A busy day in the editing department of a Berlin film company. A young woman shows us how a film is edited, using a scalpel, scissors, film cement, and a splicer. Her work requires skill and the utmost attention. The young woman has to hurry to finish editing the new “big revue film” for its gala premiere that evening. Still a little drunk from a night out with her boyfriend, she inadvertently splices in newsreel footage. Thus, when the film is unveiled, African tribal dancers appear in place of the Tiller Girls, geese run backwards, a ballerina stands on her head, and Lil Dagover’s pet dog turns into a hippopotamus. Beginning as a documentary about the craft of film editing, Die Tragödie einer Uraufführung is no tragedy but a surreal slapstick comedy. The film-withina- film sequence can be read as a parody of the French avant-garde’s experiments with montage, tricks, and discontinuity. As in Entr’acte (1924), the screen is destroyed at the end: in René Clair’s Dadaist film by the actors, here by an angry audience.

Philipp Stiasny