Überfall
(Accident)
Erno Metzner's experimental short reverses the usual connotations of the “street film” motif when its bourgeois hero, who is lured into the shadowy night life of the streets by an “accident,” refuses to return, repentant, to his former existence. “Who is the guilty one?” asks the film's one inter-title. The film “makes a remarkable use of subjective camera and mirror images to create an atmosphere of emotional intensity. It was banned by the Nazis as ‘brutalizing and demoralizing,' and the original negative was burned” (Eileen Bowser, Museum of Modern Art).