10 August 2012

People on Sunday – on Monday: Film Screening and Late Viewing

Olivier Castel with Katie Guggenheim and Justin Jaeckle



IBID PROJECTS, London
6 August 2012, 9pm


IBID, Olivier Castel, Katie Guggenheim and Justin Jaeckle invite you to a rooftop screening of People on Sunday, on the occasion of the IBID exhibition of the same name. 



All three current exhibitions at IBID (Harold Ancart, Rallou Panagiotou, Colin Snapp; Video exchange: PROJECT88, Mumbai; People on Sunday) will be open for viewing from 8pm. 

The film will start at 9pm. Drinks and popcorn will be served.

PEOPLE ON SUNDAY
(Germany, 1930, Dirs. Robert Siodmak and Edgar G. Ulmer, 73 mins)

"Filmstudio 1929 presents its first experiment: People on Sunday, a film without actors. These five people appear in front of the camera for the first time, today they are all back in their own jobs."

Years before they became major players in Hollywood, a group of young German filmmakers — including eventual noir masters Robert Siodmak and Edgar G. Ulmer and future Oscar winners Billy Wilder and Fred Zinnemann — worked together on the once-in-a-lifetime collaboration People on Sunday (Menschen am Sonntag). The effervescent silent film features five ‘non-actors’ (a wine seller, taxi driver, film extra and model) playing versions of themselves, and follows their leisure pursuits over the course of one summer weekend in Weimar Berlin. A deliberate entanglement of fiction and reality, the film could be considered an early precedent of contemporary scripted reality television.