Word: desks
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Walsrus was sitting behind the wooden desk in the front part of the office. Before the partitions had fallen, the garage had been divided into a front part, a mimeograph part, a phone part, and a storage part in the back. There was a winding stairway that led to the basement, the scene of all important group meetings...
...desk was the only part of the office that was still in the same position. Walrus had his feet propped up on it. There was one partition remaining behind him. On it, pages were scotch-taped from movement newspapers that looked like posters. One was red with white letters: "Some people talk about the weather. Not us." It had the silhouettes of Marx, Engels, and Lenin...
...dining-room beyond) from the diagonal. And he has carefully included objects that tell us much about the characters of the household--little vases of lilacs or lilies-of-the-valley, framed pictures, an old square piano with a tasseled shawl, candle brackets by the main door, a writing desk and accoutrements, a folding screen, antimacassars on the backs and arms of chairs, and so on. Hovering over everything in the back are gray tree branches suggestive of tentacles that keep the inhabitants rooted to their provincial garrison town although they long to go to Moscow and its supposedly greener...
...next scene at school shows the regimentation of German education. The classroom's chaos before Jannings' arrival yields to rigidity when he sits at his desk; but a prank subverts his authority and takes him to the entertainment district that night. Here huge shadows and trap-like streets, in the finest tradition of German Expressionism, stress his fears of this setting, fears augmented inside Dietrich's dressing room by a clown and a "professor" of magic who implicitly mock Jannings' position. The impingement of settings and objects on Jannings' security climaxes in a song sequence where Jannings seated...
...singing. Jannings charges offstage to kill her; her flight is shot in high-angle, expressing the degree of freedom in even Jannings' most desperate action. Indeed, Sternberg cuts away to a doorway rather than showing Jannings being strait-jacketed. Later released, he returns to his old school desk to die the death of all Expressionist heroes. But Sternberg ends the film with shots of Dietrich, the burning Romantic figure and object, so that even in the person of the protagonists Sternberg's system triumphs over the Expressionistic scheme...