A few weeks back I watched Shattered and Backstairs back to back for the first time.

I've gotta say I was a bit disappointed with Shattered. It left me sort of cold, and the characters seemed fairly vague and generic. I read a review that seemed to have almost identical reaction I did, except that it's conclusion was that this vagueness made the characters relatable to everyone, whereas my reaction was quite the opposite. I was initially ready to mark this off as an interesting pre-cursor of things to come. That it had achieved a really wonderful thing of conveying story with virtually no inter-titles and that later films would do this to a much more effective degree.

Then I watched Backstairs, I believe released a little bit later the same year, and the gap seemed monstrous. Establishing character traits and their relation in the story immediately through setting and visual cues. Lots of wonderful scenes where you could see the changing in characters' relationships through subtle visual details. In shattered it seems like events just happened and then characters reacted to them. Backstairs seemed to give a much stronger idea of the flowing mental states of all the characters and how their relationship towards each other change from scene to scene. Considering how quickly Backstairs followed on the coattails of Shattered, it seems to me like it quickly surpasses and makes Shattered seem much less innovative.

Just curious, if other people feel the same way about Shattered and it's just a case of the things I don't like about the film are the very things others cling on to. Does anyone know if Carl Mayer had much different intentions in writing Shattered than he did Backstairs? Or are these differences to be owed to the directorial differences of Lupu Pick and Leopold Jessner? Pick isn't looking too good in my book so far, but perhaps Sylvester will change my opinion of him.

Granted in the past there have been quite a few classics I dismissed on my first viewing, only to absolutely love them a few years later. And maybe that will be the case with Shattered, but maybe not.

Review in German of a collection of essays, further reading in the notes

Uli Jung: Der Filmpoet des Weimarer Kinos (Vienna 2003)

Interesting. . . Lupu Pick's Scherben/Shattered (1921) has been added to the Internet Archive for free viewing and download. This obviously for those who have no other access to the film.

This is a very key film in the development of the Kammerspielfilm, and the first of Mayer's trilogy, all of which were slated to be directed by Pick, the second of course being the sublime Pick/Mayer Sylvester (1924), and the last going to Murnau at the last minute . . . Der Letzte Mann/The Last Laugh from 1924/25.