1933. The film has been read ever since as an elegy for a Berlin that was about to stop existing, and that reading is irresistible and slightly too easy. Nobody making it knew. What they knew was that studio time cost money they did not have, and that the city was free.

The technique is what interests me. Schüfftan shoots at eye level, in available light, with a lot of medium-long lenses that let him stand back from a crowd and take it without the crowd arranging itself. The famous passage is the photographer's stall in the park: a stills man posing ordinary Berliners one after another, and Schüfftan holding on each face for a beat after the pose collapses. You watch a dozen people stop performing. It is the single best argument the film makes for its own method, and it is not a story beat at all.

Compare the two Schüfftans. On Metropolis he built an apparatus to make a fictional city convincing. Here he removes the apparatus so that a real one will hold still. The instinct is the same instinct. In both cases he is solving the problem of how to get something onto film that the budget cannot afford, and the answer at the Wannsee was to stop paying for it.

What travelled to America was not the lyricism. It was the location work and the fast cheap eye, and when Ulmer shot Detour in six days and Robert Siodmak lit an insurance office like a cell, they were drawing on a Sunday at a lake. The lake became the noir. That is a strange sentence and I think it is true.

Brigitte Borchert sold records for a living, and near the end of the film she demonstrates a gramophone in the shop where she worked. She was still alive in the 1990s and gave interviews about the shoot, mildly amused to have been in a classic. Of the five, she is the one I keep thinking about: a woman who went to the lake, was filmed, went back to work on Monday, and outlived the whole century that took the others away.

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sources
[1] Kracauer, Siegfried. From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947.
[2] Isenberg, Noah. Edgar G. Ulmer: A Filmmaker at the Margins. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014.
[3] Zinnemann, Fred. A Life in the Movies: An Autobiography. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1992.
[4] The Criterion Collection. People on Sunday (release essay), 2011.
[5] Elsaesser, Thomas. Weimar Cinema and After: Germany's Historical Imaginary. London: Routledge, 2000.