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Film still from DAVID GOLDER: A woman in a ball gown leans on a man

Sat 04.03.
19:00

  • Director

    Julien Duvivier

  • France / 1931
    81 min. / 35 mm / Original version with English subtitles

  • with

    Harry Baur, Paule Andral, Jackie Monnier

  • Cinema

    Arsenal 1

    zu den Ticketszu dem Kalender
  • Introduction: Heike Klapdor

Duvivier's first sound film was also a key film in his oeuvre. His adaptation of the debut novel by the Jewish-Ukrainian writer Irène Némirovsky, who wrote in French, is a somber masterpiece: The title character David Golder (Harry Baur) is a wealthy businessman, who is perceived by his wife and daughter mainly as the guarantor of their life of luxury in Biarritz. When he has a breakdown and subsequent crisis of purpose, triggered by the suicide of a business partner whom he unscrupulously drove to ruin, they are horrified. In this unfathomable work,  capitalism comes across as cynically and inhumanely as communism. It is a film that deals with the anti-Semitism of the time and makes the small bliss of love come across like a cheap, albeit costly, bourgeois fantasy – yet it still manages to leave the audience with a vulnerable belief in humanism at the end. (re/fl)

Funded by:

  • Logo Minister of State for Culture and the Media