Das Brot der frühen Jahre

When it comes to the breaking of the bread of the history of German cinema, we come across the source of its modern source with The Bread of Those Early Years, and while watching it, I somewhat feel like "I am at the source, and I perish of thirst." This is not only because the plot of the film tells the story of a young man dissatisfied with the predetermined bourgeois future (in line with the resistance intentions of the Oberhausen Manifesto against "Papas Kino," of which this film was a pioneer), but also because the plot and partly the story somehow - at least to me - did not completely fulfill expectations of greater iconoclasm. The story indeed uses many avant-garde approaches, such as local freezing of the image and above all the non-linear storytelling, but especially in the case of the latter, certain limits of this film are revealed: the local non-chronology does not create the same temporal aporias as in Robbe-Grillet/Resnais of the same period, which lead to a new perspective on art and life, but still allow for reconstructing separate 'before' and 'after,' and thus the form remains more of an ornament than a transcendental hammer of the new... However, it is still an above-average ornament compared to the myriad of conventional films created in the history of cinema before and after... This temporal progression of "two steps forward, one step back" thereby noticeably reminds me of the fate of H. Vesely himself, because this film also feels like a step back compared to his previous masterpiece Nicht mehr fliehen (1955), which with its stylized and surrealistic style may have attacked the old world and film more than this more civil piece that is closer to reality. (2023.05.26)