Dennis James on Piano (Sylvester-Tragodie Einer Nacht). Not a late silent but a rare treasure nonetheless. Auteur scenarist Carl Mayer in Sylvester experiments with the subjective visual motifs he would perfect in The Last Laugh. The inability to "understand one another's speech," as cited in a Tower of Babel quotation, is conveyed purely in expressions and gestures, without intertitles. A pub owner (the hulking, childlike type perfected by Emil Jannings and reprised in Fassbinder's films) is caught in the intense rivalry between his possessive mother and his long-suffering wife. It is New Year's Eve; in the last hour of the old year, the bitter feelings intensify, and an incredible real-time drama ends in tragedy at midnight. Long takes in the domestic scenes pay off in the extraordinary protracted moment when the wife literally opens her eyes to the smoldering violence in her life. Cutaways to the increasingly frenzied revelers in the pub and on the streets function as a commentary on social chaos, internal and external.