Garbo in The Joyless Street

A scene from The Joyless Street (or The Street of Sorrows), a 1925 silent film directed by Georg Wilhelm Pabst and starring Greta Garbo before she came to Hollywood. Scored to Shostakovich‘s Violin Concerto no. 1 in A minor. Shostakovich scored many ‘silent’ films but I’m not sure he originally scored this Youtube clip. The very young Dmitri Shostakovich helped to make ends meet by playing the piano in movie houses and later went on to compose film scores for many silent films, including his debut The New Babylon.

Like many of Pabst’s contemporary films, The Joyless Street concerns the plight of women in German society.