Underrated and all but forgotten by film historians, G.W. Pabst’s The Devious Path is, on the surface, a story of marital crisis and sexual mores in Weimar Germany. Released in 1928, it is also a prime example of a post-Expressionist film that eschews distorted sets, demonic characters, and far-fetched narratives. Set in the present, it deals with contemporary social issues in a realistic way. Coming at the end of the silent era, it shows what film could do before sound came to compromise and devalue the image. Pabst, who had established himself as an audacious director with classics such as The Joyless Street (1925), Secrets of a Soul (1926), and The Love of Jeanne Ney (1927), imbued The Devious Path with a formal finesse that deserves a closer look. Together with Fritz Lang and F.W. Murnau, Pabst pioneered a silent film language that was highly conscious of its visual foundation and required few intertitles.
From the outset, The Devious Path draws our attention to the act of seeing and being seen. The film opens with an unusual shot: a close-up of a hand putting the finishing touches on a pencil portrait of a woman in profile. We see the painter’s artistic rendering before we see its subject, demonstrating silent cinema’s intense sensitivity to the power of images. A quick cut to the painter (Jack Trevor) shows him looking at Irene, an elegantly dressed, blonde society woman played by Brigitte Helm. After a flirtatious pause, she returns his longing gaze. Her friend Liane (Hertha von Walther), a modern young woman sitting by her side, engulfs her in a cloud of cigarette smoke. The film cuts back and forth between the three characters as they play a game of gazes. The spell of the intimate, tightly framed scene is abruptly broken by a wide-angle shot across the room that shows Irene’s husband intruding like an ominous stranger. The contempt the husband, a wealthy lawyer played by Gustav Diessl, has for his wife’s demimonde company is expressed in hostile glances and small symbolic gestures. Fluidly edited, the first few minutes introduce all four main characters and set up the field of forces in the domestic crisis to come.
The first scene leaves no doubt that The Devious Path is also a star vehicle for Brigitte Helm. Like the painter at the beginning of the film, Pabst creates an idealized portrait of Helm as a highly stylized icon, enhanced by exquisite costumes designed for her by the fashion label Modehaus Mahrenholz, which received its own credit line. Helm had been discovered by Fritz Lang in 1925 at the age of seventeen and, in a huge gamble, was given the female lead in Metropolis (1927), then the most expensive film ever made in Germany. She assumed the dual role of the virginal Maria and her cyborg clone, a destructive vamp who lasciviously gyrates before men whose ardent voyeurism is made literal by a surrealist montage of disembodied open eyes. Owing to her portrayal, Helm gained renown as Europe’s “Über-vamp,” as one critic called her, and the role became her calling card.
The Devious Path, which opened in Berlin on September 5, 1928, was Helm’s fifth film after Metropolis. Pabst had to negotiate with Ufa to release Helm from her ten-year contract. (He also reportedly wanted her to play Lulu in Pandora’s Box, but Ufa refused.) Although Pabst attempted to transform her image, Helm reprised some of the vampish body movements and exalted gestures from Metropolis. No matter, the shimmering glamor and sheer elegance of her persona dazzled international audiences. In 1930, British film historian Paul Rotha raved about Helm in The Devious Path: “Her vibrant beauty, her mesh of gold hair, her slender, supple figure were caught and photographed from every angle.” Theodor Sparkuhl’s brilliant cinematography and lighting paint an archetypical “portrait of a lady” who, like Isabel Archer in Henry James’s novel, is tormented by the loss of her freedom in marriage.
Helm’s Irene dominates The Devious Path, driving the action and appearing in every scene. The camera keeps us at an emotional distance as she repeatedly struggles to free herself from a suffocating marriage. The editing also occasionally interrupts the continuity of the narrative with infusions of ironic details. For example, it cuts away from Irene recovering from a fainting spell to a servant cluelessly vacuuming the stairs. Such a juxtaposition undermines our empathy with the character and forces us to contemplate social difference: while the upper class sleeps, the servant works.
For Irene, the alternative to her large, sterile mansion is the crowded, smoke-filled nightclub where she carries on with Liane and her bohemian friends. The nightclub is where well-dressed and bejeweled customers rub shoulders with gigolos and sex workers. (Prostitution was decriminalized in 1927, and Berlin became known as the most permissive city in Europe.) As Jill Smith points out in her book Berlin Coquette, during the Weimar era the lines between professional prostitutes and respectable upper-class women were often blurred.
The nightclub also allows cinematographer Theodor Sparkuhl a chance to display panache. Joining the manic crowd on the dance floor, the camera is quickly swept up and loses its bearings; it becomes “unchained,” participating in the frenzy rather than observing it objectively. Faces come in and out of focus as the unsteady handheld camera is pushed and shoved. Irene, at first confused, soon commands the dance floor. After she takes cocaine, her dancing becomes more frenetic, leading to a crash that is no less hysterical. Sparkuhl’s camera captures the hothouse atmosphere and delights in depicting Berlin’s “Roaring Twenties,” offering a glamorized image of decadence that later inspired Bob Fosse’s Cabaret and the recent German TV series Babylon Berlin.
In 1962, Theodor W. Adorno, looking back at what he called “Those Twenties” and its “imagistic world of erotic fantasy” and “romantic desire for sexual anarchy,” argued that the main function of the era’s “ambiguous attitude toward anarchy” was “to provide National Socialism with the slogans it later used to justify its cultural terrorism, as if this exaggerated disorder were already longing for the order Hitler later imposed on all of Europe.” Pabst’s film presages this fear when Irene, wasted and lost, is confronted with depravity’s deadly consequences. She is told that the unnerving drug addict, who goes from table to table begging for money for a fix, was once married to a bank director who committed suicide when she left him. Seeing her own fate mirrored in the ruined life of her female counterpart, she panics and rushes home to her husband.
In the end, a postrevolutionary attitude prevails in the manner of New Objectivity, an art movement that superseded Expressionism. New Objectivity emphasized facts over utopian ideas, rational thought over sentimentality, and the status quo over change. From this perspective, The Devious Path stages a rebellion against the existing state of affairs, only to demonstrate that the status quo is more “realistic.” (Both Karl Grune’s The Street and Metropolis have similar endings.) The wife’s rebellion against her rigid but rich husband drives the plot, but (like the Expressionist revolution at the end of the war) it is bound to collide with economic reality. Her romantic and risky escapades are shown to be unreasonable. The movie concludes with a farcical divorce followed by the promise of remarriage. And yet, despite this ostensibly ironic ending, the film hints at a state of ongoing crisis beneath its dispassionate surface.
The Devious Path (whose German title Abwege means, less luridly, “Wrong Ways”) had the word “crisis” as a working title (Crisis is also its British title). The film’s central marital crisis alludes to the larger crisis of a disintegrating German value system in the wake of a lost war, political unrest, hyperinflation, and rapid Americanization. In fact, between 1928 and 1933, more than three hundred books were published in Germany with the word “crisis” in the title. Pabst’s invocation of “Crisis” was part of a discourse that addressed the collapse of traditional notions of gender and sexuality and of institutions like marriage. In 1929, just a year after The Devious Path, Pabst directed two more crisis narratives, Pandora’s Box and Diary of a Lost Girl, both silent. Taken together, The Devious Path can be seen as the first part of a trilogy about the precarious position of women in a society dancing on a volcano.
Presented at SFSFF 2024 with live musical accompaniment by Guenter Buchwald and Frank Bockius